40 ms·

Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

1741 points by xylo 7y ago

I have Raspberry Pi and I mainly use it for VPN and piHole. I’m curious if you have one, have you found it useful? What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

polskibus 7y ago
Check out hass.io
swsieber 7y ago
I'm working on turning it into a IR emitter to control some stuff that I have that lack remotes. I have another I've loaded snips onto an will be experimenting with soon - I'm currently using a PlayStation eye for the experimentation, but will have to get a better microphone/speaker. I wish I could hack a dot/echo/etc. and use their microphone/speaker, but meh, I'll take what I can get. Also, the IR pi will probably drive some ambient light as well.
- shock 7y ago
  > I'm working on turning it into a IR emitter to control some stuff that I have that lack remotes That's really neat. Please share some details – I was planning on buying a Broadlink IR/RF device for that purpose.
tyilo 7y ago
Unpowered in a drawer.
- robin_reala 7y ago
  Yep. As much as I’d like to play around with it, I have no projects in mind that aren’t pure-software and easier on my laptop, or just end up filled with pre-made solutions to save on support time. Shame, but there you go.
- elagost 7y ago
  If yours has wi-fi (Pi 3 and above or Pi Zero W) you can always just leave it plugged in somewhere innocuous as a pi-hole. It's super useful and takes almost no time to set up, provided you can change the settings on your router to use it as DNS.
  - elcomet 7y ago
    I'm scared that if the pi is down then the whole internet is down (i'm not always home with my family, so if I'm away I couldn't fix it). How do you manage failover ?
    - iforgotpassword 7y ago
      How do your manage your router failing? Do you have a second one in hot standby? Sure, the pi would add a second point of failure but personally I never had a router or rpi fail, so I think the advantage of running a pi hole outweighs that increased risk.
    - stordoff 7y ago
      FWIW, I ran Pi-Hole on a RPi for about six months, and it was flawless (long enough for me to forget the root password :p). One option would be to set up two Pis, and distribute both IPs in DHCP. If one is down, or can't resolve, clients will fall back to the other one. The chance of both being down at once (unless it's something that takes your network down) seems low, and the cost of a Pi Zero W (~$10) wouldn't add much.
    - elagost 7y ago
      If necessary I can SSH in (if the pi is on) and troubleshoot. No one runs a business out of my home so Internet isn't super critical, and the smartphones have data connectivity if need be. I have a couple fresh SD cards in storage and take quarterly SD card images, so if it fails I don't have to rush out and buy anything. If the pi itself blows up, I can talk my wife through changing the DNS server on the router config page from her laptop, or she can just wait until I get home. Not a huge hassle. Even so, normally you can set a fallback DNS server on your router, and you could have two little Pi Zeros on a plugstrip in a closet somewhere! (Or just set the fallback at opendns or something)
RobertRoberts 7y ago
Media player connected to tv. (Kodi or Elec, I can't recall which) What I found really neat about this is that if you use the HDMI connection, there is some automated setup/control that allows my tv remote to control the PI. (through the HDMI connection) But also, the smart phone app for Kodi remote control added a new layer of interaction with the media player that is just sort of unique and unexpected. (everything worked so easily)
- colechristensen 7y ago
  The remote control tech is CEC. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control
  - RobertRoberts 7y ago
    Thanks, forgot what it was, and didn't have time to dig around in the docs where I first ran into it. The fact that this is not widely advertised as a feature is surprising. It made remote control automatic instead of having to hack something together.
tlack 7y ago
Does work-in-progress count? I have two with cameras I am attempting to rig up as a frontend/backup camera in my Humvee (very necessary!), hopefully w/ UI on iPhone
maplewizard 7y ago
I use it to build a cloud backup system. My files in the computer will automatically sync to Raspberry Pi.
- keehun 7y ago
  What software do you use for your setup?
messe 7y ago
DNS and DHCP server running on NetBSD.
photoangell 7y ago
I have several, I use them for multiroom audio with snapcast (mostly with USB DACs although one has a DAC hat. Some have temp and humidity sensors, one has the rpi cam. One has a always on vpn connection and transmission running. For a while I used one with a Parsec client and cloud gaming. However, I use a Odroid XU4 for all the big stuff (home assistant, NAS, nodered, mopidy, etc.)
onion2k 7y ago
I spent a while figuring out the cheapest possible way of doing front end dev for a series of blog posts (that I never wrote) . The result was using a Pi3B+ and a lot of open source tools, Github and Netlify. It works so well I'm still using it for a ton of dev.
mvip 7y ago
I got a bunch of them running Screenly (https://www.screenly.io https://www.screenly.io), so I'd say that's a good use :) Also, I'm using PiHole and Home Assistant. Disclaimer: I'm the author of Screenly.
vanadium 7y ago
Pi-Hole, RetroPie, and for my 1st-grade son I installed Kano OS for his first computer. I see a couple of Pi 4s as upgrades in my future. Also looking to get my SDR rig up and running on one of the other Pis i have waiting to be used.
- dgacmu 7y ago
  Anything you've learned to share about having it as a computer for your first grader? I recently set one up for my daughter, same age, but haven't put much thought into the software side yet. She's played Minecraft-pi a couple of times, we made the cat meow in Scratch, and we used it to watch a movie the other day, but that's it so far.
  - vanadium 7y ago
    Since I only installed the Kano OS image on a bog standard Pi 3, it's basically this without all the accessories. https://kano.me/store/us/products/computer-kit https://kano.me/store/us/products/computer-kit It's great that Kano makes it available standalone. Kano OS has all the activities built into the image, including visual coding of Minecraft and other tools, and guided lessons around using the Terminal. Chromium and LibreOffice are also installed by default. There's also a curated app "store" like experience to add new games. Installing CUPS to add our printer to the Kano OS Pi was pretty straightforward, so he also uses it for personal writing and printing out stories. It's really engaging for our son, and provides ample time for parent-child learning opportunities to boot. We ended up getting the Pixel Kit while we were at it, and Kano OS picked up on it immediately and exposed all the lessons for it. Hoping their move to Windows 10 doesn't leave their Kano OS image locked to a Pi 3, though. I'd love to upgrade his Pi to a 4 soon. Kano OS Image: https://hello.kano.me/downloads/ https://hello.kano.me/downloads/
blago 7y ago
VPN
carry_bit 7y ago
Media center & TV PC. I have a 4 TB external hard drive connected to it (and swap on it). Using a custom compiled kernel with zswap support, browsing the web isn't that bad with the 1GB of RAM on the 3B. I've also hooked up an RTL-SDR to it and ran rtl-tcp instead of needing to run a long USB cord.
amingilani 7y ago
I used it to monitor ADSL device status[0], also created a DIY timecapsule for MacOS[1] — these were all in the past, though. Currently the Pi is on my roof, connected to an SDR. I sometimes run rtl_server on it, and listen around. Although it's been a hassle, since I have to run upstairs and disconnect it everytime there's a storm. Also, listening to the device over WiFi means I get really laggy control over my SDR. I'm planning on replacing the Pi with something better powered. [0]: https://github.com/amingilani/scruffy https://github.com/amingilani/scruffy [1]: https://github.com/amingilani/chronopill https://github.com/amingilani/chronopill
- valent1ne 7y ago
  You could probably automate cutting the power with a relay switch also connected to the pi. Just scrape weather data, and if you expect the storm, trigger the switch.
  - amingilani 7y ago
    I'm actually more concerned about lightning strikes hitting the antenna, frying the Pi, traveling down the Ethernet cable and frying my router. I'm still a ham in training but I've been told that it's best practice to disconnect the antenna and isolate it from your setup. Some hams as far as placing their connectors in glass jars. I don't want to use a relay on the antenna cable because 1) it'll pick up RF interference, and 2) if a direct strike hits it, there'll be enough energy to jump the gap in the relay anyways. I might figure out a more permanent solid-state solution in the future though. Like I said, still learning :)
    - wrycoder 7y ago
      Ground the antenna.
      - amingilani 7y ago
        That is easier said than done, unfortunately. I live in a developing country. My house does home have a home grinding rod.
hlfshell 7y ago
I've made some interesting projects over the years - only a writeup on a few of these, and some are in pieces and in various states of disrepair after moving so much. Some write ups on larger projects: 1. I used a raspberry pi to coordinate the firing of multiple cameras, and then had the pi upload to a cloud service that would stitch them together to an "infinite zoom" super selfie. https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/gigasnap- https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/gigasnap- a-prototyping-story-efed72099d32 2. I created a library that made it dead simple for a raspberry pi to communicate to arduinos, and used that to control a lot of hardware projects, like little robots. https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/serial-synapse-94a114aa271e https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/serial-synapse-94a114aa2... 3. Raspberry Pi's controlled the heartbeat detection (controlled lights and music of your booth) and conductive paint controller (I built it and still don't understand the meaning) for this art piece. https://vimeo.com/207047769 https://vimeo.com/207047769 4. I had a video / text message doorbell a couple of apartments ago. https://github.com/hlfshell/doorbell https://github.com/hlfshell/doorbell 5. Used one as an MQTT hub for numerous IoT projects. I created https://github.com/hlfshell/mqtt-scheduler https://github.com/hlfshell/mqtt-scheduler to schedule MQTT jobs for things like the arduino powered garden controller (lights + water pumps) I built for my wife. https://github.com/hlfshell/garden-relay https://github.com/hlfshell/garden-relay 6. This never got off the ground, but when Pokemon Go had first launched and was super popular, I wrote a slackbot that would alert everyone in the office when pokemon (outside of the super common Rattatas and Pidgeots) was nearby. I was repurposing that code to make a portable Pokemon radar that would jump a false account around the area around you, thus hunting down pokemon for you. https://github.com/hlfshell/pokemon-tracker https://github.com/hlfshell/pokemon-tracker It never got far as the game got super stale quick.
- lloydpick 7y ago
  Disney now have exactly what you described in your first project as a photo opportunity at the Magic Kingdom. https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2019/05/enjoy-new-disney-photopass-experiences-at-walt-disney-world-resort/ https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2019/05/enjoy-new-dis...
  - hlfshell 7y ago
youeeeeeediot 7y ago
Running piAware for flight tracking https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/ https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/
- sucrose 7y ago
  Is there a benefit to personally tracking flights instead of querying 3rd parties?
  - matthewmcg 7y ago
    Most of the services (FlightAware, Flight Radar 24, ADSB Exchange) get much of their data from volunteer-operated receivers. If you feed your own data to these networks, you get several benefits including multilateration capability (computed location for planes that don't send their own GPS location data) and free business accounts on FlightAware and Flight Radar 24.
  - gleenn 7y ago
    Perhaps they are in a remote location that doesn’t have data?
  - markdeloura 7y ago
    FlightAware in particular gives you access to a greater level of data and services on their site if you're an active contributor via a PiAware. Also, honestly, it's just fun fooling around with the antenna and software setup to maximize the number of flights I can see :)
adrianvega 7y ago
print server for an older printer
zoul 7y ago
https://pi-hole.net https://pi-hole.net. Just installed, very happy so far.
- Tehchops 7y ago
  How do you deal with it breaking things like Amazon-based UI(Fire, Mobile shopping etc...)?
  - apazzolini 7y ago
    I'm not OC, but my solution there would be to seek non-Amazon based UI :)
    - Tehchops 7y ago
      Of a number of different solutions, Amazon has consistently delivered the best UX for streaming, shopping, and wireless music playback. Why would I switch?
      - apazzolini 7y ago
        I'm sorry, what? Have you tried searching for a show with multiple seasons on Prime video? It's a fucking joke.
        Tehchops 7y ago
        >I'm sorry, what? "Of a number of different solutions, Amazon has consistently delivered the best UX for streaming, shopping, and wireless music playback. Why would I switch?" I view shows on Prime with multiple seasons all the time.
  - zoul 7y ago
    So far I have not found anything broken yet. I think I would go for a whitelist in that case.
cheeko1234 7y ago
Homeassistant (Hass with mqtt and grafana), Octoprint, MotionEyeOS, pihole, pivpn, Donkey car, Robot operating system (ROS), and a wireless controller for my crazyflie quadcopter
WhompingWindows 7y ago
I'm totally naive with Raspberry Pi..can someone comment on the following project: Is it possible to put a glass eye behind a portrait of a one-eyed pirate and make its eye move around/follow whoever enters the room? A friend has a glass eye but nothing to do with it.
- amingilani 7y ago
  Lemme think. A camera that observes the room from the portrait, anyone that walks in is a dot on a plane, and it points the eye at the point on the plane. Should be doable. Yes, the Pi should handle that fairly easily. The part that you'll have to figure out is making the eye ball rotate. There are GPIO pins on the Pi, so you can get the commands out, but you'll need to build the eyeball component yourself.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
    Probably not. Servocity has x-y gimbal controllers. If you can find one small enough, it could control the eye.
- fizzledbits 7y ago
  If I hadn’t started this startup and had time, I would want to start making this right now
- cheeko1234 7y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/6y55zw/robot_eyes_that_follow_you_around_raspberry_pi_3b/ https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/6y55zw/robot_... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLxbPB3CHwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLxbPB3CHwQ
- shearskill 7y ago
  Totally possible. https://youtu.be/0o_9CHYeRvI https://youtu.be/0o_9CHYeRvI Make it play the Spongebob theme and you’re set.
- monocularvision 7y ago
jchw 7y ago
Right now: I use it as a Flashrom rig, for flashing BIOS chips. The new Raspberry Pi looks powerful enough to use as a media center PC, I ordered one and want to see if it can do that well enough (read as: I’m curious to see emulation performance.)
- fsagx 7y ago
  I've been happy for a year or two (not even sure, now that I think about it...) with two Pi3s running openElec. Both run over wired ethernet to SMB media server. I'm generally stingy with my storage, so I usually opt for the 1080p file sizes. I don't know how well or if it can handle 4K.
SteveNuts 7y ago
Pi-hole, and my home backup target using an external HDD and Samba.
egn 7y ago
I have a small Internet kiosk for one-off browsing and guests. Currently, mine is running on an ODROID-C2 but the Pi 4 should have more than enough performance for one. My setup is a stripped down install with a minimal window manager. There's only one icon for launching Firefox which is configured in an amnesic mode. The DNS is set to my Pi-hole.
rjmunro 7y ago
We use it as a front end to our Church's AV system. It runs a GUI written in Python with PySide that controls our cameras, hyperdeck recorder and vision mixer. It also controls the power switches for the system, and the blinds.
llamataboot 7y ago
1) PiHole 2) Wired one into a rotary phone to make a weird steampunky smarthouse controller (Dial '0' to turn off all downstairs lights and music, etc) 3) Various LED controls for fun, and Christmas 4) Always experimenting with MycroftAI to stay away from Alexa
- sergiomattei 7y ago
  This sounds so cool.
- Gabriel_Martin 7y ago
  2 sounds amazing
  - llamataboot 7y ago
    Thanks! A first version of the code is on github: https://github.com/estiens/confessional_booth https://github.com/estiens/confessional_booth It was originally part of a confessional booth taken to Burning Man in 2015. Since then it has evolved and become part of my smart home stuff. I was intimidated when I started as it was my first "hardware" project, but the rotary phone part was pretty easy! Just a little switch that turns on and off the number of times of the number dialed basically. It actually has a (new) microphone wired into the mouthpiece and it uses the receiver original speaker ired to the pi sound output. (At the time I knew nothing about Linux so I think getting pulseaudio working correctly took as long as everything else!) Those aren't working currently, but eventually I plan to integrate both the rotary dials and voice recognition and "scenes" So like, dial "721" for light control. Voice: "And what are we doing with the lights today..." Me: "Make the outside light purple" and it is done. I have custom voice recongition for things like that working with Mycroft, so it will just be a matter of joining the two projects!
    - llamataboot 7y ago
      As a bonus, since it was originally designed to work in the desert without a screen, it can do things via a weird analog interface. For example, if I press the hangup button 10 times in a row and then dial a number, I can get a report of how much memory is left on the device, etc.
LeonM 7y ago
I use my Pi2 as a media player (LibreElec), and just ordered a Pi4 4gb which I'm planning to replace my ageing server and NAS with.
pixelmonkey 7y ago
Primarily, an always-on node to run wake-on-lan (via etherwake) on other home network nodes, and to act as an SSH bastion when other entrypoints are failing.
seanalltogether 7y ago
I used mine as a dlna server and file server, but I was constantly having to restart it or delete the database to get it to pick up new files I had recently dragged on to it. Has anyone been able to use one successfully for serving media?
- sirius87 7y ago
  I run minidlna on it to host music. No issues scanning for new files, but IIRC detecting new files was an issue when I ran Plex under docker on it.
Klathmon 7y ago
I use them as controllers/monitors for remotely managing a 3d printer farm. At about $40 total extra per printer for the pi and associated hardware, and an open source utility called "octoprint", i'm able to remotely upload, monitor, cancel/pause, and have a camera feed to each printer. They also give some additional nice-to-haves by allowing me to upgrade the printer firmware remotely, and get very accurate print completion estimation times.
Malcx 7y ago
Using it to run an order scheduling system in store of an automated coffee chain startup we're developing.
ryandrake 7y ago
Mine is running in my attic, hooked up to three antennas on my roof: 1. A GPS antenna which provides an accurate “stratum 0” time source. The pi runs ntpd and provides time for all devices on my network. 2. A home built ADS-B antenna for receiving position reports from local aircraft and airliners. Interfaces to the pi with a USB SDR. Pi runs dump1090 to provide a web visualization of local air traffic. I also feed FlightAware with this info. 3. A home built VHF antenna for listening to airband transmissions. Second SDR. Pi runs scanner software and an IceCast server for clients on my network to connect and listen. The pi also has a temperature sensor that logs once a minute so I can plot my attic’s temperature and I can have it alert me if it gets too hot.
cheesymuffin 7y ago
I don't use it, I never got around to it because I'm not actually all that interested in computers, at least not in the sense that I thought I was.
__lm__ 7y ago
My Raspberry Pi 3 works as a CUPS print server connected to a laser printer, as a pi-hole DNS server to filter ads, and as a ssh entry point (with dynamic DNS). I would use a Pi zero, but Ghostscript is not too happy when printing large documents on a single-core processor with 512 MB of ram. I still have to find the time to set-up a backup server on it (and decide which software to use).
gsruff 7y ago
1. I used a Raspberry Pi Zero W to flash Coreboot onto my Lenovo X200. 2. I have a 3 B+ running RetroPie. 3. I use a model 1 with USB Wi-Fi adapter as a wireless print server for an old LaserJet printer.
crankylinuxuser 7y ago
I built the RadioInstigator, a mobile SigInt attack platform for around $150. https://hackaday.com/2019/06/05/mobile-sigint-hacking-on-a-civilians-budget/ https://hackaday.com/2019/06/05/mobile-sigint-hacking-on-a-c... If it wasn't for F5OEO's Rpitx library, I would have been stuck with non-SDR Tx. https://github.com/F5OEO/rpitx https://github.com/F5OEO/rpitx
ykl 7y ago
Low-cost Aarch64 development machine! I run Aarch64 Fedora on a Pi 3B+ for porting personal projects to Aarch64 and for testing. When mainstream desktop ARM arrives (ARM Macs perhaps?), I’d like to be ready in case I have to make a switch from x86-64.
kageneko 7y ago
I'm building a CarPi. I'm using a bluetooth OBD-II adapter and Python-OBD to monitor my car's diagnostics and record them. I'm planning on adding a GPS adapter and probably a gyroscope/accelerometer so I can track location and motion at the same time. It's mostly just for fun. Maybe one day I'll add some kind of analysis to it. It might be interesting to track location, motion, and car status in order to predict mileage or if the engine light will turn on.
- NickBusey 7y ago
  Please open source this.
  - gchokov 7y ago
    Please do
SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
I used it as a ad hoc game camera last summer (we had something coming through our back yard, so wanted to see what it was, and I won't say no to buying more electronics I'll use once), but that's about it. Been powered off ever since.
jononor 7y ago
Doorlocks of our hackerspace has been RPi controlled almost since the original RPi came out, maybe 2013. Nowadays we got 4 doors on 3 RPIs (internal and external), with over 200 members that has access. Using MQTT to communicate with our membersystem since 2016 or so.
- Tomte 7y ago
  Please think about failure modes, and don't take these guys as an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10302686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10302686
  - jononor 7y ago
    Of course. Our system controls electronic latches in the door frame, while the door-bolt is unmodified - so all doors can be opened from inside without any electronics. Additionally there are separate fire-exits from all our rooms.
postit 7y ago
main pi: pihole and google cloud print spare pi: retropie loaded with all the good goodies.
elagost 7y ago
I used mine as a NAS for a while with an external USB HDD and a samba share. It was also set up to be a VPN and pi-hole. I have a pi zero that I use to flash coreboot on laptops. My PS3 isn't doing so hot as a media server client for my NAS's movie library - the network connection is poor, the interface is fiddly, and it can't load subtitles embedded in files. I was going to buy a pi3 to replace it as a media server client and hook up an external DVD player, but now I'll be getting a pi 4!
- KingFelix 7y ago
  Check out ROckPro64, I just set mine up. Running plex with an internal HDD on a PCIex4, 6 core processor and 4gb ram. Using Dietpi, I am interested in checking out the Pi 4 as well, but looks like it might be a few months until its available
bitlax 7y ago
1. simple server for backup and git repos 2. xbmc for videos on main tv 3. retropie (I had fun with this for about a week but haven't used it lately) 4. pihole for blocking ads and time-wasting sites 5. various small projects: security camera, motorized window shade, etc. I run Home Assistant on my desktop to communicate with a few of the other devices in the house but I might move that over to a Pi so I don't have to worry about restarts and performance. I'm thinking about consolidating this setup somewhat but I'm waiting for my next move.
gattr 7y ago
I got a RPi 3B+ to build and test some open-source amateur astronomy tools I contribute to - everything has been working quite nicely so far (I use Fedora on my computers and it also works fine on the Pi). I'm eyeing the RPi 4 with interest.
riston 7y ago
I have several Raspberry Pi's in use: - One Zero with AudioQuest Dragonfly for PiMusicBox - RPI v1 with a camera for motion detection - RPI v3 for HomeAssistant Hub
quartz 7y ago
The coffee machine in our office is controlled by blockchain NFTs and a Raspberry Pi: Once authenticated, an owner of the NFT can select their coffee type on their phone which then signals the Raspberry Pi to make whatever coffee type was selected by jumping the contacts that used to be pressed by the machine's buttons (which have been removed). It's a cool gimmick, fun to show off to visitors, gives us a nice record of who is making coffee (since each NFT's owner is unique and trackable), limits users to those with the NFT without us having to build usernames/passwords, and is also how I make my coffee each afternoon.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Is it HTCPCP-enabled? Inquiring minds want to know!
