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I've got three Raspberry Pis. I don't know why. I don't know what to do with them. None of the projects that I've seen have been particularly compelling to me,
by Jemaclus 11y ago
I've got three Raspberry Pis. I don't know why. I don't know what to do with them. None of the projects that I've seen have been particularly compelling to me, and I'm not creative enough to come up with a good idea. So they sit on my desk, gathering dust, and act as a conversation piece when friends come over. "That? Yeah, I can build X, Y, or Z." and they say, "oooh, cool" and then I never actually follow through. I'm a terrible nerd. :(
- Spooks 11y agowhy not build a htpc or an arcade box? very straight forward and you'll have more to talk about when your friends come over!
- dwd 11y agoNice idea. 70s era arcade games running on a processor with more MFLOPS than an early Cray at ~1/1000000 the price.
- superuser2 11y agoCan you actually build an HTPC? My understanding is they can't really handle video, except from the purpose-built camera module.
- Fuzzwah 11y agoI've been running R-Pi based HTPC since the original R-Pi release. I current run a distro called OSMC (debian based, with Kodi on top) on my R-Pi 2 and it plays everything I throw at it with out an issue. http://osmc.tv http://osmc.tv
- xanderstrike 11y agoThat's exactly wrong. They have the same processors as used in phones, which means they have hardware level decoding for video. My B+ can stream massive 1080p blu-ray rips over ethernet with zero problems. They make fantastic HTPCs.
- ant6n 11y agoMy phone doesn't ever play 12GB blu-ray rips; and the rpi hardware is older than current phones (which use armv7 and armv8). Given the speed of the cpu, it's surprising it can decode a full H264 stream. But It's good to know. The down-vote seems unnecessary.
- ac2u 11y agoIt's not so much software running on the CPU doing the work here. It's hardware support for decoding via the GPU that enables it.
- Tsagadai 11y agoBeen running OpenElec on mine for years now. Works great and does 1080p output without transcoding or anything like that.
- robgibbons 11y agoThere are several HTPC implementations (eg. RaspBMC). They're all pretty nice, but personally, I just use omxplayer, which is the command line package that powers RaspBMC under the hood. It's a command-line-only media player, but it plays anything I can throw at it, including live-streaming 1080p YouTube videos. The command-line interface for omxplayer is a bit verbose, so I wrote a basic wrapper in BASH, so all I need to do is type "play <url>" and the video will begin streaming after a 10-second buffer. I keep a Screen session open on the Pi so I can drop in and command it from anywhere. At any given point, that little Pi can be simultaneously playing 1080p video, while downloading another two videos in the background. Incredibly capable little devices!
- TheCapn 11y agoBuild them out as dummy media boxes and sell them for a markup. I've had people knocking my door down after they saw my Kodi setup but I simply pointed them to the how-to guides and told them to learn for themselves. I'm sure there's a few people out there who'd take one for $50 or so.
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoProbably. But at $50 each you're not really making a profit.
- rasz_pl 11y agochinese seem to do just fine at that price point http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Streaming-Media-Players/zgbs/electronics/13447451 http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Streaming-Med...
- pickettd 11y agoThere is a "Dragon Box" on Amazon that sells for $270ish and appears to be a lower-powered Android Kodi box. I imagine that a second generation Pi could perform just as well.
- remarkEon 11y agoI'm new to tinkering and discovered you can build an SNES emulator out of a Pi, so that's one Xmas gift right there! I have 2 more Pis on the way. Not sure what I'm going to do with those yet, but maybe a NAS for my Dad?
- ProAm 11y agoThe real fact is the Raspberry Pi are massive in the IoT arena. Just because Joe Average tinkerer doesnt know what to do with them this size reduction is a big deal for industry, Easy money.
- el_benhameen 11y agoI suppose it's good these sold out so fast. I probably would've bought six or seven, used one, and left the rest to collect dust.
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y agoI hear ya, I've been "lucky" and got my order in on every model of Pi on the day of release - even the original. I went through the same process of "ooh, shiny thing!" when I saw this announcement, then thought back to my other RasPi's sitting on my desk doing nothing and decided to leave it for someone who might actually get some use out of it. I'll be getting a Zero when they're more generally available though, if only to complete the collection! That said, they have been used in the past for various things - a simple SSH server, a networked webcam, a serial interface for my Atari ST, and I've even done some tinkering with a breadboard and the GPIO, so I have had some use out of them at least.
- jrcii 11y agoMine is collecting dust, meanwhile I have a list I wrote while waiting for it to come in the mail of all the things I was going to try on it: * ZNC for IRC connectivity * connected to backup server for incremental backups * connected to backup server for bittorrent downloads * media server streams bittorrent downloads to macbook * test web server * git server * owncloud or ftp server for sharing files * controls light switch via http->gpio * nes emulator through hdmi to tv with usb nes controller * ddclient for dynamic DNS of c1.jrcii.com on afraid.org * Run printer jobs/server * snort + snorby * web SDR * WPA2 cracker * in-room temp humidity to menubar and blinds * pet feeder/waterer * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXmCiaRc9XU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXmCiaRc9XU * piphone
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoMmmm. I had a conversation the other day about side projects. People would ask me what I did for side projects, since I have experience in software, electrical engineering, control systems, mechanical assemblies, etc. My answer was generally that at my day job I got to write software to control electromechanical systems with a budget in the millions. What am I going to do on the side to compete with that? Sound familiar? I'm guessing that a lot of your "I don't know what to do with it" is because even a cheap laptop, desktop, or tablet is so much easier to work with and has pretty much greater capability than the RPi that the latter just sits and gathers dust. Oh, and if it helps, in addition to my RPi gathering dust, I also have a BeagleBone and about a dozen flavors of Arduino :-) At least I do some consulting work with Arduino code, so they get used a bit.
