For those of you who use Raspberry Pi’s in your home environment, I’m curious as to what you use them for. What applications are you running on them? Do you have your Pi’s setup in a cluster?
I made a python soft that uses the pi camera and scans qr codes, and plays the playlist that’s on the eventual qr code. Just show the album and it plays.
But they have become so incredible expensive, and banana pis etc just doesn’t work that well, so I just stopped the whole Raspberry Pi craze.
Today I just collected a 55€ Lenovo thinkcenter (like 18cm squared x 3.5cm) with a quad core, 8GB/256GB. I think it will replace my next rpi quite well and when it breaks, I can get another one quite simply.
If I want to do more to the metal electronics stuff, I’ll just use a 2560 Mega or an esp8266 or similar.
I have a pi 3 running my primary instance of Adguard Home, a pi 4 I don’t know yet what to do with, and a Pi B that has RISCOS on it for fun. Seriously, if you ever just want to poke around a unique OS, download the official RISCOS image in the Raspberry Pi imager. Any UK folks reading this know what I’m talking about. But as an American I’d never heard of it and it’s just friggin’ neat!
I have a Pi 3 running Home Assistant. I also have two Pi Zeros that I have MP4 Museum installed.
I use MP4 Museum to run projected Halloween decorations mostly but it’s great to have a little box that will take a video file from a thumbdrive and dump it out the HDMI port on boot.
Not much love here for the Pi Zero W. I love them for being so flipping cute. I have a couple I use when I am learning a new system admin tool or service and I need to be able to let it run undisturbed to observe stability and function.
Lately I am learning MQTT so am using one as a broker to manage some homemade smart devices.
If I can ever find one in stock, i want a couple of Zero 2 for similar projects that would benefit from the extra oomph.
I have a Zero with a macropad attached. Key presses are then sent to Home Assistant through MQTT. The zero is perfect for it, small and low power.
Still wondering what to actually do with my Zero 2.
I don’t buy any pis because they are $100+ in Canada.
Remember when it was supposed to be a cheap computer? Ya…
Have you checked recently? According to the rPi locator, they’re starting to be available again
Just checked. All of the “cheap” ones require you to order 2+, and then have insane shipping costs. The rest are $100-120 CAD.
I don’t think these things will ever be affordable. People who want one badly, will pay the money, and everyone knows it. No need to sell them at MSRP.
One Pi Zero 2W runs NodeRed to control a few lights in the house. Another used to run Octoprint until it recently stopped responding. I haven’t gotten around to troubleshooting it yet.
I have a Raspberry pi 1b that runs adguard home and a VPN server
I have a 4 meg Pi 4b running Pi-hole and Mini-DLNA. It’s rather under-utilized for those tasks, but it serves them quite well.
I’m running a Pi Zero W as a network extender!
I’m using a pi4 8gb as my server, with a pi4 2gb as backup in case the first one dies. It’s a very classic server, running postfix/courier-imap for mails, lighttpd for web, bind9 for dns, ergo for irc, sqlite3 for databases. I also use fail2ban for IDS and cron to run tons of various task. All of that is hosted on a Gentoo linux OS.
The one thing I don’t want to use is docker. I love docker for development or for deploying the main app at work, but it makes managing updates a nightmare for handling multiple services on my server (most your containers probably contain vulnerable software due to lack of system updates), and it eats resources needlessly. Then again, it’s made possible because I avoid the big webapps that usually need it.
A Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
It’s connected to my 3d printer and runs octoprint allowing me to upload print jobs. and control the printer from my home network.
It serves up the Pi camera video stream.
It can also switch the printers light on and off.No cluster setup.
I use it as a media remote for my computer via infrared. IR sensor sends analog data to an arduino which converts it to digital and sends it to a raspberry pi which then invokes commands to control media on my computer by invoking rest apis on a “unified remote” server running on the computer.
Feeling impressed here…
If I want to have this, too: is there a kinda tutorial or quick-setup, or is it more like 6 weeks of tinkering? :-)
It actually turned out to be easier than I thought.
The infrared reader (arduino code) is based on
https://github.com/Arduino-IRremote/Arduino-IRremote
The code running on my raspberry pi was written in Java using spring boot which is probably overkill but I am more comfortable with java than python so I used
https://github.com/Fazecast/jSerialComm
to read data from the pi’s usb port and just sent instructions to the unified remote server which does most of the heavy lifting. I used
as a reference along with some verbose logging on the unified remote server to see what codes needed to be sent over the rest api.
Happy to help you along if you want to give this a go :)
I use a Pi4 to run one of my HAproxy nodes. It does die once in a while from not enough power because my power brick is pretty old at this point. Other than that its great. I used to have a cluster of Pi3’s bit I’m transitioning cluster managment systems so they aren’t doing anything right now. I recently got a Lichee pi and that will most likely replace them once I get it all working.
I run PiHole on mine
I use a RPi3 for pihole and a RPi4 with debian + docker to host a bunch of stuff (in no spécific order): goaccess-for-nginxproxymanager
filebrowser
smokeping
searxng
duplicati
whoogle
nginx-proxy-manager
flaresolverr
linkding
ntfy
librex
shlink
speedtest-tracker
unbound
wg-easy
I run a Pi Zero W over wifi as my backup pi-hole so that clients can still connect if my main system is updating or down. Planning to get a more powerful one for OctoPrint.