  - jtolly710 7y ago
    Hopefully including HTTP Error 418 too!
- amelius 7y ago
  > gives us a nice record of who is making coffee Is that allowed by GDPR?
  - coolspot 7y ago
    If you don't serve cookies it is okay.
  - quartz 7y ago
    If an EU user tries to make coffee we redirect them to a "this content is unavailable in your region" page so I think we're 100% good to go with GDPR compliance.
- notdang 7y ago
  What coffee machine are you using?
netsectoday 7y ago
In production since 2016 with 3 x Raspberry Pi 3s. Very reliable - they only need a reboot once a year. These guys are hardcore - processing bursts of thousands of records from a serial interface 24 hours a day 7 days a week and shuffling it off to the cloud.
- fsagx 7y ago
  Did you do some work to run 100% from ramdisk after boot? Conventional wisdom says that the SD cards should fail eventually from log writes, etc.
davidb_ 7y ago
I've got 5. I only actively use 3 of them. 1. Media player connected to projector running RasPlex - this software is outdated enough and buffers on some high bitrate content that I should buy a replacement device, but it still works well enough. I tried upgrading to a newer raspi and wasted an hour trying to get it to run, then gave up. So, I still use my old one. It still gets used daily and works well enough (only issue is the buffering on occasion). 2. RetroPie - I rarely game, but it's cool to be able to turn this on and have a library of all the games I played (and those I never had) from childhood. 3. I use the third one as a networked LED marquee controller (HUB75 panels) with this software: https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix The other 2 I just have sitting on my desk and occasionally use for small dev projects or to test out some new project I read about on here, hackaday, etc. An ongoing project that I haven't made much progress with is an automated turret that squirts squirrels with water. I made something similar in college (a "paintball gun" turret with openCV blob detection/tracking) that had decent performance. Now that openCV on rpi can outperform my old college laptop, I want to setup the pi to detect squirrels, track them, and keep them away from a bird feeder/plants in my backyard.
- ncarroll 7y ago
  Would that turret will work for pigeons landing on my balcony? Or better yet, to protect my air space by squirting them on a fly by? That'd be some sweet fun. :-)
  - mft_ 7y ago
    This makes me sad. Pigeons get a bad time, but they're lovely birds of you spend some time observing and maybe even interacting with them. We had an obviously-paired couple visit our balcony most days for a couple of years. Please don't be (thoughtlessly?) mean to them.
    - sersi 7y ago
      I like Pigeons and don't mind them except when they visit my balcony at 7am in the morning and wake me up (we only have single pane windows and no way to change it since we're renting).
ge96 7y ago
I have three always on One Pi3B+ connected to anemometer and single solar cell, uploads up to 60 secs of analog data reading every minute by CRON, then has other CROn stuff for emailing One Pi Zero for home security camera attached to motion sensor/rapid shutter mode, uploads to S3 bucket One Pi zero for reading HN news out loud in the morning by Amazon Polly, tracking solar cells on window, and then more scheduling stuff I have another one powered by USB, I intend to use it as "swappable dev stacks by sd card" through USB SSH
kawfey 7y ago
I have a few. 1) PiHole. I'm upgrading this to a RasPi4 and seeing if I can also merge 2) 5) and 6) into it. 2) NAS/VPN/Media Server/Hass.io 3) RTL-SDR for ADS-B Receiver feeding to numerous data warehouses (Flightaware, ADS-B Exchange, PlaneFinder, etc) 4) Connected to RTL-SDR and running rtltcp for generic HF/VHF/UHF radio receiving which was previously part of a SATNOGS automatic cubesat/Amsat/ISS receiver build I've not completed yet. 5) Debian desktop on my workbench 6) A Pi Zero W running a ZNC IRC bouncer 7) Experimenting with remote ham radio control but linux-based ham radio software is still a bit too frustrating, so this isn't an active project. 8) Two extra RasPis and three PiZeroW's just lying around because Microcenter always has them for ridiculously low prices.
madengr 7y ago
Using one for a DMR (ham radio) hotspot. Plan on using one for a GPSDO data monitoring. The problem with the RPi is the SD card file system. It’s just not reliable enough. I have had better luck with the Beaglebone Black, which as on-board eMMC.
chandlermayo767 7y ago
I use it to control my 3D printer: https://octoprint.org/ https://octoprint.org/
sunmaker 7y ago
I am using The Pi for 1) video security system using zoneminder 2) text and email me alerts 3) Automate lights/devices using 433MHz RF sockets, crontab and RF433Utils 4) A cloud storage for my files using owncloud
corporealshift 7y ago
I build an RC (with the goal of making it autonomous) car. I got as far as giving it edge detection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-o8Uzi5o1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-o8Uzi5o1k but haven't continued the project. It's a great platform for exploring controlling hardware and prototyping ideas!
westondeboer 7y ago
pihole and instapy
cartoonfoxes 7y ago
1. Trello displays in conference rooms. 2. Admin terminal that sits on my desk.
codingdave 7y ago
I just set up pi-hole on one this weekend. It was my first time trying a Raspberry Pi, and I loved it. With the news about the latest version and the improved specs, I'm considering setting up a couple to replace my kids' computers, which are all old and under-powered.
beanjammin 7y ago
1 - Kids' desktop (Raspi3) 2 - Kodi (Raspi2) 3 - LAN print/automated backup server (Raspi1) I've order a 4GB Raspi4 to upgrade the kids' desktop and 1 GB Raspi4 to upgrade the automated backup server (Gb ethernet + USB3!). Kodi will get the old kids' desktop.
- yashwanthcp 7y ago
  Hi can you share more details on the kids desktop setup? What applications do you use?
albumdropped 7y ago
Tracking aircraft within radio range and feeding data to ADSB Exchange and Flightaware.
pfalafel 7y ago
I run a Newsreader server. It collects news from many hundreds of places and at any time offers a beautiful timeline view for all my screen devices: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=238133 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=2381...
peternicky 7y ago
PiHole service is the only project I run on my raspberry pi. Setup is not as user friendly as we are accustomed to these days, however, with a few hours you will have a robust ad/analytics block system in place.
- djhworld 7y ago
  I've been using the docker version of pihole for a few years now https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole It made the setup process really very simple for me
camhenlin 7y ago
I use one to control a 3D printer with https://octoprint.org https://octoprint.org and another to integrate some smart home devices that are not homekit compatible with my homekit setup, using https://homebridge.io https://homebridge.io.
arrakeen 7y ago
1. pihole and unifi cloud key (not pleased that this is a requirement, but glad i can run it alongside my pihole) 2. retropie 3. commodore64 disk drive emulator! [1] [1] https://cbm-pi1541.firebaseapp.com/ https://cbm-pi1541.firebaseapp.com/
ixtli 7y ago
Pi Hole!
realshowbiz 7y ago
retropie, pi-hole and running misc temporary servers like minecraft
- ladberg 7y ago
  How does it perform as a Minecraft server? Do you use any mods or just vanilla?
  - realshowbiz 7y ago
    Vanilla. It’s so-so performance wise. A raspberry pi 2 has been good enough for our 6 player games. Newer models I’m sure would perform better.
sbhn 7y ago
Zabbix Proxy https://youtu.be/i2b1DfscSqo https://youtu.be/i2b1DfscSqo
djhworld 7y ago
I have 3 running right now 1x Raspberry Pi model B (from 2012!) - runs a reverse proxy to things in my local network, and runs a dynamic DNS service. It's showing its age as its ARMv6 and I guess at some point updates won't be as frequent so will eventually have to retire it, but it works fine for now. 1x Pi model 3 - runs various services, inc. GOGS a private git server, ZNC, a service to control my TV, a service to control my 'smart plug' lamp through a private API, a private docker registry, a voicemail system connected to Twilio 1x Pi model 3 - running Pi-Hole and wireguard I love all of them very dearly and looking forward to reading this thread!
- smkelly 7y ago
  Do you have any more information or a write up on what you're doing with Twilio and voicemail? That sounds sort of interesting.
  - djhworld 7y ago
    No write up unfortunately, I actually made it a few years ago as I was getting a lot of recruiter spam calls, but ever since the GDPR came in that has stopped. I don't receive that many calls these days. I have my (cell) phones voicemail set to my Twilio number. When a voicemail request hits Twilio, it calls an endpoint hosted on my Pi, which then just calls the Twilio APIs to 1. tell the caller to leave a message after the beep 2. record the message 3. use the speech-to-text API to transcribe the message 4. send me an SMS message with the transcription It's really just an ersatz visual/text voicemail service that I think iPhone users get. Also the Twilio speech-to-text transcriptions are hilariously bad, I don't think it copes well with UK accents :)
  - chrismeller 7y ago
    You can actually do voicemail within Twilio for free using their TwiML Bins and Functions, you don’t need any extra hardware to maintain. Just did this for a couple of numbers I set up with SIP. The docs were... confusing and inaccurate but I finally got it to work.
castis 7y ago
Quadcopter pet project https://github.com/castis/currant https://github.com/castis/currant One for running Retropie https://emulationstation.org/gettingstarted.html#install_rpi_retropie https://emulationstation.org/gettingstarted.html#install_rpi.... Next one is for playing with https://www.zoneminder.com/ https://www.zoneminder.com/
cbm-vic-20 7y ago
SSH/IRC client for a VT420.
jedberg 7y ago
A lot of folks have said "pihole". I have a linux server at home that does my DNS and a bunch of other stuff. I also have a pi3 still in the box. Would there be an advantage to me running pihole on the pi3 instead of on my linux server?
- TheGRS 7y ago
  I don't see why, its just neat to have a little dedicated device next to your router IMO.
- jki275 7y ago
  Not at all. I run the service in a VM on a windows server.
- NikkiA 7y ago
  I still don't understand how pi-hole became so popular whereas privoxy didn't
  - jedberg 7y ago
    Better marketing and a cool name.
  - dgacmu 7y ago
    A filtering DNS server is much easier to add into your network - don't have to play with proxy autoconfig, and because it's not mucking with the http content, very lightweight.
- atonse 7y ago
  Energy use, probably. I bet the RPi uses a ton less energy than your linux server. But in this case that's not really a tradeoff since you'd be running your server in addition to the RPi.
alanbernstein 7y ago
I have 5 or more in my house, some bought, some inherited. One of them runs pi-hole. I'm in the middle of setting up octopi for a new 3d printer on another one. Two of the others are pi zeros (no wireless), no plan for those any time soon. I also have one of the older models, RCA video output instead of HDMI. I'm not sure I'll ever find a use for that one.
epmaybe 7y ago
I'm using a Raspberry Pi (Gen 1, Model B I think) to run a smart mirror. It pulls up my daily commute, news headlines, weather, and calendar. I take no credit for the software (https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror) I also had one connected to my Motorola LapDock back in 2012 to run a portable raspbian laptop. It worked surprisingly well.
- drieddust 7y ago
  This is a cool project I was completely unaware of.
- ashurov 7y ago
  Doing this as well as we speak! Also using a Pi as a RetroPi.
shriphani 7y ago
Mine drives an LED pixel frame in my living room: https://www.instagram.com/p/BIgFP9dhkPZ/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BIgFP9dhkPZ/
Ftuuky 7y ago
Have any of you done something with machine learning on rpi? Like face recognition or some fun robot. I'm looking at rpi4+google coral and it seems impressive enough to run interesting projects.
- 2sk21 7y ago
  I have a script that retrieve photos from an attached camera and then uploads the images to an AWS GPU instance and train an image recognition model there. This is all for controlling my model trains :-)
s-macke 7y ago
Pihole and tvheadend
ebrewste 7y ago
A bunch: - Ubiquiti network controller, Pi Hole - Temperature controller to knit an ancient hydronic in floor heater and a new-ish mini split together to act in unison. Pings local national weather stations to get more accurate data than I care to replicate at my home. - Octoprint for my 3d printer - 4x for a hobby project stitching together video from multiple cameras
kingnothing 7y ago
It was bought with the intention of using it as an emulator for old games, but it just sits unused in a closet.
lavoiems 7y ago
I use it as a visualization server for my research!
thecodemonkey 7y ago
1x Raspberry Pi 3 installed in my car within the internal network as a bastion box and to run software that let's my interact with the entertainment system 1x Raspberry Pi 3 running Home Assistant with a Z-Wave USB Dongle (Home Automation) 1x Raspberry Pi 3 running OctoPrint (Host/remote-control for 3D Printer) 1x Raspberry Pi 3 running FullPageOS (Full-screen Chromium in kiosk mode) displaying a server statusboard in our home office Next project: 1x Raspberry Pi Zero W to run Unifi Controller I have a couple of original Model B+ sitting around unused right now - just not powerful enough for any of the above projects. (Update: Formatting)
- exhilaration 7y ago
  FYI - I had to buy a Pi 3B+ to run Unifi Controller, the forum posts said the Zero W didn't have enough juice.
  - thecodemonkey 7y ago
    Boo! Might have to reconsider then. I used the Pi Zero W for FullPageOS for a while but performance was absolutely terrible, recently switched it out with the Raspberry Pi 3. The Pi Zero really has an awesome form factor, but many of the projects I come up with either require more performance (i.e. needing a Rasperry Pi 3) or are simply better suited for a microcontroller such an ESP32 or ESP8266.
    - tjoff 7y ago
      I guess it depends, but having the unifi controller on wifi isn't always the best of idea. If you misconfigure the wifi or just change the ssid/password the controller looses access as the settings are applied. And now you can't even connect to the controller to fix it.
      - thecodemonkey 7y ago
        I’m using an Ubiquiti gateway but not for access points (yet). So that’s not currently a problem. But that’s good to know!
cstuder 7y ago
Mine is running Hypriot OS (https://blog.hypriot.com https://blog.hypriot.com): Everything on it is dockerized. The coolest application: An Airconnect container (https://github.com/philippe44/AirConnect https://github.com/philippe44/AirConnect) which upgrades my mediocre Internet radio device with AirPlay.
Kaway 7y ago
I use it for a personal project implying scraping some websites. One of these websites was behind Cloudflare (I think), and thus was blocking request from my OVH server. Therefore I used my Raspberry to do the job, on my own connection. I also put recently a Pi-hole on it.
warp 7y ago
1. A raspberry pi 3 on which I use git-annex to archive data on a bunch of large USB disks. 2. A raspberry pi 2 at a different location which provides off-site backups for the data archived by the first pi 3. A raspberry pi zero to run magic mirror on a leftover screen (I cannot be bothered to turn it into an actual smart mirror though) 4. And I recently added another raspberry pi 3 to play with RetroPie
hanklazard 7y ago
1. Retropie 2. Pi-hole 3. Bluetooth presence detection 4. Previously ran a Hassio instance on one 5. Wireguard server 6. (HiFiBerry + Volumio) x 3 great for multi room sonos-like system
jepler 7y ago
- LED Light alarm - Living room music player & "radio" streamer -- I need to set this up as an A2DP audio receiver too - octoprint server - Stratum 1 NTP server (GPS referenced) If I didn't also have a "big" linux system running 24/7, it would be doing things like DHCP, DNS, MQTT server, etc.
- prkr 7y ago
  I'm interested in learning more about your LED light alarm set up—I had a similar idea a while back but am less familiar with the world of Raspberry Pi.
  - jepler 7y ago
    Thanks for asking! I haven't documented it anywhere, and the source code isn't suitable for consumption by others. But, I can tell you about the basics. I bought a "12V" LED strip intended for automotive use, and created a simple circuit with a +12V DC supply and an NPN transistor. By hooking the NPN transistor to a PWM output on the Pi's I/O (via a resistor), I can control the LEDs from nearly full darkness to their maximum brightness. Here's a tutorial that covers the same ground: https://dordnung.de/raspberrypi-ledstrip/ https://dordnung.de/raspberrypi-ledstrip/ There's also a switch for "disable alarm no matter what" and "turn light on/off right now". (I also use it as a nighttime reading lamp, with the added bonus that it starts ramping down the brightness after about 25 minutes and turns off after 30: a good reminder to go the f--- to bed) This all hooks to some not very interesting software to listen to the buttons, carry out an alarm schedule, ramp the LED intensity up and down, and so forth. In my case, it's written all in Python in a sort of timer-and-event-driven style. Since this pi has wifi, one part of a traditional alarm clock is missing: it sets the time from NTP and applies the standard DST rules to obey summer time; there are no controls to set the time, and even after a midnight power outage it'll generally alarm at the right time in the morning, as long as power came on at least a few minutes before the appointed minute. I've had a number of variations on homebrew light alarm over the years, AVRs and arduinos, TRIACs switching standard incandescent lamps, RGB LEDs simulating the sunrise color sequence, etc. It's the sort of project you can always do again and explore more of the problem space and find what works best for you.
flexer2 7y ago
I wrote up a Medium post about what I do with mine: https://medium.com/@adamargo/how-i-use-raspberry-pis-for-homekit-automation-ed69df8d8be7 https://medium.com/@adamargo/how-i-use-raspberry-pis-for-hom... Mostly home automation. 1x homebridge server, ffmpeg transcoder for security cameras, 1x for controlling an electric fireplace using an IR shield and power monitoring outlet, 1x for controlling model train switches and bridging that into HomeKit
TheGRS 7y ago
There was a time I was super into a project where I had a streaming server that used my Spotify account and would allow anyone with access to the server to change the song. I was basically trying to replicate what Sonos does with a Pi. It worked, but I abandoned it after a few months of not using it.
ravenstine 7y ago
I'm not really using one regularly right now, but here are the few things I've done with my Pis: - Hosted a blog using Rails and a Cron that updated the A record on my Route53 domain to point to my local IP address. I'm not sure anyone ever read it, but I had it up for about a year. - Attempted to reverse engineer a treadmill controller with the UART pins. I successfully figured out the baud rate and captured bytes, but never figured out how to control the treadmill motor board. I have a feeling the motor board had a problem. - Connected a piezo element to GPIO and made a controllable alarm device. Nothing that cool, really.
guilhermetk 7y ago
I have 3 use cases for my RPi: -PiHole as an ad/tracking blocker (adding PiVPN tonight to VPN into my home network) -Plugging sensors to measure temp/humidity and controlling AC state (on/off) via IR Led (https://imgur.com/a/pYugqXz https://imgur.com/a/pYugqXz) -Unifi Controller
luckylion 7y ago
Two things, working on more. VPN router and a doorbell to desktop-notifications box. I like listening to music on noise cancelling headphones sometimes when I work. I wouldn't hear the doorbell in that case, so I have a pi with a mic that sits close to the doorbell. If the noise level goes past a certain threshold for a few samples, it sends a command to my workstation where a script sits and triggers a desktop notification. Works pretty well with very few false positives and all "I might miss the package delivery guy" anxiety is gone while I enjoy music.
koolba 7y ago
Coincidentally there’s another story on the front page about using a Raspberry Pi to hack NASA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264774
- slim 7y ago
  thats not a coincidence. That's a well coordinated product launch with a good PR agency doing it's job
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    A PR agency that hacks NASA to boost your product launch, sign me up! ;o)
xmichael999 7y ago
1x House power monitor 1x Solar power monitor 1x DVBT airplane tracking (flightradar.com) 1x Fridge temperature and humidity graphing for Salami chamber 1x Pi-hole (I also run a second pi-hole on a VM)
- Tempest1981 7y ago
  What sensors for your power monitor?
  - Tempest1981 7y ago
    This project shows some $8 sensors: http://www.the-diy-life.com/simple-arduino-home-energy-meter/ http://www.the-diy-life.com/simple-arduino-home-energy-meter...
2sk21 7y ago
Using several Raspberry Pis to monitor CO2 levels in my house. Each Raspberry Pi has a CO2 sensor - wrote a little Python script to retrieve data from sensor and upload it to a server Which is also a Raspberry Pi.
- jdsnape 7y ago
  What sensor did you use? All the ones I’ve seen tend to be pretty expensive
  - 2sk21 7y ago
    Yes - the sensors are a bit expensive at about US$ 90 apiece but as I explained in another comment, I think that it has paid for itself
  - anfractuosity 7y ago
    You can get cheap NDIR based sensors from aliexpress (around $20) such as MH-Z14A, which I've used with a Pi, via the UART interface. I just hooked it up to the 5V line on the Pi pin header and then used the Pis UART lines for the data, as that runs at 3.3V.
- mef51 7y ago
  which CO2 sensor do you use?
- inson 7y ago
  I am also interested in your CO2 sensor. What kind of CO2 sensor?
  - 2sk21 7y ago
    This is the sensor that I'm using: https://www.co2meter.com/collections/desktop/products/co2mini-co2-indoor-air-quality-monitor https://www.co2meter.com/collections/desktop/products/co2min...
    - 7y ago
pinjasaur 7y ago
I run Pi-hole off a RPi Zero W on my local network. Set it up over Ethernet with a bit of cron automation [0] and later expanded Gravity (the blocklist) along with firewall NAT rules to redirect all DNS queries to go through the Pi-hole [1]. [0]: https://paul.af/adding-pi-hole-to-my-local-network https://paul.af/adding-pi-hole-to-my-local-network [1]: https://paul.af/pi-hole-revisited https://paul.af/pi-hole-revisited
thedjinn 7y ago
I built a guitar stomp box using a Raspberry Pi Zero to trigger samples with a foot switch. Runs on 9 volts and has a very bright OLED display so I can still see what it's doing when I'm playing in a dark venue.
- unforswearing 7y ago
  I have been thinking about doing something similar -- would love to hear more about this if possible!
  - thedjinn 7y ago
    It's basically a Pi, a buck regulator, a tiny COB USB audio interface and an SSD1306-based 128x32 display. Removed all connectors and replaced them with soldered wires so it packs neatly into a tiny box. The software is all custom and written in C, using Jack for low latency audio and my own driver for the display (Adafruit makes a Python driver but it eats half of your CPU and is not optimized for i2c bandwidth or high framerates).
F00Fbug 7y ago
- WiFi garage door controller - OSMC x 2 - Stratux I had PiHole, but moved it to a tiny VM in an effort to minimize cables.
ohazi 7y ago
I use one as a hub/gateway for untrusted IoT devices. It hosts a separate, isolated wifi network via hostaod/dnsmasq. Clients aren't given routes to the primary network or the broader internet - they should only see the Pi and other clients (I'd eventually like to restrict access to other clients as well, but haven't played with that yet). Access to the devices is via a web server running on the Pi that relays commands and responses. Right now it's a page full of hard-coded buttons and indicators, but I eventually want to turn it into a flexible firewall-like system to make it easier to add/configure/remove clients and rules.