- oneJob 11y agoIt used to be called a "hobby", but now it's a "side project"?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Udo 11y agoJust as a counterpoint, I have found many, many uses for Pis in my life. One is hosting my home automation software, I have built several information radiators with it, one is acting as a network-controlled media player, I even made one that acts as a faux remote control for the AC with IR diodes attached to the GPIO ports. By contrast, I have several Arduino boards sitting here, and never found a good use for them. For me the appeal of the Pi lies in the combination of low energy usage, low price, networking, and comparatively high computing power. Once you get over the "woah, wasting an entire computer just for [insert menial task]" barrier, it's simply incredible what this single component enables you to cook up on a whim. The Pi allows me to make things that are not yet (or will never be) available commercially. However, I would not say this thing is necessarily useful for all hackers or nerds. It's only useful if you have ideas for small, self-built devices that require programmable intelligence. Take note that this is also fundamentally different from the stated purpose of the Pi, as stated by its manufacturer.
- HiroshiSan 11y agoI have a Raspberry Pi 2 and would like to buy a digital scale, and somehow tweak it so that it can sync my weight with my myfitnesspal account anytime I weigh myself, how do you suggest I get started with this? I don't have much of an electronics background.
- Udo 11y agoI have been searching for the same thing, ideally I'd like to buy an electronic scale with a digital I/O port. You may have more luck finding these in the US than I had in the EU, but in any case I wasn't able to find anything that hooks up to a computer in a non-proprietary way. As with home automation, all products seem to sync to the cloud, most of them in a one-way fashion. I lost track of this idea a few years ago, so the situation may have changed. But if it hasn't, I see the following options for you: 1) find a cloud-synced scale that offers an SDK or at least some way of retrieving the data from the cloud. 2) buy a low-cost digital scale, take it apart and see what you can do with a voltmeter and a soldering iron. At the very least, you should be able to hook into the raw analog weight data which you could feed to a Pi with an A/D board. The nicer solution would be to siphon off the digital value. Even in scales where one chip does everything you could still try to pick up data going to the LCD. However, that might require some epic cabling and soldering, not sure it's worth it. 3) cheesing it: hook up a networked camera and point it to the scale's display. You can do this with any old android phone and a remote webcam app. Have the software on the Pi (or some other computer) pull the image when you step on the scale, run OCR on it, write the value out to wherever you want.
- anonu 11y agoI hear ya. One of my Raspberry Pi's sat around for a year or two. Then I got this idea to connect my sheet-fed scanner to it and scan pages directly to Dropbox. That worked nicely. My 2nd RPi I got 2 Canon Selphy Printers and setup a gmail account where I could send pictures to. The RPi picks up the images and send them to the printers in a round-robbin fashion. ... I guess what I'm saying is the sky is the limit... So how do you follow-through? The idea needs to have some practical purpose. In my case, I use both those setups regularly.
- mongol 11y agoWhat brand of sheet feed scanner?
- simonswain 11y agoI set mine up with a camera to do timelapse. https://simonswain.com/day https://simonswain.com/day
- sb23 11y agoThis is cool, did you follow a guide to set it up, or just wing it?
- agumonkey 11y agoThe pi was an odd thing. Out of the box it was 'suited' for GPIO from python. For any better project you'd need to know electricity. Or going below and learn the SoC weird architecture... But recently I used one as an IRC bouncer, and another as a XBMC host. Before that I just wanted to see how arch+dwm+emacs would feel on a 700MHz prev-gen. ARM CPU. Acceptable. I tried to underclock it down to my first desktop computer freq (p75), I've never seen linux run on such slow freq. I also enjoyed the pre-compiled cross compiler so I could write factorial on my x64 machine and then deploy it on my rpi cluster of 2. None of this is amazing and no hard requirement on a pi (I could have done the same in VMs or with MIPS emulators but ... it would be more setup and less toying). Impulse buy for most. ps: One more major downer for me, hardware compatibility, too frail. SDCard would fail, usb would fail, first psu would not push enough amps ... It made you realize how the ATX desktops shielded you. And now I was at the point where I couldn't be sure of anything without researching wikis for hours. Again electricity.
- locusm 11y agoI used my first Raspi to build one of these - got me interested in other music projects like DACs etc. http://www.pimusicbox.com/ http://www.pimusicbox.com/
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoFamiliar stuff... at the end of the day, I just end up doing the software side on my macbook. Like running a server, or some old console emulator. Media boxes are useful, but it's a bit like buying cakemix and making a cake, it's so trivial at some point you stop caring about the process and just buy a cake. As for hardware projects... I've never had an idea for one I'd actually want or care for. Things like a lightbulb that flashes when you get a tweet, and that reads it out loud when you wave your hand infront of it... pet feeders... etc I can do without. Would be fun to build but I'm so busy these days I can only motivate myself to make time if I like the end product I'm building, too.