DanTheManPR 7y ago
I use mine to run and monitor my 3D printer remotely. I use octopi and the little webcam extension. Since I have a permanent use for it now, I'll probably be buying a second to play around with.
asatterfield54 7y ago
Meat curing fridge, plant watering system, LiDAR controllers on my truck
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zlalanne 7y ago
I have one hooked up to my TV on an HDMI port to display all my home surveillance cameras in a grid. Works with any cameras that support RTSP. https://selfhostedhome.com/raspberry-pi-video-surveillance-monitor/ https://selfhostedhome.com/raspberry-pi-video-surveillance-m...
guyromm 7y ago
A client that I'm consulting was being ripped off by a local IT provider with pricing for on-premises servers & MS software. I proceeded to rent cheaper equivalent machines off-site. The IT provider claimed the hardware firewall (Fortigate) was not configurable for site-to-site to the new machines directly (could be, not an expert on those). Therefore, I ended up purchasing several Raspberries and configuring them as OpenVPN routers that opened up the office LAN to said machines. Quite satisfying, as it allowed to break the client out of the proprietry software/hardware/vendor chain at a rather small expense.
- weaksauce 7y ago
  Fortigate is pretty configurable. I’d be really surprised if it couldn’t do site to site or site to client with a little configuration.
- the_angry_angel 7y ago
  You can absolutely configure IPSec tunnels on Fortinet. Can I ask, do you perform updates and maintenance on these boxes? How do they perform in terms of throughput with openvpn?
  - e12e 7y ago
    I'd be more interested if wireguard is an option, and how it performs. Since they're already on linux/oss.
    - the_angry_angel 7y ago
      IPSec is pretty much the standard interop still - pretty much everything talks it Cisco, Juniper, pfSense, Fortinet, etc. You name it I’d be surprised if it didn’t have support. I’d love to see wireguard implemented in the networking world, but I think it may take some time to get there :/
scottlamb 7y ago
A security camera NVR. (Help wanted! I'm developing it here: https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr I'm proud of the design but it's still far from a polished system that does everything a reasonable person would expect. Lots of opportunities to extend it if you're looking for a fun Rust + Javascript project.) A Raspberry Pi 2 will run a working setup; the new Raspberry Pi 4 should be a lot more pleasant in terms of being able to recompile it in a reasonable time, transfer video segments quickly, etc. I think the biggest missing piece is a real-time clock. Faster flash, builtin SATA, and a builtin NPU would also be great of course but not realistic for $35. A home theater control system. The Pi uses HDMI-CEC, my Samsung TV's EXLINK (their protocol over RS-232), Roku's HTTP interface, etc. and an Android app is the frontend. I wanted to make this into a nice polished thing other people could use but have given up on the idea for now. The thing is that media components are super finicky, many things need special support written just for them, and you really have to extensively tweak them to see how they function as a whole. (eg does your TV turn off your stereo receiver when it turns off itself. The answer varies based on the model and settings of both components.) HDMI-CEC doesn't live up to its potential in this regard. [edit: fixed hyperlink]
- j1elo 7y ago
  You got a '>' as part of the URL, which goes 404! Just removing it should do.
- aloer 7y ago
  Moonfire NVR looks like an amazing project that I can learn a lot from for an entirely different project with streams and stuff that I’m interested in and have zero experience with! Also great that it’s written in rust Is there any way to test it without rpi/camera? If I understand the readme correctly, you store frames individually (as jpegs?) on disk and construct flexible mp4 streams on the fly. Naturally I would have assumed that this would be inefficient so I’m wondering if I got this right, not very familiar with stream/video/codec tech
  - scottlamb 7y ago
    Thanks! > Is there any way to test it without rpi/camera? Without a Raspberry Pi, yes. It should run on any Unix-like OS. I've tested Linux/arm32, Linux/x86-64, and macOS/x86-64. (For the last, install ffmpeg via homebrew first.) Without an IP camera...hmm, there are probably some public RTSP live streams somewhere. Not sure offhand. > If I understand the readme correctly, you store frames individually (as jpegs?) on disk and construct flexible mp4 streams on the fly. Naturally I would have assumed that this would be inefficient so I’m wondering if I got this right, not very familiar with stream/video/codec tech No, I store the video stream in the compressed form the camera gave it to me. Currently that's H.264; it wouldn't be hard to add H.265 support as well. I break it apart into roughly one-minute segments at convenient locations. The schema design doc talks about that here: https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/master/design/schema.md https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/master/design... .mp4 serving will aggregate those together (maybe clipping the start and end segment) to give you a .mp4 segment for any time range of interest. It comes up with a mp4::File struct which knows what video segments to serve and maps byte locations to parts of the .mp4 container format. I don't have a good doc about how this works other than the source code right now. https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/master/src/mp4.rs https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/master/src/mp... [edit: and you probably won't be successful in understanding it without having a pdf of the ISO/IEC 14496-12 specification open next to it.] Here's some debug output for generating a five-minute video segment: https://pastebin.com/Wzfz7BF7 https://pastebin.com/Wzfz7BF7 Storing individual frames as jpegs would be inefficient I agree in all sorts of ways: recording CPU (you have to decode the H.264 and re-encode it as JPEGs), disk space, disk seeks, playback bandwidth, browser CPU, etc. My understanding is this is how Zoneminder currently works. I imagine it worked better with the cameras Zoneminder was originally designed for: low-resolution, low-qps webcams that didn't do their own H.264 encoding.
jachee 7y ago
Pi hole. SSH server for tunneling gogs Anything else that needs a tiny Linux box.
Notorious_BLT 7y ago
1. PiHole (seems popular in this thread) 2. OctoPrint for my printer (with a touchscreen because I hate using the knob-based interface on the printer when I'm leveling the bed or doing maintenance) 3. Sitting on my desk because my Terraria server was freezing when saving the world file. Might set it up for emulation in the living room
jon-wood 7y ago
There's a thousand or so of them scattered around Europe which were the foundation of the company I work at, acting as IoT hubs to communicate with devices designed to alert insurance customers of floods, intrusion, and fire in their homes. We hadn't ever really planned to get into building our own hubs, but the RPi ecosystem meant that when we were forced into that corner on short notice (thanks Smartthings for shutting down app approvals at the last minute) we were able to go from zero to working product in a matter of weeks!
- personjerry 7y ago
  the things network?
gen3 7y ago
I use a B+ to run a print server. Its wired directly over serial to a receipt printer. Since it exposes a standard CUPS interface, I have a few bots that call it to print out things. (messages, memes, weather, diagnostics)
Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
1x nailed to my wall and acting as a jump box for my home network and a DNS server 1x running OctoPrint by the 3D printer 1x responsible for remote serial access to and cycling power on my RISC-V board 1x updates the weather on an e-ink display every 20 minutes
rjakobsson 7y ago
I run PiHole on a raspberry 1 rev b. Going to get the new model to run a bitcoin node at home (instead of running it on my old laptop).
elihu 7y ago
I'm using one as part of a midi controller project: http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/jik/keyboard.html http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/jik/keyboard.html The controller has 156 pressure sensitive keys. The raspberry Pi runs a program that reads from a bank of 20 8-channel ADCs all wired up to a SPI bus (it runs at 2mhz, and I'm able to get about 90 samples per second), and then generates MIDI commands that are sent over a USB-MIDI adapter. I could use a microcontroller for this, but it's kind of convenient to be able to plug other USB-MIDI devices into it and have it work, and to be able to run a Linux-based synthesizer locally if I want. (I've been planning on using a Teensy for the next version.)
- oddsockmachine 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this, it's great to see your process. I'm working on something vaguely related, a grid-based synth-controller/sequencer with a bunch of i2c shift registers and laser cut hardware. I've been thinking about building a pressure-sensitive hex-layout keyboard next, you've given me a bunch of ideas and inspiration.
  - elihu 7y ago
    Thanks. Pressure sensing is actually pretty simple and cheap, unless you have a really large number of inputs (like I have). I was planning to switch to a matrix layout in the next version to reduce the number of ADC chips I need, but then I'll have to figure out how to mitigate ghosting. I haven't used any of Sensitronic's producs, but they do have a lot of good information on their site about the various ways to use force-sensitive resistors.
cameron_b 7y ago
I have a pair of Pi Zero Ws set up as timelapse cameras that I keep in the garden - Cucumber vines and flowers opening is pretty interesting at 1 frame per minute I recently did a project with a pair of RPi 3b+ and cellular modems as construction cameras. I set up RetroPie on a 3b+, but it wasn't enough for the N64 games my wife and I wanted to play the 4 could change that Currently my security cameras are recorded using Orchid VMS on an Odroid XU4 ( Cloudshell with 2x 4T SATA) Its a great little tool for learning Bash, and groking your systems - testing portability? - without invoking AWS resources.
- jwong_ 7y ago
  What do you use for the camera? I have some plants I'd like to monitor but the cameras I'd use always ended up dying due to the heat.
  - cameron_b 7y ago
    one is the latest Pi camera, I also got one of the m12 mount cameras that use the same interface. I have a wide angle lens that has some distortion, but its a nice look for some things. I use a little box that I glued a tripod mount to, keeps the rain out.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jsilence 7y ago
  What is your take on the cloudshell? Genuinely curious.
  - cameron_b 7y ago
    Its a great little box. I have 2 or three cameras recording 24x7, a large chuck of the spinners is a Samba share, and Webmin tells me that I'm usually at 10-20% cpu and 25% memory. I've got an SSD connected to USB also, and it really makes the spinners feel slow ( WD Red Pros ) but that's mostly because they spend a lot of time idle and the first access is delayed. Of course it isn't perfect. It holds on to dust a bit too well, and it isn't super easy to connect another USB device once you get it all dressed in place. I don't use the screen. I did at first, but I'm not black-belt level at managing HDMI devices and it doesn't present as much value as the light pollution it causes. The RockPro64 would probably best it in most tests, but I already had the Cloudshell. I have dreams of incorporating it into an all-ARM Linux domain classroom.
nategri 7y ago
Current and former use cases: 1.) Arcade emulator box for a custom control panel I made 2.) Host machine for a twitter bot 3.) Octoprint server 4.) Virtual disk drive for an Apple II computer 5.) Internet connection quality monitor
h4waii 7y ago
1x Raspberry Pi 3B+ running OctoPrint, velcro-attached to my printer. 2x Raspberry Pi 2B running OSMC (with Kodi) for streaming from NAS to office TV and living room TV. 1x Raspberry Pi Zero W running OSMC (with Kodi) for streaming from NAS to bedroom TV. Provided HEVC H265 decoding works as it should, I suspect I will eventually upgrade all 3 of these to Model 4. They're great for a media center -- low power, small, and provide a local-only player for TVs I don't want to connect to any network. Also have 2 OG B+ models that sit in a drawer unused, since they don't have enough power for the above tasks.
dokument 7y ago
- Hosting personal website from my DMZ at home. - SDR and packet radio (Direwolf) projects - Kodi - rpi zeroW with usb serial for connecting back to my house from work/travel. I had more projects, but I've been able to replace them all with ESP8266's. Rpi is overkill to do simple things like toggle a gpio pin or take temperature readings. Use it if you have it, but it's nice freeing up extra rpi's with a $2 ESP.
- inson 7y ago
  I am planning to build Voip server using raspberry pi. Any idea how to start with this?
  - mytdi 7y ago
    Take a look at RasPBX (http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org).
vs4vijay 7y ago
I have setup RetroPie on my Raspberry Pi....
localhost 7y ago
I use a RPi Zero W to run DakBoard: https://dakboard.com/site https://dakboard.com/site which my family uses to organize our life. I'm planning on adding another Pi as a Pi Hole device as an experiment in parental controls via low TTL values to provide scheduled access to specific DNS names. For example, my kid gets distracted beyond all that is reasonable by Discord and I'd like to let him use Discord, but only at specific times. Anyone with an interest in this, please let me know!
- codealchemy7 7y ago
  You can probably run it on the same Pi Zero using screen? Am not sure if it will have enough juice to run both though.
guggle 7y ago
I have 2 Pi3. Nothing special, one is for retrogaming (recalbox), the other is for files server / backup (raspbian).
hawaiian 7y ago
Hack NASA, mostly. Also it makes a great pihole and man-in-the-middle for phone apps.
auiya 7y ago
RetroPie to run video game console emulators and MAME. Maybe the new version can finally run a proper N64 emulator?
michelb 7y ago
I made a fairytale phone as a present for a colleague's kid. I played with Arduino's before and this was my first Pi project. Pretty fun to do. Roughly followed this tutorial: https://www.instructables.com/id/Fairytale-Phone/ https://www.instructables.com/id/Fairytale-Phone/
Rebelgecko 7y ago
Use a small software defined radio to listen to ADS-B messages (real time airplane telemetry— even with a crappy $10 USB SDR dongle I can sometimes see planes that are 100+ miles away) Host my website (if I ever got any actual traffic it might be a problem, but since 99% of the traffic is me it's ok) Various web scraping/archival tasks
- KingFelix 7y ago
  I have been working on my own hosting as well and I wonder where the tipping point is, and if it's in regard to multiple users at once, or just consistent website hits?
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    For my use case (almost entirely static content), I think the bottleneck is SD card IO. I can handle at least a dozen hits per second no problem though
johnpowell 7y ago
Pi-hole and Syncthing. And I have Apache installed that just spits out a list of upcoming Doctors appointments since I have a few of those a week and they frequently change. I don't drive and my sister drives my to appointments so it helps her keep track of things.
diarmuidc 7y ago
1x RP3 running OSMC https://osmc.tv/download/ https://osmc.tv/download/ 2x RP2/3 with HiFi Berry DAC driving an amp. https://www.picoreplayer.org/ https://www.picoreplayer.org/ connecting to http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Logitech_Media_Server http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Logitech_Media_Server 1x RP2 running PiHole and Apache + Owncloud 1x RP3 running RetroPie The OSMC and music players get daily use and have been in use for a few years
aylmao 7y ago
I haven't built it yet, but I want to buy some clickable rotary encoders, some knobs and build a light switch for my smart lights. A knob you can click to turn the lights on or off, and turn to control the brightness. A knob you can click to toggle between "natural light" and "color", and turn to control either the warmth or the hue. Not sure if I need a whole Pi for this or if I should attempt it with something more bare-bones, but that's the project I have in mind.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
I think I'm just going to nope out of this one before the over-engineering makes me want to burn the world.
GuyPostington 7y ago
1x 3b+ Retropi cabinet 1x 3b+ Prometheus metrics scraping + grafana 2x 3b+ Volumio
JudgeWapner 7y ago
* DHCP server for my LAN * DNS server including pi-hole * headless bittorrent client (transmission daemon) * NFS and miniDLNA media server * git remote
NortySpock 7y ago
I've got a RPi 2 running PiHole and a SAMBA server for a bit of in-home file-swapping convenience. ("Just throw it on the server and I'll pull it from there!") Currently my problem is that samba will fail to write files greater than around 100+ MB uploaded to the server. (Writing to a USB drive). It still handles multi-gigabyte downloads ok. I've been able to work around it with SFTP uploading, so it's just a minor annoyance, but I wish I knew what was going on.
- KingFelix 7y ago
  I have mentioned this is a few comments, check out the RockPro64, its got 6 core processor 4gb ram, and runs Dietpi. It has a PCIe port, you can install 2 sata drives. I just installed an SSD and it's awesome so far. https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/ https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/ 80 bucks for the 4GB, includes all the stuff on the new pi though. Interested to see how the pi4 stacks up
adrianrocamora 7y ago
2 RPis running Octoprint for the 3D printers 1 RPi connected to the laser cutter which I'm currently fixing 1 RPi that I take with me and connect to from my phone through ssh (moving to mosh and a Bluetooth terminal when I get the chance) 1 RPi that I leave in the lab so people can play with it with numpy/scipy/octave 1 RPi that I'm setting up with something like Jellyfin for my home media server
- plicense 7y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, which laser cutter do you have?
  - adrianrocamora 7y ago
    Hey, some random Chinese one from Alibaba that we assembled. It works great but we are using LaserWeb on a PC and I want to have the RPi handle it.
Isamu 7y ago
Stepper motor control - I use the Adafruit DC & Stepper HAT https://www.adafruit.com/product/2348 https://www.adafruit.com/product/2348 Pretty easy to use, so far I like it.
forinti 7y ago
1 runs RISCOS so I can run old beeb games on and emulator; 1 keeps a log of temperature/pressure/humidity using sense hat; 1 has a backup of my photos on an external hd (and also has an sds011 dust sensor (https://github.com/glgraca/sds011 https://github.com/glgraca/sds011). But my best project has been a picture frame using a Pi Zero W that receives photos via Telegram. My kids' grandparents have this also and they love it (https://github.com/glgraca/PiFrame https://github.com/glgraca/PiFrame). I once took one on a holiday to watch Netflix at night.
bloopernova 7y ago
I have a Pi3 in a case that looks like a NES. I'm running RetroPie on it with a few ROMs I've found around the internet. It works pretty flawlessly. When the pre-order frenzy for the Pi4 has died down, I'm going to buy a 2 or 4GB model and use it to replace the old and slow crappy Windows 10 box we're using to stream Amazon Prime stuff to our TV.
linuxguy2 7y ago
I use it to take up space in my drawer of useless electronic stuff because I can never find a combination of power supply and SD card that doesn't eventually end up corrupt and unbootable.
- pnutjam 7y ago
  pxe boot
- arbitrage 7y ago
  You could try not buying cheap components. Storing it in a drawer probably doesn't help either.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    My drawers have been pretty good on my electronics. Where do you store them?
mindcrime 7y ago
I have one set up with the RetroPi distribution, that I carry around with me, along with two USB game-pad controllers, so I can engage in retro-gaming wherever I'm at (assuming there's an HDMI display available). I'm also dabbling with embedding one in the gutted out shell of an old boom-box, and making it a portable Alexa-like "smart speaker" of sorts. Looking at using something like Mycroft[1] or something of that ilk. But outside of running Mycroft or whatever, I want to load this thing down with sensors (microphone, webcam, GPS, SDR, accelerometer, temperature, humidity, ultrasonic, infrared, whatever I can) and stream the data to a server where I can do more intensive AI related work. The idea is that this thing is the front-end to experimenting with "embodied AI" and having an AI "thing" that can really sense and experience it's environment. This whole thing is very incipient, but I'm looking at seeing what I can do with something like OpenCOG, or SOAR or ACT-R, coupled with various ML techniques, to give this thing some level of smarts. [1]: https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/
felepeg 7y ago
3 rpi w 8mb camera to create a HD CCTV. 2 rpi to serving to 2 viewsonic touch screen 1 backing up PROD server
mpettitt 7y ago
I have one running pi-hole and Ubiqiti controller (powered by my router's usb port), one sitting under the TV running Kodi connected to a NAS, avoiding the need for discs (big plus when you have small children), one sat next to an old hi-fi which also links to the NAS and lets me stream music to the hi-fi, and a couple of older ones which aren't connected to anything having been replaced with newer models. Oh, and a Zero, which I've never found a use for.
- covercash 7y ago
  I also do the PiHole + Ubiquiti controller w/ PoE, it’s a cheaper and more robust solution to the CloudKeys!
zadler 7y ago
I have one with a DAC running shairport-sync to recieve audio from iPhone and one running pihole.
gensynackbar 7y ago
One RPi 2 for RetroPi, one RPi 3 for PiHole & PiVPN and one RPi 3 running motioneye as a security camera.
el_benhameen 7y ago
I love and hate this question! I've always been curious what others do with them, but I just convinced myself not to buy a 4 and I'm sure this thread will give me reason to reconsider. -1x Raspberry Pi Zero W in my garage running my drip irrigation (a relay board connects it to standard 24V irrigation solenoids) -1x Raspberry Pi 3 B+ in my office running a dynamic dns script and sitting behind a forwarded port for easy sshing. I have also used this to play with pihole and Apache Guacamole, plus whatever other networking stuff sounds interesting -1x Raspberry Pi Zero W hopping between my garage and car running a program that collects and displays OBDII and GPS data -Nx of most other Pi revisions collecting dust in my closets and storage areas. They're cheap enough that I've compulsively over-purchased them over the years...
- myhay 7y ago
  >>1x Raspberry Pi Zero W hopping between my garage and car running a program that collects and displays OBDII and GPS data This is what I also want for my car. I am planning to collect the GPS and car data and answer the eternal question I have .. Which road to work is more efficient in time and gas. :)
  - knd775 7y ago
    Why do you seem to be shadowbanned with two comments? Your first comment was dead before I vouched for it, too.
    - myhay 7y ago
      To be honest I don't know... I'm usually just reading on HN, nothing else...
  - prometheus76 7y ago
    I tried something similar and was astonished at the amount of variance caused by stoplights and weather. Because of that, it's hard to get a good dataset for comparison. In the end, because of the variance caused by external factors, there was no clear winner in my case, so I now use an app from random.org to flip a coin and follow the results accordingly. That's not because either way is better, but this way if I have a long delay for some reason, I can blame it on a bad coin flip.
callahanrts 7y ago
I have one set up as a sprinkler timer (https://github.com/callahanrts/sprinklers https://github.com/callahanrts/sprinklers). Scheduling my sprinklers with cron jobs gives me a lot more flexibility over water times. It also runs a local webserver so I can turn a zone on for just a few seconds when I'm fixing a leak.
- atomi 7y ago
  You should check out Open Sprinkler. I've got mine running on a Zero W in a docker container and it's been solid.
sawmurai 7y ago
One raspberry pi to water the plants on my balcony every night at 4am
jandrese 7y ago
I have one hooked to a RTL-SDR that pulls down Earth snapshots from NOAA weather satellites.
jquinby 7y ago
Pi3 runs piaware (aircraft tracking via rtl-sdr), pivpn, and pi-hole. Another Pi Zero runs an RF hotspot for ham radio stuff.
andrey_utkin 7y ago
Wearable computer with head-mounted display (Vufine+) and one-handed keyboard+joystick (Twiddler 3).
joemi 7y ago
My work has a really old phone system which I became the admin of. I discovered it had an audio input for Music-On-Hold, so I set up a spare RPi Zero that I had as a music player so that we'd have hold music. Low effort but wonderful improvement for work. Every now and then I go back and tinker with it to improve it a bit. (Next step is to make it controllable via a web interface.) I have a RPi 3B+ that I use for some emulation, though I hardly ever play with it. Setting it up was plenty interesting, though. And I have a Zero and a Zero W that I use for random tinkering/testing, both semi-permanently attached to a breadboard for ease of use. (I've got a big list of projects I'd like to try or develop, but the above are the only things I've done so far.)
- youeeeeeediot 7y ago
  Did you also acquire an ASCAP/BMI license for the music-on-hold? A lot of people are unaware that is classified as a public performance of the music and requires a license. Unless you are playing royalty-free music, in which case you are fine.
  - joemi 7y ago
    I purposefully sought out royalty-free music. As the person who set it up, I did not want to risk being culpable for anything. (When it was first set up, my boss kept requesting that I add various catchy songs he heard on the radio to it, and I kept having to explain it's not legal.)
    - knd775 7y ago
      I use the hold music that zendesk made. I think it's pretty neat. I doubt anyone really loves it, but no one seems to dislike it.
whalesalad 7y ago
For a while I had a doggy puppy cam running with a real old Pi. Just grabbed a 3b+ to use as a dedicated Pihole DNS server for my home network.
ddmma 7y ago
- MagicMirror - Nodejs IoT Azure Gateway - Lamp server for Greenhouse
spiderfarmer 7y ago
I have 4 raspberries running 24/7: - 2x Raspberry PI 3B+ in my office running 2 custom dashboards with info related to my web projects. One also runs Homebridge. - 1x Raspberry PI 3B+ running pivpn.io - 1x Raspberry PI X running an energy monitor (bough it as a kit I threw my first Raspberry Pi in the trash just last week.
sjs382 7y ago
I have 4 running at home as servers: - an OctoPi server, which allows me to manage my 3d printer remotely. - a VPN - a Plex Server, serving media to my TVs and phone. I just ordered the new 4GB Pi4 to replace this one. I’l probably re-purpose it as an OctoPi-like box for managing a CNC. - a seldom-used retro gaming box, that’s actually been mostly by a hacked Playstation Classic
- _zachs 7y ago
  Would you mind going into your Plex server setup a bit? I tried using a Pi before but could barely get it to trasncode anything, and playback was miserable. Now I'm using a Kimsufi server, but I'd prefer to have a locally running server (that isn't my main PC) as my Plex media server
  - thedanbob 7y ago
    I'm using a NUC rather than a Pi for Plex, but I avoid transcoding on the server by just transcoding everything up front. Nearly every client these days can play H.264 natively.
  - sjs382 7y ago
    If you have total control of the media files and the clients, you can avoid transcoding altogether. Everything on my server plays on all of my clients without transcoding. From what I understand, an “Atomic Pi” is inexpensive and can handle a few transcodes at once, if that’s a requirement of yours.
milofeynman 7y ago
I have one pi3b+ running Dark Ice transmitting my local police scanner to broadcastify. I built it manually on raspbian and it was a bit of a pain to get setup.
joaomoreno 7y ago
I got it running an OpenVPN server, love it!
RubberShoes 7y ago
I run a grid of about 250 Pi 2 and 3s across several offices and datacenters. They are the backbone of our graphics playback system (i.e. slates) and low latent IPTV system. Users can subscribe to any channel necessary without expensive re-encoding or RF antenna systems. I absolutely love them and 4k60 HEVC is a huge upgrade for the 4!
- elcomet 7y ago
  Wouldn't it be less expensive and simpler to buy a few real servers ?
  - RubberShoes 7y ago
    Not at all. $35 for a pi and $200 for HDMI>SDI converter is significantly cheaper than any media server with that many broadcast outputs. For IPTV - each TV needs a decoder. Hard to beat $35 per set. Plus running our own stack means we can tune for latency unlike an app on Roku/ATV
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Nice. I'm looking at a streaming media system of some sort which repurposes existing audio hardware where possible. This turns out to be ... somewhat frustratingly difficult. There are numerous Bluetooth-based systems, some WiFi-based ones. The hard part is sorting out the interface to control the system -- there's nothing quite so frictionless as either on-device controls or a remote, though going with an iPad or cheap tablet seems the best option.
- cameron_b 7y ago
  Tell us more! My team is currently looking for a digital signage option that would include cable/IPTV of some variety.
bmurphy1976 7y ago
At home: emulating old games, wifi hot spot (not needed so much these days) for hotel rooms with wired internet, and a plex server to serve videos to the kid's iPads in the car during road trips. At work: show Grafana dashboards on our 4k monitors. Currently using model 3 which doesn't like 4k so much. I'm looking forward to upgrading to the 4 in this case, see if they are more reliable. The 3's like to crash/reboot periodically and really struggle to drive the 4k display at a decent speed.
smush 7y ago
Pi Zero W running Pi Hole Besides having to hit the reload button 10 times day or so, it works a treat
inson 7y ago
I haven't used RP before but I am planning to get one and use it as Voip server. I wanted to start with blogs but most of them are outdated.
KingFelix 7y ago
- pi hole - NAS - Plex server working on super interested in the work Nick Busey has been workingon HomelabsOS tons of cool stuff, lots of awesome software to install. I have been enjoying the open source community a lot lately https://gitlab.com/NickBusey/HomelabOS https://gitlab.com/NickBusey/HomelabOS
jsight 7y ago
I use one running OpenWRT as a router. Its an old 3B, so it barely keeps up now that our internet has been updated to 100Mbps. It will soon be replaced, possibly with a pi 4. Of course, it also runs some other things. I have OpenVPN running on it as well as a little nginx instance that I can use for reverse proxying if need be. And the wifi turned out to be surprisingly solid as a (slow) access point, so I have sometimes used it as a Internet of Things Access Point with routing rules to keep all of those devices off the internet. Its a surprisingly powerful little network box even with its significant limitations.
- yumraj 7y ago
  Don't you need two Ethernet ports to use it as a router? Are you using USB as the other Ethernet port?
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Any two interfaces. Ethernet+wifi is enough. (Technically, RPi's integrated ethernet port is also connected over USB) I have once seen a single interface both for external and internal network, but that was an abomination.
  - jsight 7y ago
    Yes, you do need two and it does significantly limit throughput since both the internal and external Ethernet adapters are routed through the same USB bus. The 3B seems to top out at about 90Mbps. I'm not sure what the throughput on a 3B+ would have been, but I'm sure it would have been much lower than its maximum of ~270Mbps. Having said that, much of the US is restricted to <100Mbps internet and there are some nice advantages to having a relatively powerful little computer running right at the edge.
zantana 7y ago
I was bullish when I got my first Pi to run Home Assistant (before hass.io), but got discouraged when the sd card failures were gas-lighting me by silently reverting my code changes. That and the lack of hardware clock hampering some of the diagnostic tools I usually use, kept me sticking with VMs on a NUC and a fanless Celeron for Kodi for my main compute uses. In time I have gotten more Pis, but mainly for hardware aided projects such as the Pidp/8: https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8 https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8 The rejuvenated Nabaztag: https://www.ulule.com/le-retour-du-nabaztag/ https://www.ulule.com/le-retour-du-nabaztag/ The seasonal Xmas tree hat: https://thepihut.com/products/3d-xmas-tree-for-raspberry-pi https://thepihut.com/products/3d-xmas-tree-for-raspberry-pi And a Mycroft Mark I: https://mycroft.ai/mark1/ https://mycroft.ai/mark1/ which is Pi based inside and the only one these projects which is always powered on. The 4 seems like it may finally have the horsepower to make me try to give it a go again and possibly replace my various x86 pucks as they age out.
- avh02 7y ago
  oh jeez the SD card story just gave me flashbacks. I changed networks (uni to home) and the RPi running pihole would constantly keep my uni DNS settings after a restart. Took me a good few hours to figure it out given that I thought the DNS settings were getting copied in from elsewhere on startup. I think i finally figured it out after i re-installed rapsbian from scratch and to my horror was booted in to the old system. PSA: Bad SD card can make you feel crazy.
  - wil421 7y ago
    The SD card was failing to write? It would have blown my mind if I reinstalled raspbian and the old config popped up. I’ll have to keep this in mind.
    - asveikau 7y ago
      I had an SD card once that would not fail to write (i.e. kernel does not show write errors) but when you read back it gets the old data. Tried it on multiple operating systems with the same behavior. It was a more expensive SD card because I see more issues with cheap ones. But it seems to me that SD cards suck at all price brackets. Maybe even some of the expensive ones are counterfeit?
advertising 7y ago
We used a few to power kiosk touch screens and other commercial display applications using network broadcast video. Made a seven screen display each with their own pi that sync’d individual videos running on each to create some video art pieces. Also made a bullet time rig with 15 pi’s and each with their own webcam. There was a guy who did this already with lots of documentation but using his own pi-interface hardware he created. We did it without the pi controllers.
tylerjaywood 7y ago
I have it set up to run a project where a subreddit has control over the watering of a live plant in my apartment. The pi runs a reddit bot that reads the votes, and can switch on a pump to water. It also collects data about sunlight, moisture, temp and humidity to help inform the decision about watering. Despite many people's preconceptions about the goodness of the internet, I must admit that they do a wonderful job caring for my plant! website: http://www.takecareofmyplant.com http://www.takecareofmyplant.com subreddit w/ voting: http://old.reddit.com/r/takecareofmyplant http://old.reddit.com/r/takecareofmyplant
- consumer451 7y ago
  This is one of the coolest uses of reddit/community sites that I have ever seen. Out of curiosity, how did you come up with this idea?
  - tylerjaywood 7y ago
    Trying to impress a girl with my plant-keeping abilities ;) --We had a collaborative message thread reminding everyone to water our plants based upon a set schedule which I was going hook up to a pump to automate, and at the time Twitch Plays Pokemon was a big thing, so I just kind of combined the two ideas. If you have interest in doing something similar, come check out the subreddit and feel free to DM me on reddit or twitter. Always happy to talk about plants and automation
    - rishiloyola 7y ago
      So finally did you impress that girl or not? :D
      - tylerjaywood 7y ago
        No... but some people on the internet thought it was cool, so I can live with that :)
        7y ago
orpheline 7y ago
One Pi 3 running Pi-hole: One Pi 3 hosting a Picroft instance; One Pi 3 with a camera to experiment with simple video capture; One Pi 3 and several Pi zero W's on a custom network ( the Zero's act as temperature sensors in different rooms, reporting back to the Pi 3 as a control node; eventually it will be running our HVAC).
hsnewman 7y ago
Mine runs my game http://decwars.com http://decwars.com (or telnet decwars.com 1701)!
mhandley 7y ago
One runs CUPS and is my printserver for an ancient but very reliable HP laserprinter. One is our Internet radio in the kitchen. One Pi 3 with a PiNoir infrared camera is used in a home-made camera trap for recording the local wildlife. Two Pi Zero Ws are used in my son's high altitude balloon cosmic ray high school experiment, recording video, and reporting GPS altitude and Muon count rates via 50bits/sec RTTY. One is used in a beetbox I built for a BBC TV show. Not this one, but pretty similar: https://newatlas.com/beetbox-vegetables-musical-instrument/25462/ https://newatlas.com/beetbox-vegetables-musical-instrument/2... Then there's assorted robots, but none of those are currently operational.
oceanghost 7y ago
I have several running 3d printers-- OctoPi or NanoDLP. I've been able to modify OctoPi to run several printers at once, but it is way more work than its worth. I also made a media player for my daughter that has all of her kids shows on it. I designed/printed a case for the RPI+vesa mount. I'm super excited about the new RPI that was announced todayish-- because it has a hardware h.265 decoder meaning, I'll no longer have to transcode some things. I tried PiHole and I really liked it, but it caused some problems with some sites my folks frequent, and it broke mDNS discovery on my network. I may reinstall it and just exempt their devices.
gerpsh 7y ago
I have a Raspberry Pi 3 that functions as a multi-purpose home server (Pi Hole, laptop backups, data scraping jobs, etc). I have another 3 running MotionEyeOS that I keep pointed out the front of my house to catch package thieves.
oulipo 7y ago
Hi! If you are interested in a 100% offline and private-by-design Voice AI, you should take a look at what we are building at https://snips.ai https://snips.ai, it is 100% free for Makers This allows you to do a 100% private Home Assistant, or add voice control to any of your projects :) It works for english, french, german, japanese, spanish, italian, and more coming, and runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 (and iOS, Android, Linux) You can take a look at our blog to see how to get started https://blog.snips.ai https://blog.snips.ai We would love to publish on it what you are building with it!
- jaboutboul 7y ago
  This would have been more interesting had you highlighted some of the projects your community built and are showcased on aforementioned blog.
khnov 7y ago
pihole, nodered domoticz mosquitto for home automation, plex sonarr bazarr radarr jackett emby deluge for home media server, all in one little rpi3 and dockerized
LameRubberDucky 7y ago
I think I have at least one of every variant. I had fun playing with all of them. But in the end, I wanted to use one for a Linux development machine and it was always just a bit too slow to be useful. This one sounds like it might have just crossed into the lower realm for laptops so I'll give it a try. And yes, I know, using it as a development machine was not really the intended purpose, but a $55 machine is so tantalizing.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I have several * Pie-hole and runs Nagios to collect information about things going on inside the network. * One running a PiDP-11 (pdp 11/70 emulator) as well as providing MOP service to boot my DEC terminal multiplexor (it provides the boot image when the mux comes up) * One is a stratum-1 time server using an Adafruit GPS module with PPS output. This because I got tired of both the reflection attacks and trying to manage ntp access from inside the house to outside. * One runs RasPBX and talks to the VOIP phone that is my home "business" line. * One sits on my electronics workbench and runs OpenOCD and allows BlackMagic Probes to export GDB as a service over the network. That lets me debug from anywhere without burning a USB port or adding additional software. * One runs a very simple time series database and is the collector for IOT type devices that are sending various bits of information (energy use, temp, humidity, particulate levels, etc) * One drives a display which has a dashboard of various things that the others are doing (like Nagios alerts, data trends etc) This one is a candidate for replacement as the 4K monitor would be nice here. * One runs the waveforms live software from Digilent and hooks to an Analog Discovery 2 on my workbench. (scope, logic analyzer, etc) EDIT: And its important to know that I boot them using the network and run them off NFS from a NAS box, the idea being that when they break I can easily swap the CPU part with a new one.
- fnigi 7y ago
  In term of electricity consumption and maintenance is worth to run so many PIs?
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    The lowest power "x86" server I have found runs at about 30W, that is equivalent to about 8 RasPis (typically about 4W each, the PiDP-11 is an outlier at 8W) in the current configuration, and the RasPis are fairly distributed around my lab which would have to be done with wiring otherwise.
- vardump 7y ago
  > This one is a candidate for replacement as the 4K monitor would be nice here. You might be able to run 4k display with an old RPi at about 8-10 Hz.
H1Supreme 7y ago
I have a Pi 3 running Kodi, and I have another that I'm using as a border router for a thread mesh network. I'm going to get another at some point to run piHole.
teekert 7y ago
RPi2: Hass.io, switches the lights and reads my electricity/gas usage from mqtt. RPi1B: sends smart energy/gas meter values over mqtt to RPi2. RPi3: Recallbox, mainly for Mariokart 64 and GranTurismo 2 with my son but also does Kodi. Probably will be replaced by a 4 soon :)
matco11 7y ago
1x Raspberry Pi 3 to power a weather station sampling wind direction, wind speed, air temperature, soil temperature, air humidity, rainfall and push data to Weather Underground. 1x Raspberry Pi 3 to teach the kids how to code in Python and do math games.
keybits 7y ago
Airplay server connected to my hifi using https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync Here's a setup guide: https://thepi.io/how-to-set-up-a-raspberry-pi-airplay-receiver/ https://thepi.io/how-to-set-up-a-raspberry-pi-airplay-receiv...
beezlebubba 7y ago
Pi Zero W running Pi-Hole - Pi 3 running Retropie - Rock64 as a shell box/dev box - RockPro64 as an occasional desktop/dev box
guruz 7y ago
We're actually running multiple of them (different generations bought at different times, one is even some similar product) * company ownCloud server * company wiki, company IRC server * private RaspberryMatic instance for doing smart home (HomematicIP) without cloud
babyslothzoo 7y ago
There are tons of great comments and use cases here. Perhaps I'll have to dust off my old Raspberry Pi and repurpose it.
geddy 7y ago
I just use one as a Plex server. Can't beat the cost of running it, which is roughly $6/year worth of electricity if I remember correctly. Previously I was running my Plex server on my gaming rig which cost a relative fortune to have running 24/7.
- KingMachiavelli 7y ago
  Do you otherwise not leave your gaming rig on? Me and all of my roommates leave our desktops on... they draw about 50-60W so abbout 1.5kWh a day which is less than 15c a day each. Perhaps your conflating the extra cost of the GPU activity incured what actively transcoding files? Which the Pi really can't do so Plex ends up just being a dumb DLNA server.
daxorid 7y ago
1. Buy 8 of them with large-capacity SD cards, hoping to make an awesome Ceph cluster. 2. Build said Ceph cluster. 3. Become disillusioned with both SD and USB I/O. 4. Place all of them in storage. 5. Buy 8 Tinkerboards, hoping to make an awesome Ceph cluster....
megous 7y ago
Networked sound card that can also play by itself via ssh/screen/mpv when the main workstation is down. That was the easiest way to avoid ground loops in my home audio setup.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  What software are you using for the virtual sound device, and does said software work with Windows?
  - megous 7y ago
    Pulseaudio with network plugins. It does not. Maybe some ancient version does: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Ports/Windows/Support/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Ports/W...
lando2319 7y ago
I have a script check Hacker News every hour for stories on VIM and Tweet them out. Love my Pi. https://github.com/lando2319/HN_Vimmy_Bot https://github.com/lando2319/HN_Vimmy_Bot https://twitter.com/HN_Vimmy_Bot https://twitter.com/HN_Vimmy_Bot
barryfandango 7y ago
Squeakernet FLP is not a cat feeder, it's a feline lifestyle platform. Current features are largely focused on kibble deployment though. https://github.com/buzzcola/squeakernet/ https://github.com/buzzcola/squeakernet/
- elitistphoenix 7y ago
  You look like the author of this? Could we get some more info on the scale and dispenser please?
  - barryfandango 7y ago
    Yes, I'm the author. Happy to share. The dispenser is a "dry food/cereal dispenser" like the kind you would see at a hotel breakfast bar. They can be found on amazon in various configurations. (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=dry+food+dispenser&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=dry+food+dispenser&ref=nb_sb_noss...). A continuous-rotation servo is attached to the crank, allowing the Raspberry Pi to turn the crank to dispense food. The scale is a cheap kitchen scale (also amazon, I think mine cost $9.) These scales contain a device called a Load Cell. I cut the four wires to the load cell (bypassing all the other electronics in the scale) and ran them to an HX711 chip, which can be had for a few dollars. If you google "raspbery pi hx711" you can see the people's instructions on how to make a Pi scale for various reasons (weighing people, luggage, etc.) So the scale, the dispenser, the servo, and Pi Zero are put together with a few pieces of wood. Most of the work has been getting the software side working. Hope this helps!
sdfjkl 7y ago
It used to run kplex to bridge NMEA data (wind speed, depth soundings, boat speed, etc.) from our SeaTalk network to TCP/IP. Now a GL-AR300M does the job though, along with all the Wifi/GSM routing, saving one computer and power (when running strictly off solar and batteries, this matters).
- chris-metcalf 7y ago
  Have you by any chance documented how you did this, or could you link me to where you learned how to set this up? This is actually one of the projects I puttered on for a long time with one of my RPis (NMEA-2000 to SignalK) but abandoned because I had too many moving parts.
  - sdfjkl 7y ago
    Been meaning to blog about it, but not got around to it yet. Essentially it's just a (bunch of) USB-serial converters and the Seatalk data is converted by a Raymarine E85001. If you have N2k, you need a different converter, e.g. Actisense or better yet, a translator to NMEA0183, which is the de-facto standard for NMEA over TCP/IP.
    - chris-metcalf 7y ago
      Yup, I've got an ActiSense NGT-1 that outputs NMEA 2000 PGNs on USB Serial that I can decode with CanBoat: https://github.com/chrismetcalf/canboat-ansible https://github.com/chrismetcalf/canboat-ansible You can tell by the age of the repo that I got a bit distracted... the distraction just turned two years old.
xt508 7y ago
I created an internet-controlled rover, with live camera feed. Tutorial: https://limitos.com/tutorials/rover https://limitos.com/tutorials/rover .
novaRom 7y ago
I block all YouTube ads using PiHole in my local network.
cr0sh 7y ago
I'm kinda concerned by the number of mentions here of using the Pi to run OctoPrint (I think that's right?) to remotely admin and monitor a 3D printer... I've always been of the mind that a 3D printer should never be left physically unattended - even with monitoring (via camera and such), as they can potentially start a fire if something goes wrong (failed print spewing random filament?). Is this a wrong viewpoint? Are there certain failsafes put into place to make the possibility of a fire non-existent? I can think of a few failsafes (fire/smoke detector to shut things down, encasing the system inside a fireproof cabinet, perhaps with some kind of instant extinguisher system, filament/jam monitoring sensors) - are they enough?
- limonkufu 7y ago
  Most of the 3d printer firmwares can detect heat spikes and stop heating the extruder to prevent fire and you can control your printer's power with rpi with a simple relay circuit. You can also setup a bot with camera to alert you via mail/message/telegram if there is a fire risk. These are the common precautions I have seen people take.
- yohann305 7y ago
  that's a very good point. Especially because there is a large community of hackers that love tweaking their printer (I'm one of them). Things like using the wrong voltage on a hot bed or fan can start a fire. Here is an example of what this guy had to go through: https://www.thissmarthouse.net/dont-burn-your-house-down-3d-printing-a-cautionary-tale/ https://www.thissmarthouse.net/dont-burn-your-house-down-3d-...
- 64cde 7y ago
  I always think how i would feel about a known fire in my house. Would i leave my fireplace unsupervised for a longer period? Definitely not, and that is the one place that should be fireproof. I use my Octoprint mainly for three things: 1: Controlling the axis for manual bed leveling (yes i level manually) 2: Upload the gcode files to octoprint (no fiddling with micro sd cards) 3: Watching the picam. So i can sit in another room, but so close to hear if a motor jammed or something else.
- 7y ago
dividuum 7y ago
Not technically my Pis, but I built a digital signage (https://info-beamer.com https://info-beamer.com) product around it. So I enjoy working with the Pi and making a living from it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
everdrive 7y ago
Pihole, Owncloud, Ambient particulate matter sensor.
daltontf1212 7y ago
I'm partial to PiZero/Ws. I have one connected to a big screen TV with a USB stick loaded with home videos playable using omxplayer. I use Raspicast to control the playback using my phone. Also, like using them for projects using Rust.
anfractuosity 7y ago
https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-tree/ https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-... - A little project I created to 'paint' my Christmas tree lights. https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/diy-inline-refractometer/ https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/diy-inline-refractome... - I'm currently working on an inline refractometer using a pi zero to capture the output and attempt to convert to a digital reading. https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/wildlife-camera/ https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/wildlife-camera/ - I've also got a pi zero setup in an IP68 case, with waterproof USB cable, to capture wildlife in the garden. This uses a simple script using picamera, to detect motion and record video, which I then just rsync to my laptop. I tried to use a PIR sensor, but alas the casing seemed to block IR. I'm planning on using a doppler radar sensor instead at some point.
TaylorAlexander 7y ago
With the Raspberry Pi: I've made a four wheel drive robot called Rover that uses brushless motors and 3d printed planetary gears. It's all CC0 open source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwCkX6bLY3E&t=4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwCkX6bLY3E&t=4s https://github.com/tlalexander/rover_control https://github.com/tlalexander/rover_control https://reboot.love/t/rover-and-skittles-cad-design-files-here/171 https://reboot.love/t/rover-and-skittles-cad-design-files-he... https://imgur.com/a/GqXD2Zj https://imgur.com/a/GqXD2Zj I've made a smaller classroom style robot named Skittles that also uses brushless + planetary and is open source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2-zIUY_kww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2-zIUY_kww I taught a robotics class using the robot Skittles, and the students did a great job picking up Raspberry Pi. There's a lot of tutorials on the web they found to do their work! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pql6ZbPVog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pql6ZbPVog I've made a "fake Philips Hue" light out of a SK6812 RGBW LED strip to go with my existing Philips Hue system. That uses this github project: https://github.com/diyhue/diyHue https://github.com/diyhue/diyHue I made a humidity controlled chamber for mushroom cultivation: https://github.com/tlalexander/humidity_controller https://github.com/tlalexander/humidity_controller I've made an RTK GPS system using two raspberry pis and two $75 GPS receivers to make a GPS system that so far looks to be accurate to within a few centimeters (when you have clear sky). http://rtkexplorer.com/how-to/posts-getting-started/ http://rtkexplorer.com/how-to/posts-getting-started/ I replaced our dodgy bluetooth audio sink on our stereo with an Airplay node using this software: https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync I've added a wireless front end to some of my 3D printers using Octoprint: https://octoprint.org/ https://octoprint.org/ What else? Well I just keep going. Professionally I'm a robotics prototyping engineer and I cannot tell you how much joy I get from the Pi and the things I can make with it. :)
philjohn 7y ago
I wrote a small network monitoring system to check jitter, packet loss, RX and TX speeds (single and multi threaded) on a regular basis. Had some troubles with an ISP a while ago and having metrics like this on hand are useful.
agentultra 7y ago
My most recent use has been teaching game development. I have kids and their friends are often around the house. A couple of them asked if I knew how to program games and I've been teaching them using Pico-8. Many of these kids don't have computers at home so as a reward for finishing their first project I'm making them a home console with some RPi's I have laying about and Pico8.
- omgmog 7y ago
  That's great! Do you have an enclosure design for the home consoles, perhaps a physical pico-8 style enclosure?
Avamander 7y ago
A DNS server, running MyController, serving media in LAN.
supernova87a 7y ago
I don't have a project yet -- but one I'm really interested in is having a Raspberry Pi run and store historical data from an air quality (particle) measurement sensor. I'm hoping to measure how the air quality outside my home (near a freeway) changes during the day and night with traffic, and also how the indoor air quality is impacted. It outputs UART 9600 baud data (https://sensing.honeywell.com/honeywell-sensing-particulate-hpm-series-datasheet-32322550 https://sensing.honeywell.com/honeywell-sensing-particulate-...). Does anyone have a good link to some simple guides / advice on how to run such devices using a RPi? Thanks!
- weaksauce 7y ago
  Uart is just serial, you’d connect it to your serial pins on the pi and read serial from Linux like normal. Data is whatever the protocol Honeywell is using. Could be any range of things sent in a predictable pattern. Could be timestamp,temp,air quality,status, and then some kind of delimiter like newline or eor. Note the pi devices use 3.3 volts instead of 5 so you have to make sure Honeywell is not sending too much voltage as a logical high. There’s probably an easy way to convert it though using a voltage devider. How much do those sensors cost?
  - klodolph 7y ago
    Minor clarification: UART is “just serial” but when people say “serial” they usually mean RS-232 or RS-422, and these don’t use 0V / 5V like you would for 5V logic. They use anywhere from 3-25V signals, with positive voltages for zeroes and negative voltages for ones. Your PC, if it has a serial port on it, probably sends around +/- 13V (this is typical, IIRC). So don’t hook up 5V logic parts to a serial interface. If you look at RS-232 interface chips they have integrated charge pumps and external capacitors to generate the Tx voltages from Vcc.
  - weaksauce 7y ago
    actually I looked at it again and the honeywell uses 0-3.3vdc so you should be ok to use that directly. (obviously double check before wiring) you need to setup the device by sending a few packets to enable sensing/auto-sending of data that is a particular 32byte structure.
lucb1e 7y ago
I will use my first one to power a hard drive that I leave with family or friends. They'll have a small box (mind the inclusion of an external hard drive, still a relatively small box) with my off site back up, and I could host the same for them. This is after a failed plan to use it for Android TV (my girlfriend made the mistake of picking a WebOS TV and I made the mistake of thinking it wouldn't be so bad). The old one was just a little too slow and only did full HD (honestly, it's fine, but if you have a 4k TV it feels kinda silly). Now that the pi4 has a bunch more power and can do 4K at 60Hz, there is another chance for this! I'm also toying with the idea of using it for sensors. Battery powered air quality sensor to see along my walking route (there is a narrow, busy car passage that I'm curious about), or maybe measuring things like electricity or heater usage in realtime. Having a graph showing you when it gets used a lot might help identify some easy wins, since walking to the basement to check the meter is a little cumbersome. But those are just ideas.
- cameron_b 7y ago
  Regarding your mutual backup idea, I love this and I've wondered why this hasn't taken off as a Thing in response to how many of us are untrusting and DIYers in this era of cheap storage and bandwidth.
  - lucb1e 7y ago
    Indeed! I'm not sure why I don't already have three hard drives from friends, it's 10x cheaper than S3 or Backblaze B2 or any such thing. I've had this idea for years, but seeing that someone else built exactly this[1] while also having time for it soon gave the idea another push. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7rjcdn/home_made_non_gmo_cruelty_free_offsite_backup/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7rjcdn/home_ma...
rubberyCycle 7y ago
I use it to automate my weed garden in my closet. It turns on and off the LED lights everyday and waters my plants with a pump based on the moisture level of the soil. I measure the moisture level through a moisture sensor. Weed is fun.
- nullbyte 7y ago
  This is why NASA needs to get rid of their esoteric drug screening practices. Our space program needs more stoners!
- xyzwave 7y ago
  Have you looked into nutrient sensing at all? I’m curious if/how others are tackling this.
undersuit 7y ago
I have a RPi2 running as an NFS server. I have a RPi0W with a camera streaming video to said NFS server. I have a RPi1(256MB) in the bathroom streaming music from the aforementioned NFS server. I have a RPi0 attached to the USB port of my router running PiHole. And then I have a shelf of other Pis doing nothing, but you know, one day I will finish all those projects...
dibarra21 7y ago
I have several RPI... I have one that controls the roof of my remote astro observatory, using some level converters drives relays to control two whinchs... When I have to open the roof I launch a python script. I have also another controlling the supplies of the mount, telescope, camera, focuser... These pi's are really realiable (I use Raspian, no X)
dw0rm 7y ago
Currently using Raspberry Pi to expose the speakers through the AirPlay protocol, since my AirPort Express died.
robreilly 7y ago
I'm Dr. Torq and have a Raspberry Pi in my Steampunk conference badge. Use it during my tech talks. I walk into the room, power down the badge, plug in the HDMI, power up the badge and run my slides with a nano-keyboard/mousepad and LibreOffice. Works great. When I'm walking around a show, the badge displays a little promotional video on it's 3.5" touch-screen. Runs on a big cell phone power pack, in my pocket. See my gadgets and hacker articles at https://thenewstack.io/author/rob-reilly/ https://thenewstack.io/author/rob-reilly/.
- MrZongle2 7y ago
  Wow! That's a heck of a rabbit hole I fell into there. Lots of cool stuff there.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Nothing yet, though I'm looking at possible projects. The router and modem both run OpenWRT, which addresses any number of basic sins one might hope for, including adblocking, firewalling, and media server. I am looking for options to provide streamed media over existing audio equipment in the flat. This might be applied to a media library (DLNA audio and video), podcasts, Internet radio, and borrowed items from libraries (local, online). There's a set of devices which offer to talk to local audio equipment, much of which costs as much, and often several times more than, a RaPi. Seems that a full SoC system might be the better option, particularly if WiFi and Bluetooth are built in.
bravura 7y ago
What I would pay for is: A preconfigured raspberry pi, maybe with case, that automatically saves multitrack audio from a USB card. When you plug it into a Soundcraft Signature MTK audio interface (USB soundcard), at boot it waits for sound and reads all the live input channels and saves them to disk. That way, we could record the full multitrack of our sessions very easily, and not necessarily need to have a laptop computer involved. Edit: I would also pay for this if it shipped: http://www.samplerbox.org/ http://www.samplerbox.org/ which is a sample-box for a MIDI keyboard. So also taking instruments off a laptop and into a smaller device. I don't know why people don't sell prepackaged RPis for a mark-up for installing software that just boots and has sensible defaults.
- Kliment 7y ago
  I've done this for clients as part of projects (automated firmware flasher sort of stuff) but never thought of offering it as a service. People definitely do do this (I know people have done for HTPC stuff, and as VPN boxes, and for adblocking) but I haven't seen it at scale. If you're interested, email me and we can look into making it a product.
vitomd 7y ago
A security camera outdoors (connected to another webcam outdoor), when there is motion it will send a request to another indoor raspberry (node server) connected to a speaker and will play the sound of an angry dog. The system is working fine for more than a year without breaks. Raspberry is robust.
- sdfin 7y ago
  Interesting. Would you recommend some brand of security cameras that work well for this kind of projects. Where I live the more popular brands are Dahua and Hikvision. Maybe I have to look for a certain communication protocol, rather than for a special brand.
  - vitomd 7y ago
    In my case the security camera is also a raspberry pi with the camera module (it could have night vision), connected with a webcam logitech c170 (really cheap) and the motion software to detect movement (https://github.com/Motion-Project https://github.com/Motion-Project).
    - erklik 7y ago
      If its a raspberry pi with a camer amodule, then why is there a need for the webcam? Sorry if I am misunderstanding.
      - vitomd 7y ago
        To have 2 cameras. 1 the raspberry pi camera, the other the usb webcam.
- BMorearty 7y ago
  I made the exact same thing with a Raspberry Pi in 2013. For the outdoors part I used a motion detector attached to an Electric Imp that uploads the message to the Raspberry Pi indoors, which is connected to speakers.
georgeecollins 7y ago
I got an AdaFruit servo hat and I use it to drive my hexapod. I used to use a Propeller and then an Arduino. My next project is to integration some vision recognition into my robot. I am planning on using a Jetson Nano for the vision part, but I believe switching to a Pi for the robot was a helpful precondition. I haven't decided if I will just use the Nano to control the robot or use it as a visual co-processor with the Pi. Old video of my hexapod below. Still works great though, because it is really sturdy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=121DuXM5tYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=121DuXM5tYE
odiroot 7y ago
As I mentioned in another post in here I'm running a 4 Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster at work (based on K3S). At home I use RPi Zero W for controlling my media centre in the living room (Mopidy-based) from my kitchen.
jhc_za 7y ago
One runs pi-hole, and maybe soon will also run pi-vpn. The other runs a small Nextcloud instance that I use for org files and such. In the past I also had magic mirror installed on one and used it as a sort of weather/reddit/news dashboard.
dewy 7y ago
I have three connected in a Spark cluster.
MarcScott 7y ago
I work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, in the Education team. We're always on the look out for new ideas and projects to turn into learning resources. If anyone would like to share their code, wiring diagrams and setup processes, then please feel free to email me. marc@raspberrypi.org
- MrsPeaches 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing your details! We are working on an educational charge controller for students in sub-Saharan Africa. We are currently using an Arduino but I think the Raspberry Pi would be a goot fit as well. You can read more details on our website: https://localelectricity.org/ https://localelectricity.org/ I'll drop you an email with more details.
mytdi 7y ago
1. RPi 1B (256 MB RAM) as my home phone/voicemail system, using Asterisk PBX (with FreePBX). Have used it since it first came out. 2. RPi 1B+ as a car media server with minidlna using a USB WiFi adapter. 3. RPi 2B as an ownCloud server. 4. RPi 3B as a LibreELEC (Kodi) media (streaming) center. 5. RPi Zero W. No use yet. I have used the 3B for RetroPie as well in the past. I am planing on using a RPi for different kinds of webscraping in the future. I would also like to set up a NAS/backup server.
ordinaryperson 7y ago
Four things: 1. Pihole to ad block ads (useful for phone browsing) https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ 2. Custom Weather conditions dashboard, using Dark Sky's API I'd love to replace the weather dashboard with one of my integrated work / personal calendars so I could see what meetings I have each day but work won't expose that data, claims it's a security risk. 3. Custom NYC subway dashboard, showing me estimated train arrivals for trains at the 2 closest stations. The MTA has free apps which also show estimated train arrivals but only for one station at a time. Also, the MTA's train estimation methodology isn't as accurate as it could be. 4. Retro Pie, to play NES and SNES games https://retropie.org.uk/ https://retropie.org.uk/
- aoeuidiue 7y ago
  Have you experienced any issues using PiHole? I would imagine some apps etc would go to lengths to prevent their use. But if it works I'll set one up for my partner who plays way too many spammy games.
  - ordinaryperson 7y ago
    Two areas where I've seen problems. One, sometimes I want to browse/buy things via Google Shopping (or some other shopping interface) but the Pi-Hole blocks it. Two, sometimes for work I will run a docker-compose script that say, downloads a copy of Puppeteer. For whatever reason the domain seems to be on Pi-Hole's blacklist. Granted I could probably whitelist the domains but that seems like a hassle. It has the ability to disable blocking for periods (like 5 minutes or an hour) but that doesn't seem to solve the above problems. Other than that, it works great. It probably won't affect a regular internet user. But occasionally you can run into problems.
    - nprateem 7y ago
      Maybe you could create multiple wifi networks, one that uses pi-hole and one that doesn't.
  - yvan 7y ago
    I have two Raspberry Pi with PiHole (for redundancy) and it works very well. But still find something a bit annoying and there is little we can do about it. 1. YouTube Ads are still showing up (you need to maintain a list quite often to avoid those ads) 2. To maintain the software (update is simple), but you better update and then back up the SD card and replicate it to the second Raspberry Pi. In terms of performance, I have not seen anything blocker, no malfunctioning app or the network getting slower. Time-to-time, I got angry wife that cannot click on ad links. :-)
ridaj 7y ago
* Security camera with motion detection, which uploads clips to my personal Google Drive. * Always-on, ssh-authenticated gateway to my LAN. I used it while traveling to tunnel through and remotely control my desktop computer which had some credentials I didn't have with me.
- beachwood23 7y ago
  How have you set up your security camera? I'm looking to do this myself!
  - ridaj 7y ago
    Used "Motion" for monitoring and capturing interesting video clips: https://motion-project.github.io/ https://motion-project.github.io/ ...combined with rclone to copy those to Google Drive: https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/
- chadmeister 7y ago
  This sounds awesome! Can you share some code for it?
  - ridaj 7y ago
    See my answer to beachwood23. Good luck!
hugg 7y ago
Transmission daemon + Kodi + Running home assistant (just preordered the rpi4 4GB)
bobbylox 7y ago
I used it to make a game about High-Fiving, and I got to show it at GDC! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RGjEkkfuwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RGjEkkfuwA
udia 7y ago
Currently have one Raspberry Pi serving as a home git (Gitea) server, incase a widespread GitHub outage occurs. Good to have multiple repositories and take advantage of the distributed nature of Git anyways. https://gitea.io/en-us/ https://gitea.io/en-us/
JackFr 7y ago
Sits on a shelf and uses the NYC MTA NextBus API and flashes a LED when a bus is 4 minutes away from the stop closest to my apartment.
lordelph 7y ago
I have a pi with a Displayotron HAT which is designed to wake me up with a loud klaxon noise if it detects service outage. It also emits a soft glow to show that all is well. Aside from valuing my sleep, I have a lot of incentives to ensure it never goes off, including the fact my wife says she'll divorce me if she ever hears the klaxon :D
kweks 7y ago
We have over 2000 deployed over Europe in locksmiths, providing a form of key service to the public. Challenges include not DDoSIng our APIs, getting a correct configuration to not nuke SD cards, and ensure that a bad firmware push doesn't knock the network offline.
- kalev 7y ago
  Any links? I’d love to know more.
  - kweks 7y ago
    Sure ! https://parklink.asia/ https://parklink.asia/ https://rebadge.eu/ https://rebadge.eu/ We've got a custom PCB which controls the touchscreen and prehipherals (LF and HF RFID readers), placed in a custom, tough ABS case (locksmiths are full of metal filings, which don't play nicely with electronics...)
Inversechi 7y ago
1 x Pi3 running hassio for home automation 1 x Pi3 running osmc for some media
aib 7y ago
An instrument/sculpture thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZswBIsfhVpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZswBIsfhVpg
chrshawkes 7y ago
I turned mine into an old Atari system.
downtide 7y ago
I bought a Pi 0 W. The USB port failed on it. Sent it back, the second did the same. Booted probably about 10 times in all. That was the end of that.
0xADADA 7y ago
I run https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ on a pi-zero.
Perceptes 7y ago
I have several of them: * 1 original model that runs pi-hole for the household * 1 RPi 3 running RetroPie for emulating classic video games * 1 RPi 3 connected to an official RPi touch screen display that runs a Home Assistant UI * 4 RPI 3s running as a Kubernetes cluster, mostly just for the fun of setting it up, but I have a few odd jobs that run on them, such as chat bots I don't have a picture of the cluster all hooked up, but this is what it looks like without any cables attached: https://twitter.com/jimmycuadra/status/846935997619200000 https://twitter.com/jimmycuadra/status/846935997619200000
- diehunde 7y ago
  How difficult was to setup the cluster using kubeadmin? did you run into too many issues because memory, cpu, etc?
  - Perceptes 7y ago
    It's been a while so the details are not fresh in my mind, but it wasn't the easiest thing in the world. I think most of my trouble came from the general lack of polish on Kubernetes (from a cluster operator's perspective) than from the specifics of the Raspberry Pi. One thing I remember clearly is that kubeadm has completely failed to upgrade k8s from one minor version to the next every time I've tried it. I always end up just saving my k8s resources, blowing away the cluster, creating a new one, and resubmitting the resources to the new cluster.
MrsPeaches 7y ago
Not using the Raspberry Pi yet but have been exploring the idea of using it as a way of delivering our educational content to rural areas of Zambia. Idea would be to provide enough information in a booklet to get students to a point where they can power the pi and then teach them the basics of electronics and coding by building a power monitoring system, with the pi at the heart. You can what we are doing here: https://localelectricity.org/ https://localelectricity.org/
roland35 7y ago
My aspirational goal is to make a "mission control" panel for my kids - basically take a bunch of panel mount buttons and switches and combine it with an old monitor to make a fun toy! The Pi would control the monitor but I will need to add/design an input/output board to handle the buttons and switches.
nurettin 7y ago
I have mine set up as a motion detector, weather display, alert scraper for local gas, electricity and bad weather condition alerts.
kasbah 7y ago
Controlling a precision stage and camera on my 3d-printed microscope. https://openflexure.org https://openflexure.org
tau255 7y ago
I have two Pis currently active: 1. Pi3: media server (minidlna), nfs & samba for backup to usb drive, Pi-Hole, weather station with BME280 sensor and gnuplot for graphing 2. Pi2: wifi bridge for my tv box And two (Pi2 & Pi3) waiting for some use.
cuspycode 7y ago
- Network controller for my latest file server and video NAS, which is based on a USB RAID-1 drive. The box that produces the graphics however is a small Intel-based box (not a NUC though). - Network controller (using CUPS) for a very old laser printer that only has USB. - Various hobby electronics projects like controlling an Arduino robot via photo and ultrasonic sensors and wifi, developing networking software for ESP8266, and various other simple electronics experiments.
secure 7y ago
I control my home automation: https://github.com/stapelberg/hmgo https://github.com/stapelberg/hmgo for sensors and valve drives, https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/tree/master/avr-x1100w https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/tree/master/avr-... controls multimedia devices, https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/tree/master/dornr%C3%B6schen https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/tree/master/dorn... orchestrates backups. I run one as an appliance hooked up to my document scanner which places the documents on Google Drive: https://github.com/stapelberg/scan2drive https://github.com/stapelberg/scan2drive I run two more for automatically testing new releases of https://gokrazy.org/ https://gokrazy.org/ All of this is implemented in Go on top of https://gokrazy.org/ https://gokrazy.org/, without any Linux distribution in the mix :).
sWallo 7y ago
mostly for running pi-hole as a DNS server for my local network on it.
sequoia 7y ago
I run a plex media server on my 3b+. The server is on the wall below my router (attached via ethernet), a 2TB HDD sits next to the server. I put movies & TV for my kids on the server, then they can watch on one of two TVs in the house via Roku. It's good for getting them off trashy Netflix movies & making classics (or what I consider classics at least) available to them. I chose this configuration rather than running plex in the cloud because a) don't want to pay monthly forever for something I use a few times a week; b) less wasting power and c) this at least theoretically can work during an internet outage (though plex authentication may make this difficult). I configured the HDD to spin down after 20 seconds of no r/w, so the whole thing draws very little power while idling (or so I assume). The major limitation of this setup is that the pi cannot handle video transcoding. As long as I transcode to something the Roku supports natively this isn't an issue: transcode once (on my laptop), put it on the Pi, play whenever. I have yet to script this process but that's my next step in the project. It will probably be a year before I realize any cost savings (a friend pays CAD20/mo for a hosted setup which also handles on-the-fly transcoding), but, well, it's a simple server and I just wanted to do it myself, gosh darn it!
- cylentwolf 7y ago
  How does the HDD connect to the pi? just via usb in an separate enclosure?
  - sequoia 7y ago
    Yes.
- treelovinhippie 7y ago
  What Plex install guide did you use? Few months ago I tried to install Plex to a pi already running Pihole but couldn't get it to work.
  - ric2b 7y ago
    You can run plex via docker, if that's ok with you. But it needs network mode "host"
cronix 7y ago
Some use them to get into NASA, so, pretty useful. > The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) this week confirmed that its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been hacked. An audit document from the U.S. Office of the Inspector General was published by NASA this week. It reveals that an unauthorized Raspberry Pi computer connected to the JPL servers was targeted by hackers, who then moved laterally further into the NASA network. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264774
senotrusov 7y ago
I use Raspberry Pi 2 to synchronize files across my ubuntu/macos/windows machines, backup them into the encrypted backup and then upload that backup offsite. I use syncthing to synchronize files. It's fast, stable, cost me nothing and the only limit I have is the size of my disks. Syncthing is decentralized, that means that two machines have to be powered on at the same time to be able to perform sync. Raspberry Pi allows me to have that always-on machine at home which is small, quiet and unnoticeable in my electricity bill. Syncthing works across internet bypassing NAT thanks to the community-ran relays (I also run one of them). I could take my laptop everywhere and file changes will still reach my Raspberry Pi. I hook up an external Seagate USB HDD and it runs just fine without an extra power source. Syncthing keeps up-to-date copy of all my files on that external HDD. I use borg-backup to take hourly snapshots of my files. Those snapshots are encrypted and I upload them offsite without any worries that some cloud provider could possibly read them. I use rclone for that, it can interface with a number of cloud providers out there. It just take your files and one-way sync them into the cloud. The setup of rclone and borg-backup is not particularly complicated but still requires some time. Directories, encryption keys, periodic jobs have to be configured. I abstracted all that into one script which is a bit opinionated but works for me. That script can be run on Linux on on MacOS. I used my Mac for that before Raspberry Pi. It uses system or launchd to run periodic jobs https://github.com/senotrusov/backup-script https://github.com/senotrusov/backup-script I installed Ubuntu server on that Raspberry Pi to have familiar environment. Sadly Raspberry Pi lacks secure boot and have no internal TPM functionality. My external HDD is encrypted but I can't trust Raspberry Pi to hold the encryption key. In rare event of reboot I have to ssh in and manually enter the LUKS key. This setup is still prone to an evil maid attack as someone could replace or modify the SD card to log that key. That scenario is highly unlikely as I am no particular interest to anyone. What is slightly more realistic is that someone could brake into my house to steal stuff. For that my data is secure as the key is lost the moment you power off the Raspberry Pi. Overall I'm pretty happy with that setup. My Raspberry Pi slowly blinks with it onboard red LED to indicate that all that services run well and alarms me with fast blinks if something is not right.
orliesaurus 7y ago
Smart dashboard for TVs
WoodenChair 7y ago
I run my new daily newsletter (btvdaily.com) from a Raspberry Pi 3. It generates the content and mails it out each morning (via Mailchimp) from my house. The website is not hosted on it though. It also runs a Twitter bot I made that takes a picture of my backyard each morning (@walkburlington).
LarryMade2 7y ago
The best use I have so far is for a local TV station have the Pi using a LAMP stack to: a) a Pubic Service Announcement slideshow it autoboots into chrome and hooks in composite NTSC. Can be remotely managed, etc. b) It also serves the station's website which previews the slideshow in a frame, or has a page showing all the slides. Experience: very resilient just cycle power when problems... but learned the SD card is way too sensitive for power cycling - so now has an external HDD for better recovery. Plan to work on one for data collection/receipt for a local recycler, that one will likely use Python with a touchscreen to collect signatures. This is a big disruption to the POS/terminal market as it gives a very powerful/flexible platform that can be developed/deployed inexpensively, and parts can be sourced easily when HW problems occur.
NegativeLatency 7y ago
I run a print server on one of mine, and shairport for AirPlay compatibility
romtx 7y ago
All four of mine sit on a box of wires and parts, waiting to be used. Have for some time now.
drev 7y ago
Playing with retropie
glaslong 7y ago
So many things! 1. Home Assistant for tying together all the various brands of smart home devices https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/ 2. OctoPrint for managing a 3D printer (also has a home assistant integration) https://octoprint.org/ https://octoprint.org/ 3. Magic Mirror that shows me news, weather, commute time estimate, etc https://magicmirror.builders/ https://magicmirror.builders/ 4. PiHole for blocking all ads on my home network https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ 5. The brains of a toy i hacked apart for a friend's robot fight https://www.facebook.com/RobotRiotCompetition/ https://www.facebook.com/RobotRiotCompetition/ 6. PyPortal Twitter feed on my desk https://www.adafruit.com/product/4116 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4116 7. Server for various weekend web projects
jimmaswell 7y ago
I set up a camera facing the door to the apartment with it but I haven't gone farther with motion detection like I planned to. Also got some IR emitters to try to control the AC unit with it but haven't gotten around to it.
novok 7y ago
I run home assistant, unifi controller and to test out restic backup to my nas. I don’t maintain it that well, right now unifi is crapping out for an unknown reason, but my one access point still works fine.
zachpendleton 7y ago
I have a few: - v3 that runs RetroPie - v2 for PiHole - a zero W with a vibration sensor that I use to text me when my washer is done (turned off the washer's alarm so as not to wake sleeping kids)
jonaswi 7y ago
I live in an apartment with quite strict fire-protection standards. Due to the fact that I have a cat that absolutly loves to go outside, I needed to find a solution for him to get outside without a catdoor trough my door. So I installed a fire-protecion-approved door drive that is hooked to a raspberry pi. Another raspberry pi then analyzes a video stream and detects my cat. If my cat is in the frame for n amount of time, a message is sent to the pi conntected to the door drive and the door opens up slightly for him to get in.
- dscpls 7y ago
  Wow. I literally just sat down to relax after building a cardboard prototype cat door fitting in my open window in winter. You just made me feel partly inferior, and partly like I'm in good company
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Now check out this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A-Nf3QIJjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A-Nf3QIJjM A cat door that can tell if the cat has a mouse it's going to "gift" to you, and locks to keep the cat out.
    - mavsman 7y ago
      I may now get a cat just to set this up.
    - skydv 7y ago
      awesome, tho I am curious are there easier ways like weighing the cat before and after :) Although he can be wet
- Havoc 7y ago
  That’s amazing
- fdjlasdfjl 7y ago
  I could actually use exactly that. Do you have a blog outlining how you did it, or the code on github by any chance?
davidbanham 7y ago
I use it to run my automated watering system in my garden. https://github.com/davidbanham/relay_runner https://github.com/davidbanham/relay_runner I used to use an esp8266 but replaced it with a Pi after a lightning strike destroyed it. The Pi is just so much easier to write software for and it's been no less reliable in practice.
- OJFord 7y ago
  Why would it be less reliable in theory? The obvious argument against is that it's 'expensive' [relative to what you need], not, I wouldn't have thought, that it's unreliable.
  - davidbanham 7y ago
    There's a lot more going on with a Pi than an ESP chip. More bits, more failure modes is my reasoning.
lloydpick 7y ago
2 Pis for dealing with ADS-B (airplane data), one for 1090Mhz, the other for 978Mhz. I could run that on the same one, but seemed easier to just split them up given some of the software is a bit picky with device IDs. The 978Mhz is much quieter than the 1090Mhz, so I also run a private SpyServer (https://github.com/lloydpick/docker-spyserver https://github.com/lloydpick/docker-spyserver) for listening to radio transmissions. 1 Raspberry Pi for a running a very stupid sitcom sound thing. Using a camera it tries to recognise who you are, then play a random sound assigned to you out of a little speaker. Think of like the cheering/clapping when a guest or celebrity enters the room in a sitcom tv show, and replace out the clapping with whatever sound you want.
- bardonadam 7y ago
  Love the sitcom sound thing!
  - bigiain 7y ago
    Me too. I've always though I and my friends should all have individual theme songs that play when they enter the room. Now I have another weekend project...
- princekolt 7y ago
  This reminds me of this project I saw on twitter a while ago where a small arduino with a motion sensor would play the Seinfeld bass riff every time someone entered a room.
- samirm 7y ago
  Why do you listen to all these radio transmissions?
  - lloydpick 7y ago
    For the airplane data, I always liked browsing sites like flightradar24, planefinder etc, and wondered how they aggregated the data, and it sort of just went from there. I also now send the ADS-B data to open projects rather than commercial only entities. In terms of the random radio transmissions, it was simply because I was already installing the two ADS-B antennas in my attic, and thought I might as well just put up the standard telescopic antenna that came with the USB receivers as well. I'm a newbie in terms of radio, so it's just been interesting scanning the bands to see what you can find and listen to. A future project I have is to try and pick up the 443Mhz transmission from a really simple weather/temperature sensor I got from Walmart a while ago, since apparently that's what it uses to talk to the little base station it came with.
oneplane 7y ago
A Pi for UniFi, a Pi as a print server (older model) for a USB laser printer, a Pi as a print and input server for a thermal receipt printer that only has serial (or a 350$ option for a 10Mbit ethernet addon) + a button to fetch a hotspot code from UniFi and print it for a guest for limited guest access. And a free floating Pi for various functions, sometimes as an I2C board, SPI interface, Scan server, placeholder when one of the others is in maintenance etc.
lxe 7y ago
I’m running a series of spaghetti-code scripts to trigger the lawn sprinkler when a camera detects motion, and notify me with a gif using pushover.
- marcuskaz 7y ago
  You kids get out of my yard!!
marcuskaz 7y ago
I use my raspberry pi to automatically delete my tweets: https://github.com/mkaz/ephemeral https://github.com/mkaz/ephemeral
kefabean 7y ago
1) barcode scanner to put products in my online supermarket’s shopping cart 2) security cam to do facial recognition and drop me an email 3) general purpose remote control website/api for turning things on/off such as tv, amp, dac (typical things that need hw integration: ir blaster, 433mhz sockets, 12v trigger voltage etc). Recently discovered APIs integrate quite nicely with Apple’s iOS ‘Shortcuts’ app for poor man’s voice control!
- cheeko1234 7y ago
  You can install home assistant and control 433mhz sockets with "hey siri" since it has homekit. It's super fast (<500ms).
dymk 7y ago
It runs OctoPrint for my 3D printer
aurelian15 7y ago
1. Programming AVR µCs via ISP/SPI 2. Home automation based on a 433 MHz transmitter 3. Media centre 4. Small router bridging from WiFi to Ethernet
brunt 7y ago
1. Telegram chat bot from this rust crate: https://crates.io/crates/telegram-bot https://crates.io/crates/telegram-bot 2. Some web microservices that the chatbot communicates with 3. Pi hole adblocking. This is all on one 3b+ with plenty of resources to spare.
Nican 7y ago
I use to control WS2812 LED strip and synchronize it real time with the music being played in the party room. Also- a PiHole.
elvecinodeabajo 7y ago
I've a Raspberry Pi 3B hosting my NextCloud instance. That's the coolest thing I'm doing now with it.
yellowapple 7y ago
I keep buying them, but so far the only thing I've done with one was years ago when I entered an RPi-powered "pumpkin computer" as the IT department's entry to the company jack-o-lantern contest. I keep meaning to buy a bunch of 'em and build a portable Erlang/OTP cluster. So far I've only done the "buy a bunch of 'em" step ;)
loeg 7y ago
Pi 1 here. Sits on a shelf collecting dust. I use lower power or more specialized micros for actual micro work and old x86 parts for higher performance workloads.
tomxor 7y ago
Turned a Pi 1 into a DHCP server at work to replace failed windows server. Got a Pi Zero at home, but only used it to play with GPIO and i2c, i like to poke around in drivers to get more insight into how different hardware interfaces and protocols work over these interfaces.
farmerbb 7y ago
I use my Raspberry Pi 3B+ as an AdGuard Home server, as an OpenVPN server, to wake my PC via WoL, plus as just a basic Linux box that's on my home network that I can remote into from anywhere.
- albemuth 7y ago
  > that I can remote into from anywhere I've been looking to set up something like this, do you have a static IP or use an external server you could recommend?
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    All you need is a DNS provider with an API, and a check for external-IP change.
    - farmerbb 7y ago
      That's correct. The one I use is duckdns.org - it comes with a script that you can add as a cron job that updates the DNS record every few minutes with whatever your current IP address is.
Scramblejams 7y ago
IIRC Pi3 gave no access to hardware crypto so using it as a VPN server could be slow. Anyone know if that changes with the Pi4?
pretty_bubbles 7y ago
PiHole... Also I have Transmission handling torrent files for downloading entirely legal movies, and keeps seeding them. I use MiniDLNA to stream them to my TV.
tomweingarten 7y ago
My favorite use is in a photo booth I set up. It controls two cameras (webcam for preview, DSLR for the actual photo -- hopefully the RPi 4 will be me enough bandwidth to drop to just the DSLR), outputs to a printer, and drives a monitor. And the whole thing fits in a nice little suitcase.
outlog 7y ago
I use it with Elixir - https://github.com/nerves-project https://github.com/nerves-project various IOT things - plants, HVAC etc etc for real world: deployed "kiosk"/touch POS using https://github.com/LeToteTeam/kiosk_system_x86_64 https://github.com/LeToteTeam/kiosk_system_x86_64
picantePepper 7y ago
Shameless plug but run a basic weather station (currently in my room until I find a weatherproof enclosure) https://alonsoarteaga.me https://alonsoarteaga.me
ultrasounder 7y ago
In the process of moving our Hardware Test infrastructure(Think Selenium for testing hardware)over from Windows SBC based solutions to a R-Pi-Zero based solutions. Applications range from driving stepper motors, sensors and generating pass/fail results. The inital investment is in porting all the code written for Windows to embedded linux but the investment pays off in the long run in cost minimized by moving away from a Windows desktop. Will do a write up of how i achieved it once i have some concrete results.
jeffdubin 7y ago
Currently: Raspberry Pi 1B+: Streaming radio scanner to Broadcastify Raspberry Pi 2B: Octoprint Raspberry Pi 2B: Signage, looping videos on a 32" TV Raspberry Pi 3B: Duplicity "server" (backup software) Raspberry Pi 3B+: Web dev box Previously: Raspberry Pi 1B: Hylafax server Raspberry Pi 2B: Kodi
- wferrell 7y ago
  What are you using to play the looping videos?
  - dividuum 7y ago
    If you need a professional solution for more than a single screen, consider taking a look at https://info-beamer.com https://info-beamer.com (my companies product). Otherwise omxplayer has a -loop argument IIRC.
jonathankoren 7y ago
mine gathers data from my weather station and uploads it to various places. I’ve been thinking about using for some robotics recently though.
gus_ 7y ago
I've been always fascinated with sunrises and sunsets, so I built a picam to take timelapses: https://hackaday.io/project/28694-yet-another-raspberry-picam/details https://hackaday.io/project/28694-yet-another-raspberry-pica... youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkH0MTHo-LlxOL_W_3Qeq9Q https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkH0MTHo-LlxOL_W_3Qeq9Q https://www.flickr.com/photos/bentretea_picam/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bentretea_picam/
deepsy 7y ago
https://github.com/deepsyx/home-automation https://github.com/deepsyx/home-automation That's what I do :)
harrylepotter 7y ago
Use it to bring Android Auto to my old car stereo: https://medium.com/@bendavey/bringing-android-auto-to-audi-navigation-plus-rns-e-using-a-raspberry-pi-3d7d3bd97d7a https://medium.com/@bendavey/bringing-android-auto-to-audi-n...
Waterluvian 7y ago
I have a wall mounted 20" TV in my garage above the corner of my workbench. Use it to look up stuff or watch how to videos or just play music. I love minimalism and part of my minimalism approach is not having vulnerable things in vulnerable places. So if the Pi gets destroyed because a workshop is fairly volatile, no big deal.
Havoc 7y ago
Experiments mostly. Yesterday I tried steam link. Previously a vpn AP. Also a air quality mon. And a flightaware station. And a file server. ie i Format it quite often and start from scratch
- erredois 7y ago
  Which sensor did you use to measure air quality?
  - Havoc 7y ago
    Don’t recall. Nova something. Like 15 bucks off amazon. Looking at the pictures they all seem to be same thing rebranded. Measures 2.5 and 10. Def works ie reacts to window being opened but I wouldn’t stake my life on accuracy Good for a project though
  - Havoc 7y ago
    Right...back on a laptop - I purchased the item linked below. Amazon should have similar for a couple bucks more. Integration part was easily...bit of hackey python does the trick. Noted very slight buzzing sound which was irritating if next to bedstand. Not a major concern. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32606349048.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.8edd4c4dm17zE7 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32606349048.html?spm=a2g0s.9...
chris72205 7y ago
- 1x Raspberry Pi (older, not sure exact model) - exposed to the internet and acts as a bastion host for ssh'ing into other devices on my home network - 1x Raspberry Pi Zero W - monitors several Wemo Insight Switches around the house and turns them on if they are in an off state (if the power goes out, the Wemo switches do not turn back on so I have to do it manually) - 6x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B - running in a k8s cluster (1 master, 5 workers) doing nothing until I can find time to continue working on this project... found out I need to build Docker images on an ARM host so my CI/CD first choice did not work :(
- kkapelon 7y ago
  I work for Codefresh, a CI/CD solution that has ARM support. Maybe it can help you? https://codefresh.io/docs/docs/incubation/arm-support/ https://codefresh.io/docs/docs/incubation/arm-support/
  - chris72205 7y ago
    Nice, I'll have to look into this further!
wolrah 7y ago
I have a bunch of them scattered around my house. 2x LibreELEC media players 1x RetroPie emulation station 1c OctoPrint/OctoPi 3D printer controller 1x Home Assistant automation controller 1x Car PC project 1x retrofitted old alarm clock 1x hosting RTL-SDR stick in attic One of the media centers is actually a Tinkerboard, but that's been annoying due to half-assed support and I'll be replacing it with a Pi 4 as soon as I can get my hands on one.
geophile 7y ago
Stuck a 2TB disk drive on it and I’m using it as an offsite backup server.
abhinuvpitale 7y ago
I have a pi with a small display that keeps generating inspiring/funny quotes from various books that I have read. https://github.com/abhinuvpitale/goodreads-quotes-raspberry-pi https://github.com/abhinuvpitale/goodreads-quotes-raspberry-...
clord 7y ago
I use 2, one controls fans and pumps, linear actuators, and sensors for my greenhouse. The other does likewise (plus heaters and heat lamps) for my chicken coop. I prefer rolling my own to ensure it works without internet.
scottlocklin 7y ago
Stratum-1 time server using a GPS module; was a pain in the neck to set up; reminded me of the old days, compiling kernels on a 386, or building things on Ultrix. Served its purpose for a trading project though. I should probably do something else with it as its been gathering dust for years now.
- algaeontoast 7y ago
  Could you maybe go into more detail on your "trading project"? Very interested!
janvdberg 7y ago
Mine runs Domoticz. To monitor gas and electricity usage via a USB-P1 cable (which plugs into my meter).
jlarocco 7y ago
I played with mine for a few weeks and got bored with it. It's on my desk here somewhere, possibly still running. I setup a headless Linux distro and tested out the ARM port of SBCL. Not surprising, really, but I was able to setup Emacs, Slime, and SBCL and develop Lisp over SSH pretty comfortably. I ended up writing a Common Lisp binding to WiringPI [0], and then another package which used it to read data from a GPS module [1]. I didn't really have a plan, just seemed interesting. I haven't done much with it since then. [0] https://github.com/jl2/wpi https://github.com/jl2/wpi [1] https://github.com/jl2/pigps https://github.com/jl2/pigps
noise 7y ago
1x Raspberry Pi 3: Retropie powering a converted cabinet 1x Raspberry Pi 3: Home-assistant.io, perennial WIP 1x Raspberry Pi 1b: Prototype of Pandora streaming box w/pianobar and an LCD char display 1x Raspberry Pi 2: WIP for next rev of Pandora box
strags 7y ago
I discovered that my 17-month old son loves to mess with stereo controls. So I bought a few rotary encoders and neo-pixel rings - build a wooden enclosure with a plastic faceplate, and wrote some code to generate fancy light and audio effects when he turns/clicks the knobs. He loves it.
- Sileni 7y ago
  Watch out, you'll have a DJ before you know it.
- 1024core 7y ago
  I'm thinking of doing the same for my kid. Any photos/description?
  - strags 7y ago
    It's actually quite a bit louder than this now. Also, the lights aren't quite as infant-retina-searingly-bright as the camera would have you believe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtE8oE9GOsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtE8oE9GOsM Currently it's still running my test code, which just lets him mess with volume/pan/pitch. I need to get around to writing something a bit fancier. Tech deets: It's just a RPi3 with most of the stuff written in Python. I tried to get a bunch of Python audio libs working, but gave up and wrote my own C++ module for sample mixing. The NeoPixel rings are driven via the SPI output, and the rotary encoders/switches are just hooked up to random GPIOs.
    - syspec 7y ago
      He really does love it. Amazing! Hahaha
    - MrZongle2 7y ago
      That's awesome! Great job!
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  Tread carefully, you're creating a young Look Mum No Computer! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafxR2HWJRmMfSdyZXvZMTw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafxR2HWJRmMfSdyZXvZMTw
dlevine 7y ago
* A Pi3 running RetroPie. Might upgrade to a 4 if I can find a use for the 3. * An original Pi that I gave to my brother in law because he was interested in setting up a PiHole (he might have used it for RetroPie, though).
alistproducer2 7y ago
I have two. The main reason I love them is I can leave them on all the time using very little power. Our would be surprised how much u can supercharge your home network by having always-on Linux boxes on it. One runs nextcloud and serves as a nas. I use freeddns to give my nextcloud instance a legit URL for free. I use letsencrypt to host my cloud over https, again for free. The other runs emulationstation, deluge (torrent) which only runs when the box is connected to a VPN running on a vps, and serves up my movies and shows via minidlna. I've also got some cool chron jobs that backup important stuff ((encrypted of course) to Google cloud and do some other things. I also serve up a keepass password database via webdav and do some neat stuff regarding keeping my keyfile separate fr my internet facing box but I won't get into exactly how that works.
evancordell 7y ago
I run OSMC[0] which is really just raspbian + kodi + updates. Because it's just debian, I also run homeassistant in a docker container started with systemd. I like this because: - OSMC ensures it boots into kodi and keeps kodi up to date - systemd/docker makes it very easy to manage my homeassistant config by scp'ing a new image over to the pi. Nothing out of the ordinary given the other responses here, but thought I'd share because it's been an especially stable setup for me. [0]: https://kodi.wiki/view/OSMC https://kodi.wiki/view/OSMC
ewoodrich 7y ago
I use a Pi as a bridge to control some lights using an Arduino and a 433mhz transceiver. It has a simple web API that IFTTT hooks into so I can use them with a Google Home.
geerlingguy 7y ago
I play around with K8s on ARM: http://pidramble.com http://pidramble.com It's been a fun hobby project over the past 6 years, and I also do some other things like home environment (temp, PM2.5, etc.) monitoring. I also have a few Pi Zero W's strapped to USB batteries I use for impromptu time-lapses, using a little set of scripts here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-timelapse https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-timelapse I love being able to tinker with software/hardware easily... The Arduino and FPGA's require a deeper investment, and I like how I can do everything I want in Python on a Pi, for more hobbyist projects that don't have more power/processing constraints.
- rcarmo 7y ago
  Have a look at k3s.io. I love it.
withinrafael 7y ago
I use an older Pi with a USB DAC to bring in audio and data from my radio scanners, for a slow-moving side project. Goal is to mux the audio with time sensitive radio metadata, like talk group and location (surprisingly difficult given messy state of formats, containers and playback options) and deliver this to clients on the network for easy listening and other processing (e.g. speech-to-text, mapping, etc.). Learned a bunch of gstreamer in the past half year, hoping to pick this all back up with the Pi4.
rcarmo 7y ago
I've done digital signage, controlled servos, used them as cameras, the works. Right now I have: - A 5-node Pi 2 cluster running k3s.io (https://github.com/rcarmo/raspi-cluster https://github.com/rcarmo/raspi-cluster), and a separate Pi 2 I use as a Docker build box and local Docker registry. - A Pi 3B+ as a "lab" desktop computer with an USB oscilloscope and FTDI cables to flash ESP8266 and Arduinos - A Lakka.tv arcade/MAME box for the kids with a PS3 controller (no room for a proper PiCade, we just use the TV( - A Pi 3A+ with a mic array for playing around with Google Assistant - A Pi Zero W taped to the inside of my electricity meter trying to estimate power consumption (we have a spinning disk mechanical meter) - Another Pi Zero W that I use to demo Azure IoT solutions - An ODROID U2 (Could be a Pi) running HomeKit and Node-Red for home automation, as well as a bastion container (all dockerized). Edit: forgot about the 3B hooked up to my 3D printer running OctoPi And the list goes on. I have many older Series Bs lying around, and once used one to revive a dead synth whose MIDI keyboard still worked (I set up timidity and a sound font on it and it became the kids' piano). I also ran a Plex server on one until it became obvious that I needed to think about transcoding (but it worked fine for music). You can do a _lot_ with Raspberry Pis, and I fully expect to get a beefy Pi 4 to use as a lab computer. I just hope they also beef up the Zero at some point (power envelope will be a problem, but a Zero with Pi 2 specs would be great).
- 1-6 7y ago
  What SW do you use for digital signage?
  - rcarmo 7y ago
    The first one I did (back in the original Pi era) was this: https://github.com/rcarmo/digital-signage-client https://github.com/rcarmo/digital-signage-client We then iterated upon that over the years, tried Android boxes, etc.
Zaskoda 7y ago
I used several Pi Zeros with EnviroPhat sensor hats to monitor temperatures and light levels in my Bitcoin mine. I have a Pi 3 setup as a game emulator in the basement. And I used to chop up rc toys from the thrift store to make RPI robots to chase my cats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Set6z566-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Set6z566-s
- VectorLock 7y ago
  Are the light levels important for your Bitcoin mine?
mnem 7y ago
There are so many amazing projects here, all of which are more impressive than what I actually get around to doing with mine! I really just use mine a simple way to play around with assembler in a simple environment.
smilesnd 7y ago
I have a rpi2 I use as a low power server that keeps me connected to my irc server and runs tasks for me. I have a rpi3 installed in my truck that acts as a media player. It also reads my OBDII so I know how my engine is running and other diagnosis information. I also use it to map wifi/bluetooth spots and other random data as I am driving.
toolboc 7y ago
I use a Raspberry Pi to stream PlayStation 2 backups over SMB by networking the onboard Ethernet port of the Pi to allow access to a Samba Share service running on the Pi. This allows for seamless playback of games with heavy Full Motion Video sequences as the Ethernet transmission is faster than the max throughput of the USB2.0 ports provided on the PlayStation 2. It -also supports auto mounting and sharing of external drives to allow for seamless drive swapping if you have a large library. Using the same technique, games can also be streamed to PlayStation 3 and original Xbox. I added some additional support for Xlink Kai so that you can play LAN enabled games over the Pi’s WiFi connection by plugging a compatible game console into the Ethernet port of the Pi or by connecting to an access point that is auto created when a secondary WiFi dongle is attached to the Pi. I learned that there are usually a hundred or so people in South America who play Halo 2 using Xlink Kai and this makes it very easy to connect to them for lag free multiplayer on original hardware. This feature also works on Nintendo Switch and PSP with a bit of extra work. The project is open source and [available as a flashable SD image on Github](https://github.com/toolboc/psx-pi-smbshare https://github.com/toolboc/psx-pi-smbshare). Youtuber VersatileNinja recently published a detailed video on [how to get started with the project](https://youtu.be/Ilx5NYoUkNA https://youtu.be/Ilx5NYoUkNA) if anyone is interested in taking it for a spin.
- idonotknowwhy 7y ago
  How fast is streaming cut-scene heavy games like MGS4 to the PS3 using this setup? Also, for the PS2, how does it compare with HDDLoader and an internal HDD. Relevant for games like Fatal Frame, where you have to open doors a lot, and on the DVD, it takes like 5-10 seconds, but on the HDD, it takes <1 second. I didn't know we could steam to the Xbox OG, sounds pretty useful compared with the 1hr process to open it up and upgrade the HDD...
  - toolboc 7y ago
    In my tests using iftop, speed on PS3 seems to top out around 60 MB/s which is slower than HDD but should be sufficient for most games. On PS2, the speed to access SMB is also slower than HDD at around 6 MB/s, however, this is nearly 6x the speed of the USB. Although it is slower than HDD access, it allows for playback of most games without stuttering. Good point on calling attention to the OG Xbox, as I should have been more specific there. OG Xbox games can only be played back via HDD or Disc due to a limitation in the system itself, however, a number of emulators support SMB paths for playing backups.
mgaitan09 7y ago
at an Airline, we are designing a IOT feed for Aircraft Turn Around processes (RFIDs, Cameras, Sensors, etc), fed to a Pi per gate and transmitted to a MongoDB with a custom made GUI, it's a prototype/lab kinda thing though not made for full production...
Lammy 7y ago
I use a Pi 3 running FreeBSD 12 and CUPS as a print server for my Brother laser printer. The printer has an option for a network card, but finding one is many times more expensive than the Pi, and it's so old I wouldn't entirely trust it on my network anyway :)
dheera 7y ago
Make little fun robots like this Pixar lamp: https://hackaday.com/2019/05/25/little-lamp-to-learn-longer-leaps/ https://hackaday.com/2019/05/25/little-lamp-to-learn-longer-...
teh_klev 7y ago
Keep them in a drawer.
bromonkey 7y ago
...plug it into networks I'm not authorized to with the default password and forget about it... but I actually use one w/ octoprint for my 3D printer, really like it.
DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
I have an old Raspberry Pi 1 that runs headless raspbian with a set of cheap speakers plugged into it and an old usb wifi adaptor. It has only one purpose: to play a wav file of a telephone ringing for one minute. My spouse does not ever have the ringer on her cell phone. So when I am out and I need her to look at her phone, I VPN in to my home network, ssh into the pi using Terminus on my iphone, and 'aplay' the wav file. The real reason we ever wanted to get a landline was because of this issue, so instead of wasting money I just used spare parts to make an alert system I can activate remotely. I can also use the 'say' command for text-to-speech, but that's not really effective. The old school phone ringer wav is perfect.
- daedalus_j 7y ago
  This is brilliant. I have the same problem, and an extra gen1 pi hanging around, and I'm quite excited about this solution. Thanks for posting. :-)
- chrsstrm 7y ago
  You could automate this even more with a Twilio number, ngrok running on the Pi and a small webserver to trigger the audio playback. Then instead of having to ssh in you can just send a text.
  - HoppyHaus 7y ago
    Or if you wanted to get even cheaper, depending on the carrier, you could text a personal E-Mail server.
  - pfundstein 7y ago
    Is ngrok the new dnat?
    - chrsstrm 7y ago
      Expose your server endpoint to the public web however you like. There are lots of options and many have been discussed here recently. I just happen to be a fan of ngrok and use it daily for all sorts of cases, including on some of my Pi’s.
nonsens3 7y ago
I stream live video (no audio) and watch how my dog chills at home while I am at work :) Sometimes I catch him on the sofa!
dpcan 7y ago
Ours ran various things in our escape rooms: 1) I ran a browser in kiosk mode with a mouse that was used with some custom software on a computer in the room. 2) We had it connected to a remote keypad that opened a magnetic lock, popping a drawer open, when the sequence was correctly entered. 3) We had one connected to a magnetic sensor that would open another cabinet when items were placed correctly. 4) I ran the clocks and hint systems in the rooms from RPi's as well, which allowed me to run mini web servers on them that I would access from the control room to mess with the time if the game called for it, or to send hints in to the rooms, or to trigger sounds or videos. 5) Finally, we ran our lobby slideshow system with one, and also played our orientation videos on them. Yes, we could have used Arduino for some of these, but I always liked RPi's because I could SSH into them to do the resets or to trigger the doors remotely if needed from my computer at the control center.
- hosteur 7y ago
  I'm currently working on developing an escape room environment using RPis as well. I would love to hear details about how you set yours up. Any way to get in touch?
sparker72678 7y ago
I have 13 in service right now: - Outdoor irrigation control via OpenSprinkler Pi: https://opensprinkler.com/product/opensprinkler-pi/ https://opensprinkler.com/product/opensprinkler-pi/ - Z-Wave home automation via ZWay: https://z-wave.me/products/razberry/ https://z-wave.me/products/razberry/ - 2 Custom HAVC thermostats using: https://github.com/jeffmcfadden/PiThermostat https://github.com/jeffmcfadden/PiThermostat - An NTP server with GPS attached for a time source. - 2 for weather monitoring (one directly attached to sensors, one that aggregates the data from a few sources and provides reporting) - A sort of centralized "workhorse" Pi that runs a lot of random cron jobs, etc. - An Alexa gateway for home automation - An NES emulator - An infrared-remote source for turning on/off surround receiver, TV, etc. - Monitoring of HVAC temperatures/performance - An intranet server Assuming I didn't forget anything.
- erklik 7y ago
  >2 for weather monitoring (one directly attached to sensors, one that aggregates the data from a few sources and provides reporting) So, I hear people doing this alot. However what exactly does this help with? Like, is the extra information really more useful than just the standard old TV weather forecast?
  - sparker72678 7y ago
    I do this primarily because I'm a weather geek. I don't _need_ this at all. I do find it interesting to see the differences in temperature (and humidity, etc.) in the microclimate around my house compared to the city and greater metro area. I also use the data to measure the performance of my home's HVAC system. Doing this _does_ require real-time local temperature and humidity data. But again, this is all for fun. I just enjoy it.
    - ianai 7y ago
      What sort of sensors are available? Just the stuff off the pi site?
      - 7y ago
alexcabrera 7y ago
RetroPi + [8bitdo N30](http://www.8bitdo.com/n30pro-f30pro/ http://www.8bitdo.com/n30pro-f30pro/) controller is the best gaming box I've ever owned.
girvo 7y ago
I'm using it to build a modern take on a "word processor", a hardware keyboard + microprocessor that only writes text to its onboard memory. My current roadblock is getting a relatively high resolution rather wide aspect ratio screen. Hard to find, it seems.
inamberclad 7y ago
I'm running CoreFlight on a rapsberry pi zero and I want to mount it on my bike with a GPS (and maybe some other sensors) to track my rides.
ulzeraj 7y ago
Personally I have a Model B running Alpine and SSH to receive incoming connections at home. I’ve also convinced the company to buy 8 3B. Each of those is connected to a 1080p display through HDMI and each one of them boots raspian with chromium-browser in kiosk mode into one specific Grafana panel or playlist. I control what URL each of them boots into from Saltstack states.
bborud 7y ago
Lots of things, but the most useful yet is the RPi Zero USB stem which turns it into a dongle that gets power and network from my Mac. Very useful for quick and easy access to GPIO pins for ad-hoc use.
just_myles 7y ago
ctrl + F 'emulator'. lol only 3.
phiresky 7y ago
We hacked together an automatic door opening system controllable via smartphone that notifies you on ringing and sends a video, then opens the doors on button press with a Lego contraption [1]. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/bwdv36/a_smartphone_door_control_system_hacked_together/ https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/bwdv36/a_smar...
ei8htyfi5e 7y ago
Is collect dust an option?
simgim 7y ago
I have 1 in my dmz running wireguard (VPN for safe public wifi browsing) and nextcloud on ubuntu 18.04. Another inside my network running Freedombox for Privoxy and Searx.
rayraegah 7y ago
I used to turn my pi into low power consumption devices and donate them to the solar berry project [0]. Side loaded with rachelpi [1] software that brings the better part of the internet to kids in dark regions of Africa. [0]: https://turingtrust.co.uk/home/our_work/solarberry/ https://turingtrust.co.uk/home/our_work/solarberry/ [1]: http://rachelfriends.org/ http://rachelfriends.org/
lyagusha 7y ago
Tor relay with Display-O-Tron Hat to visualize the tx/rx speeds. Wardriving rig with GPS puck that runs kismet, airbash, and bettercap to steal PMKIDs and also 4-way handshakes from nearby networks for offline cracking and data visualization. Also has UPS supply for backup power. An aborted project to make a Hindustani raga time-of-day player, based on a Pi Zero W with a 128GB SD card, that would stream a continuous loop of music appropriate to the specific time of day (8 distinct periods), via a network interface such as Plex. But it was too complicated. I've also used an RPi3 as a node in https://github.com/lennartkoopmann/nzyme https://github.com/lennartkoopmann/nzyme.
YaBa 7y ago
1x Pi-Hole 1x Pilight (working together with HomeAssistant in a different machine) 1x sandbox (testing software, web stuff, etc) 1x Asterisk/RasPBX 1x backup manager 1x honeypot 1x bastion host 1x media player (also integrated with HA)
thachnb 7y ago
I have 1 Pi and 2 Odroid XU4. - Pi for Pi-hole - Odroid for VPN and home assistant server and also a CCTV. - Another Odroid XU4 for RetroPie games.
PenguinCoder 7y ago
I have a pi3 setup as a garage door opener. It's wired to two, 4 channel relays (only use two relays), one for each garage door. A simple php page that can be accessed and a big icon 'lressed', triggers the gpio to switch the relay. This opens or closes the door. I set this up because I got tired of replacing batteries in a garage door opener. This way,I just open the web page on my phone and open the door. I also setup a few android Tasker jobs to register when my phone connects to home wifi, and is also connected to my vehicle Bluetooth. When that registers, it automatically opens the garage door.
Falcorian 7y ago
Really simple stuff, compared to the self watering plants, etc.: - AdGuard Home DNS (Pi Hole was just not stable for me) - Unifi Controller - Torrent box (come get your Linux distros!) - Always on platform to host various scripts on; one backs up my blog to Internet Archive when it changes, for example. - Twitter bots that report the RPi status (just went down for reboot, etc.) - Bot that watches Caltrain for delays and Tweets them to me. - Platform to play around with orchestration, DevOps, etc. I learned Ansible using them. Still want to move it all to Docker, but that'll have to wait.
floren 7y ago
I've got a first-gen Pi that's filled a variety of roles through the years. Currently it's hooked up to an old black-and-white TV where I play old TV shows and the occasional youtube video (omxplayer `youtube-dl -g <url>`).
CapricornNoble 7y ago
1. RPi Model 2B: running Kodi, and connected to my TV. Utilized for watching movies from my NFS-shared movie storage drive. 2. RPi Zero: used to prototype a device for my company. The RPi is connected to a LimeSDR Mini and an UPS. Meant to work out some of the software and form factor for a deployable electronic warfare device. I'm starting to replace RPis with ODroids for the most part. I'm actually waiting for 2x ODroid-HC2 to arrive any day now. One will be hosting a Syncloud instance, as I want to experiment with Diaspora social network. Not exactly sure what I'll use the other for yet.
chrsstrm 7y ago
Outside of off the cuff experiments, most of my Pis are provisioned as MotionEyeOS[0] security cams. Each client can be linked into a central "server" so you can view them all at once, and lots of nice config options for storing or sending image and video either continuously or based on motion. I have the streaming set up so I can peek in from anywhere using VLC on my phone. [0] https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos/wiki https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos/wiki
- megy 7y ago
  Do you need one pi board per camera?
  - chrsstrm 7y ago
    There’s only one camera ribbon connector on a Pi board, not sure if you could also plug in a USB cam or not.
elkos 7y ago
I've set up a SatNOGS (https://SatNOGS.org https://SatNOGS.org) ground-station using a turnstile antenna. I'm able to retrieve signals from satellites and assist the rest of the community to retrieve signals from my location as well.
loginatnine 7y ago
On my original pi, I use it to sense whether my washing and drying machine is working and sends me a notification when the load is done. It uses 2 adxl345 accelerometer with 1 pi. Instructions are on github https://github.com/jebeaudet/time-to-fold-alerter https://github.com/jebeaudet/time-to-fold-alerter On my rpi3, I use it for download automation with couch potato, sonarr and radarr.
dekhn 7y ago
One runs my 3d printer. I've also tried using them for robots and I've built a couple microscopes/telescopes where the pi ran the video subsystem. But for that case I always end up switching back to an Intel NUC or a laptop.
Centrino 7y ago
I'm a ham radio operator and I run a WSPR beacon using a RPi, a TAPR-QRPi shield, the WsprryPi software and a random wire antenna. The RPi generates an HF signal on GPIO_4 at around 14 MHz (20 meter short wave band), the TAPR-QRPi shield filters out the harmonics and amplifies the carrier to around 200 milliwatts. Using a 12 feet wire on my balcony I get automated reception reports from 300 to 2800 miles away.
jaimex2 7y ago
Kodi media centre.
vetrom 7y ago
With an amazing team, I'm helping run a fleet of a few hundredish pi3/3b+ and hundreds of pizero-W cameras in an evolving automotive IoT solution. It's definitely been a challenge using them in volume, but they've been surprisingly reliable once you control for things like heat dissipation and get a decent networking solution. (At our scale we're approaching having to decide if we want to be a MVNO.)
- mirceal 7y ago
  take a look at my project at cattlepi.com
alexandander 7y ago
piHole, UniFi Cloud Key, Wikipedia Bots (not for spam of course, these were officially sanctioned :))
Mazzen 7y ago
openHAB home automation. The Raspberry Pi is a recommended base for openHAB and a prepared image is provided for easy use. I use more for other purposes but openHAB is the important one. The Rpi is also nice for it as many hardware receivers/transmitters are compatible
epynonymous 7y ago
i created a digital scoreboard that can be hooked up to a large led for sporting events, can be used.from rpi 2, 3 to a, b, and zero
pier25 7y ago
I used RBPs when working on museums. For example as mini video players, to connect sensors and trigger a video or turn on some light, etc. Also to serve as RS232 to wifi adapters. You'd be surprised how much stuff still uses serial to interface with the outside world (tvs, projectors, audio switchers, etc).
bbulkow 7y ago
I have two that control fridges for cheese making and aging. I used to have one running a custom news aggregator my gf made for me. I use them as controllers for large scale art at burning man.
anotherevan 7y ago
Fairly pedestrian uses. One running OSMC (Kodi) media server. One that manages nightly backups for all the machines on my network. Does wake-on-LAN as needed, uses rsnapshot to encrypted external drive. I also run Pi-Hole on this. Have one in the office that serves as a terminal server via X2Go. Let's me remote desktop to office machines as needed. I'm quite a fan of DietPi as my distro to use on these. I also use Ansible as much as possible to configure and manage them.
thallada 7y ago
I currently have three around the apartment attached to the network: One running Seafile (https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ https://www.seafile.com/en/home/) with an old laptop hard-drive connected via USB enclosure. It acts as my own Dropbox. I mainly store notes and photos on it and sync them to a few other devices for redundancy. It also has a Samba share with all of my music and has an open vpn server so I can connect to it from anywhere. One with a HiFiBerrry Digi+ hat (https://www.hifiberry.com/products/digiplus/ https://www.hifiberry.com/products/digiplus/) connected to my sound system via toslink running an MPD (https://www.musicpd.org/ https://www.musicpd.org/) server. I can control it with M.A.L.P. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.gateshipone.malp&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.gateshipon...) on my phone. This one also has a 7" touch screen (https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-7-Touchscreen-Display/dp/B0153R2A9I https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-7-Touchscreen-Display/dp...) which I use to sometimes display ncmpcpp (https://github.com/arybczak/ncmpcpp https://github.com/arybczak/ncmpcpp) inside edex-ui (https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui). This one also acts as the living room clock with an USB LED message board (https://www.amazon.com/818-Dream-Cheeky-Message-Board/dp/B001KU43WK/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/818-Dream-Cheeky-Message-Board/dp/B00...) controlled by dcled (https://github.com/Conservatory/dcled https://github.com/Conservatory/dcled). Another with a GPIO breakout and breadboard with an individually addressable LED light strip attached. I got the idea from this Adafruit tutorial (https://learn.adafruit.com/light-painting-with-raspberry-pi/overview https://learn.adafruit.com/light-painting-with-raspberry-pi/...). I wrote a program in Python to make it softly glow between random colors and sync to any beats-per-minute.
vmlinuz 7y ago
Short answer: I've got one sitting behind the TV in my parents' kitchen, running ssh and openvpn for proxy/vpn purposes, but mostly working as an automated BBC TV downloader, scripted to download a list of shows every night, at different qualities (e.g. don't need high frame rate for quiz shows), rsync them to my server at home outside the UK, and send me a PushBullet message to tell me what will be available to watch over breakfast. Works beautifully! I'm very tempted to get a 4 and pair it with a lower-specced NAS for home server purposes - I don't think even the Pi 4 has quite the I/O to be a great storage server by itself, but that combo is probably more fun and flexible than just a NAS alone...
connorcodes 7y ago
I turned mine into a simple Apache server. It's really nice to save a file and instantly see it live. If I like a program, I just save it and play around with on my server.
matthewowen 7y ago
It's a great paperweight! I'm sure it does other things too but I haven't got round to it yet :).
werber 7y ago
I use it to play old movies and video games with a projector in my bedroom. Super fun
CypherSnyper 7y ago
Hook it up to NASA's network with a default password and watch hackers take over the entire network through it
chadlavi 7y ago
I have a pi0 running pi-hole on my home network, and another one running a network drive. Just got the 4B to use as a Plex server
watsocd 7y ago
I run my own energy monitoring business. We use many RPi's for remote customer site energy meter data collection and forwarding to our cloud based REST servers. Once we got over the SD card issues, I have had zero problems and no hardware failures (including SD card issues) in four years now. Because of the low cost, I always install two units on every site; one is powered and idle but ready to take over if the other fails. Not hot-standby but close enough for my purposes.
jbuzbee 7y ago
I have a bunch of headless Zero Ws spread around the house, each monitoring temperature and reporting themselves over multicast DNS http://jpbuzbee.asuscomm.com/ http://jpbuzbee.asuscomm.com/
chadd 7y ago
With my 16 year old son, I built a weather balloon with one, including an Arduino, a few temperature sensors, a GPS, LoRA radio, and we're going to launch it next month. Having a hard time finding Helium.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Don't most party stores have helium tanks?
  - chadd 7y ago
    I need 200 cubic liters and they won't sell that much
- cmmeur01 7y ago
  Welding supply store may be worth checking.
  - chadd 7y ago
    Yes they won't sell except to existing customers. New customer == no helium.
- orpheline 7y ago
  As a further science project, why not liberate hydrogen through electrolysis? Much less expensive than helium, and greater lifting capacity...
  - chadd 7y ago
    good idea! I think we're just going to get a hydrogen tank, some protective gear, and go that route.
gregsadetsky 7y ago
There's a bus station across from my studio / coworking space. I can see people waiting for the bus and doing either: 1) staring into the void 2) looking at their watches 3) desperately glancing in the direction where the bus is coming from. I figured that it'd be nice to let people know when the bus is supposed to be there. So, I installed a 28" display on a monitor stand, installed the stand on my window frame, turned the monitor to face the bus station, and show the up-to-date arrival time in a very big font (the buses have GPS; the Pi gets the real time info from the local transit authority). This is in Montreal. Some info here [0]. And a little video [1]. [0] https://greg.technology/#bus https://greg.technology/#bus [1] https://youtu.be/pc16oPb5zW0 https://youtu.be/pc16oPb5zW0
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dotmanish 7y ago
  This is awesome work and thank you for doing this for public without asking. P.S. does the transit authority offer an API or is this prone to breaking when they change their page layout? [edit: I just read about the rumor on your webpage. Clarifies.]
  - gregsadetsky 7y ago
    Thank you! As many other transit authorities, the STM [0] offers "GTFS" data (a standard feed format for transit info) [1]. Mucking around STM's public site, you'll also see the schedule information go by if you inspect the network requests. From what I've seen, their API endpoints are stable, reliable and fast. I've had to do ~2 updates in >1 year of service. [0] http://stm.info/en http://stm.info/en [1] http://www.stm.info/en/about/developers http://www.stm.info/en/about/developers [ edit: that rumor is just a rumor :-) ]
  - punnerud 7y ago
    If you use MITMProxy or Charles you can easily intercept the traffic on 99% of all iPhone/Android apps (bit harder if pinned-sertificate). These API’s are often stable because a lot of users don’t update their apps that often.
rapfaria 7y ago
I use one to receive GPS signals. Whenever I'm <500 meters from home, it turns on my air conditioner and starts making coffee. Not fully automated since I still have to put the capsule in the morning, but works great.
wybiral 7y ago
I have multiple but the one I use the most has Kodi installed. It's connected to a projector and I basically use it as a media center streaming files from one of my desktops over the local network. Another one is used more like a custom IoT hub/gateway for various BLE (and even some LoRa devices).
gwynn 7y ago
College student here with a part-time data entry job. I have automated nearly all of it using Python, Selenium, and a few nasty bash scripts called by periodic cronjobs. Recently purchased a 3b+ for the task so that I can travel without worrying about AirBnB wifi speeds. If I need anything I can just SSH or VNC into it from a coffee shop. It just sits next to my router and blinks all day doing my job for me! Best $35 I have ever spent.
- rohan_shah 7y ago
  Can you explain more about what kind of data entry is that exactly? Also how exactly did you automate it? Have you written about it anywhere?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- dougmwne 7y ago
  That's great! The business world is chock full of these situations where non-technical people create a process that could be automated but isn't, eventually leading to an entry level person (or several) who's entire job is to do things like copy-paste, clicky-click or OCR. I think the key step to automating these tasks is to have the ability to both recognize the opportunity for automation and code a solution. There could be a fantastic amount of money in building things like this on the regular.
  - xtomus 7y ago
    There's a whole industry dedicated to this task with some major players involved: RPA.
jonobird1 7y ago
Has anyone used it for any car-related mods? I share my passion between coding and cars so I'd love to push some boundaries there if anyone has tried before? Gauage display from sensor units, just a cool OS display for music, or maybe something cooler?
- sparker72678 7y ago
  http://www.carberry.it/ http://www.carberry.it/
steve_b 7y ago
I use it do Anki on my bike ride to/from work. Wrote some scripts in Python. They take my deck, convert it to speech using IBM Watson’s TTS. Then i made a small PCB with 4 buttons that is fixed to the handle bar. That way I can interact with the program.
bengrunfeld 7y ago
I have a cat hooked up to a car battery in an unused garage somewhere in the Bronx. The Raspberry Pi interfaces between the battery and a 20+ person WhatsApp chatroom via API and anytime someone mentions the word "shock" (or any other word with a negative association), the cat gets it. FYI - this is a joke, but effectively conveys the point: the only limits are in your imagination... and tech skills.
anonu 7y ago
Some projects: Easy Setup (Download and Run): - ADS-B decoder and transmitter to FlightAware - PiHole Required More Coding: - PhotoBooth: Python script that monitored a special Gmail account and sent attached images to a photo printer (Canon Selphy) - Upload to Dropbox: ScanSnap sheet-fed scanner, listened to scanner button response, created PDFs, copied to DropBox - Data Collection Engine: 1. Collected data from local sensors (temperature and humidity) in nursery. 2. Collected periodic data from public APIs (NYC CitiBike) 3. Captured time lapse images from nursery every 2 minutes.
vivekkalyansk 7y ago
Anyone has any experience using it as a NAS? Is the I/O too slow for it to be smooth?
chrisparton1991 7y ago
I previously used mine to drive my synchronised Christmas light display. It worked great one year, then for some reason the next year, retrieving the playback position of an audio file in Java was taking nearly a second (previously it was practically instant). I never figured that out, so I bought a second-hand Mac Mini to power the display instead.
ccapo 7y ago
* I made a Raspberry Pi Zero W version of this baby monitor (https://kamranicus.com/guides/raspberry-pi-3-baby-monitor https://kamranicus.com/guides/raspberry-pi-3-baby-monitor) * I am using a Raspberry Pi Zero W + Arduino Pro Mini, with a GPS, Sensors, Camera and Radio for a High Altitude Balloon (HAB) project (https://bitbucket.org/ccapo/habpi/src/master https://bitbucket.org/ccapo/habpi/src/master), launch pending. A friend is also launching a similar project (https://bitbucket.org/peterkingsbury/neopi/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/peterkingsbury/neopi/src/master/) * I am using a Raspberry Pi 3 for RetroPie * I have a Raspberry Pi 3+ for development purposes, mainly the HAB project since developing on a Raspberry Pi Zero is quite slow
celnardur 7y ago
I'm in a college club that uses Pis to run football playing robots. The Pi basically translates instructions from a Bluetooth PS4 controller into commands for a motor driver. We currently 4 college clubs in the league and we play a couple of scrimmages and a championship every year. The robots take big hits in the games(these bots can go faster than we can run) and we've found the Arduino to be the most durable and reliable platform as well as being the most customizable. Here is our club Website: https://www3.nd.edu/~rfc/ https://www3.nd.edu/~rfc/ Here is a little video about the club: https://www.greatbigstory.com/stories/nbc-sports-intramural-football https://www.greatbigstory.com/stories/nbc-sports-intramural-...
zmix 7y ago
I didn't fiddle with it for quite a while, since I was bored of updating and using old code, so I removed it from the chain, but a few years ago I ran it as an ad-filtering, transparent proxy in my LAN. Very nice (for a tiny network) !
fizzledbits 7y ago
I used an ESP8266 and not the Pi for this, but a really really great m/c project is a wireless fan controller for a smoker or kamado (big green egg-style) grill. I made mine from scratch as an learning exercise, but here’s a similar project using the Pi: https://github.com/michmike/Raspberry-PI-Q https://github.com/michmike/Raspberry-PI-Q It’s We use it to make, for example, this recipe (with some modifications of our own) on a regular basis with a minimum of effort, and it is one of the most breathtakingly delicious things I’ve ever tasted, let alone cooked myself. We follow his instructions but hold to 180-190 deg until the meat reaches about 138, basting a few times with a honey+whiskey+thyme glaze; also be sure to use a fatty salmon, like (in my experience) farmed atlantic, not sockeye. https://youtu.be/1zT8QBMEML8 https://youtu.be/1zT8QBMEML8
tghw 7y ago
I have a bunch doing different things: One is running our sprinklers with OpenSprinklerPi https://opensprinkler.com/product/opensprinkler-pi/ https://opensprinkler.com/product/opensprinkler-pi/ One is running VolumeIO to splay music on the speakers in our house as a Spotify Connect device https://volumio.org/ https://volumio.org/ One controls our whole house humidifier via a relay and a combination of weather and thermostat information. One has been turned into a precision/TSD/regularity rally computer for my vintage car. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularity_rally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularity_rally One runs my 3D printer using OctoPrint https://octoprint.org/download/ https://octoprint.org/download/ And I use one as a race car telemetry system using a 9-dof sensor and a GPS module (with brake, throttle, and steering inputs to come). For most of these projects, they're complete overkill in terms of hardware, but with integrated wifi and bluetooth, and a host of GPIO pins, they make developing projects like this dead simple. And at $35, the amount of time they save is well worth it over bare metal hardware.
squarefoot 7y ago
Video playing through Kodi and nothing else. Nearly all other "competing" boards are either cheaper or more powerful or both, and more open, but the PI has the best CEC imlementation along with good video acceleration which makes it ideal for the task. The freshly announced PI4 seems a step in the right direction price and performance wise, although I don't expect the Pi Foundation (aka Broadcom) to solve the openness problem anytime soon, so although it could soon become my main video player I won't consider it for anything else, especially if security related.
mwill 7y ago
Mines not as cool as all the others here, but I use pi's to run all my homemade machines: A few 3D printers, pen plotter, CNC etc.
olixr 7y ago
At the moment I am using a few pi to control my garden systems. I just built an open source system (https://mudpi.app https://mudpi.app) to help manage the sensors and relays. Actually gearing up for a launch soon. Being able to regulate my watering and control it from my phone as been awesome. The whole thing emits events with sensors on redis so its open for systems to hook on top of it. Pi was the ideal choice to keep inital costs low. The amount of power you get for the price is pretty sweet. The other pi is running the same code moderating lights on a basement shelf of plants too. The last pi I am using retro pi to play some old school roms.
NamTaf 7y ago
I've got a 3b+ and a 1b, and whilst only the 3b is in use currently, I have plans for the other. The 3b runs libreelec for a tv in my bedroom. I found my 1b to be too slow for this, but the 3b+ does admirably. The 1b, I hope to repurpose into a couple of services: 1) a pihole for my home network 2) a Wireguard VPN for connecting my phone back to my home network. This is all sort of waiting on me getting usable internet, because my 700kbps upload currently sort of makes it pointless. However, I'd like to do this once I have better internet so I can use my phone as if I'm on my home network. This will provide me with several benefits: 1) I will be able to stream media when travelling for work 2) My phone will benefit from the pihole even when out and about 3) I will be able to control my home network as if at home 4) It will provide another endpoint for hurdling the GFW when I work in China I hope to start all of this next year, once I move house or when I finally receive a proper internet connection rolled out to my place. If the 1b is too weak for those services, then I will probably repurpose it into some sort of automation system for watering plants, since once again due to work travel I routinely have to lug them over to relatives' houses whenever I'm away for a week or more.
pierregillesl 7y ago
Run my home automation system with Gladys Assistant! :) https://gladysassistant.com/ https://gladysassistant.com/
VilleO 7y ago
1. Rpi 3 keeping my IRC session up and working as small server for small tasks. 2. Rpi 2 has zigbee-module (raspbee) which controls lights. 3. Zero W with camera is currently doing nothing.
gangadhargs 7y ago
I sent one to space on a helium balloon. Some details here http://sulkunte.net/tale-of-an-ambitious-space-odyssey/ http://sulkunte.net/tale-of-an-ambitious-space-odyssey/
m-p-3 7y ago
A Pi Zero W at work, controlling an LED from BlinkStick which change color depending on my presence and status, monitoring my position and calendar through IFTTT. I I can also change it manually through HTTP GET commands on the BlinkStick server with my API key.
sairahul82 7y ago
I use it to remotely start my computer. My raspberry pi is always on and i use "wake on lan"[1] to start my desktop whenever needed. My desktop is powerful and consumes decent amount of power. Using Rpi to start is lot more power efficient. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN
jupp0r 7y ago
A project I want to do: use an rtl-sdr to catch temperature readings from a BBQ thermometer off the air. Then push that data to prometheus/grafana and get alerting when the brisket is done.
lolcmdb9000 7y ago
Hack NASA. It's great.
sandreas 7y ago
I use a Raspberry PI Zero / 3 together with a phat dac for a bluetooth audio receiver / Airplay in my car: Auto-Installer: https://github.com/BaReinhard/Super-Simple-Raspberry-Pi-Audio-Receiver-Install https://github.com/BaReinhard/Super-Simple-Raspberry-Pi-Audi... PhatDac (hardware): https://www.amazon.com/Pimoroni-24-bit-192KHz-Sound-Raspberry/dp/B019U9VC9E/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=phat+dac&qid=1561436473&s=gateway&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Pimoroni-24-bit-192KHz-Sound-Raspberr... Alternative (hardware): https://www.amazon.com/Audio-AUDIO-Raspberry-Better-quality/dp/B00MDW602K/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=phat+dac&qid=1561436555&s=gateway&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Audio-AUDIO-Raspberry-Better-quality/... It can be controlled via buttons over bluez / dbus via infrared remote and buttons: Button Shim (hardware): https://www.amazon.com/Pimoroni-PIM301-Button-Shim/dp/B07HCPC8MP/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=pimoroni+button+slim&qid=1561436627&s=gateway&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Pimoroni-PIM301-Button-Shim/dp/B07HCP... Bluez API: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/bluetooth/bluez.git/tree/doc/media-api.txt https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/bluetooth/bluez.git/tree/doc/... DBUS control script: https://github.com/sandreas/raspberry-bluetooth-receiver/blob/master/scripts/btapi.sh https://github.com/sandreas/raspberry-bluetooth-receiver/blo... Unfortunately it is not possible to set playback position via dbus (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50190477/bluez-and-dbus-set-track-playback-position-jump-to-position https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50190477/bluez-and-dbus-...), so rewind 30 seconds is not possible atm.
- Karrot_Kream 7y ago
  I don't know anything about Bluetooth. Does bluez always mount devices on /org/bluez/hci0/dev_${DEVICE_NAME} ?
  - sandreas 7y ago
    Depending on your device... But for me it works with every audio capable device i tried (iPod nano, iPhone SE, Android Moto G7)
peckrob 7y ago
Pet Feeders! http://www.robpeck.com/2017/11/robs-raspberry-pi-powered-cat-feeders/ http://www.robpeck.com/2017/11/robs-raspberry-pi-powered-cat...
ivolimmen 7y ago
When reading specs of the new raspberry pi I decided I will buy two in the near future to serve as a desktop for my girls. I still have a raspberry pi 1b with 512mb. I was too soon and missed the free upgrade. Tried it once as media server. Was not impressed. After that I bought a pine64 with 2Gb ram that runs my bookmarks web application I personally use every day. Also bought the hardkernel mc1 cluster to play with. Still the support for raspberry pi is unbeatable.
noamelf 7y ago
I connected it to "dumb" computer speakers at my office and made it into a Bluetooth sink so that everyone can use it to play music
- captainmurvel 7y ago
  Any good guide on how to do this? I tried this a couple of years ago but got stuck in that I always had to pair my handset every time I wanted to use it.
egberts 7y ago
My son use one to monitor the completion of a washing or dryer machine.
codebudo 7y ago
I'm using an RPi as the main compute module for an Autonomous Radio Controlled Car. It's similar to a Donkey Car, but not using ROS (at the moment). Project is documented here: https://medium.com/@mikkelwilson/autonomous-rc-car-part-0-6e341de2a52d https://medium.com/@mikkelwilson/autonomous-rc-car-part-0-6e... (This is not a commercial project; just for fun) I'm very interested to see how OpenCV 4 and YOLOv3 object detection will run on the new RPi. At the current trajectory I will have to upgrade to a Jetson Nano to get hardware acceleration (CUDA), but resorting to specialty hardware seems like cheating. They also make a great prototyping platform for IoT projects. I've built 802.11.4 (Zigbee) mesh radio networks for passing small messages across neighborhood distances. Previously I used an RPi to run an Airplay Bridge to my Sonos speakers. This has since been supplanted by AirPlay 2, which Sonos supports.
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
Persistent IRC bouncer with Weechat.
rishabhd 7y ago
Pentesting. PiHole. OOBM device for my Infra.
Arn_Thor 7y ago
Nothing too exciting. I've got an air purifier set up with homebridge and run a PiHole from it. I've also used it to practice setting up websites from scratch.
la_barba 7y ago
I'm using mine as a kitchen computer to lookup stuff online. Not exactly a Pi, but I used a adafruit feather to detect vibrations. I used it for landscape photography with a super telephoto lens where I wanted to be able to detect vibrations before firing off a bracketed shot.
dws 7y ago
A Pi 2 at work runs a Grafana playlist on a spare display. A Pi 3 at home runs a Flask server that collects data from sensors around the house (ESP8266 + SHT20 for temp/humidity), and provides a web page that overlays sensor data on a diagram of the house. I've been curious about CO2 levels in the bedroom overnight, and have parts for that experiment on order.
ecesena 7y ago
Streaming via airplay (we have iphones at home). Currently connected to a jukebox: https://twitter.com/0x0ece/status/1137487161974972416?s=21 https://twitter.com/0x0ece/status/1137487161974972416?s=21
jaythvv 7y ago
- Huelights control - PiHole - NFC card hacking - ARM assembly programming - Kubernetes + OpenFaas cluster - Postgres DB (with SSD harddrive)
ardeliens 7y ago
I did a whistle box. A NAS for whistle blowers and journalists. https://github.com/Guiraud/WB https://github.com/Guiraud/WB The Idea is for anyone to make a low cost NAS that allows a TOR service to upload/dowload files , pgp encrypted them with the key of the journalist, while having the simpliest interface as possible. I did'nt update for a long time tho. There's a Slide in french language here : https://fr.slideshare.net/Fred2baro/la-whistlebox https://fr.slideshare.net/Fred2baro/la-whistlebox
chidea 7y ago
Many hospitals in S.Korea adopted my rpi based system. It is a network organized, synchronized, distributed video signage with weather/news web feeds and touch screen based vision acuity tester integrations. The major key factor in it is a framebuffer driver by pure python which is open sourced by myself through Github. https://github.com/chidea/FBpyGIF https://github.com/chidea/FBpyGIF Recent haul-over includes ESP8266 based remote power management.
djmips 7y ago
Just another Talking Fish controller project... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7busGsuIOU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7busGsuIOU4 https://github.com/djmips/trout https://github.com/djmips/trout
peteforde 7y ago
I started a company that constructed booths which used 70 accurately sync'd Pis with custom PiCams (fitted with lenses) to take pictures of human subjects, for turning them into avatars like this: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pete-swagger-walk-a55d807de14a4ba7bdb9977600e7c412 https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pete-swagger-walk-a55d807de1... At the beginning of the project, I'd barely powered up the Pis I had collecting dust in my drawer. By the end, I was a legitimate domain expert in several niches within niches of Pi dark arts. For example, since Pis do not have hardware clocks, you have to rely on NTP. However, you need to take pains to make sure that each Pi is getting the same amount of voltage or else they will run at different speeds. If you want to power 70 Pis in a constrained space, you need to devise a customized power distribution system with adequate heat venting. Due to the thin effect, voltage drops over distance, so the distance a Pi was from the power would impact the voltage and therefore the speed. The major breakthrough came when I realized that I could start with a high end power supply outputting 14 volts and terminate each parallel line with a device known as a UBEC. They are used primarily by drone enthusiasts to make efficient use of battery packs. A UBEC is designed to drop down a supply voltage to 5v without bleeding off the excess voltage as heat. Since this could also describe a fuse, we felt comfortable bypassing the Pi's MicroUSB power supply and attaching the UBEC's pins directly to the top pins on the Pi's GPIO breakout. That's just a tiny example of the hijinx. The Pi is an incredible tool if you're patient and clever. What a rollercoaster.
- Fredej 7y ago
  Could something like this be used for synchronization in such a scenario? https://ncase.me/fireflies/ https://ncase.me/fireflies/
  - peteforde 7y ago
    Thank you for sharing this! I love it. It's beautiful. Unfortunately, I also have literally no idea what you're proposing. I would like to, though.
    - terramex 7y ago
FullMetalBitch 7y ago
I have a Raspberry Pi 3 where I host my personal website including a nextcloud instance, with it I learned more about Linux. With the release of Raspbian Buster I am currently rebuilding it because it was the first one I bought so there was plenty of residual stuff from when I had no idea what I was doing. I have a Pi 3b+ I use as a Pi-Hole, samba share and whatever I want to try at the moment. I have to rebuild it after I "finished" with my site. And I want a Pi 4, or two.
hansdieter1337 7y ago
Pihole
yCloser 7y ago
pihole with my rpi1 retropie with my rpi3
LawnDart1 7y ago
Octoprint - 3d printer monitor & controller
dexcs 7y ago
I just ordered a complete Raspberry Pi Set to grab CAN BUS informations of my old landrover defender to send engine metrics to a remote sink on my synology nas at home. Maybe incl. gps tracking. Thats my plan :)
bArray 7y ago
Our Raspberry Pi 3 B is the core processing unit for our humanoid robotics platform [1]. This is in the context of the RoboCup competition [2]. With it we run: * Vision - A custom CNN using YOLO [3], where we are able to process a 256x256 (input is scaled) at 10fps to detect bounding boxes for balls and goal posts * Localization - Kalman filter (mainly currently used for tracking rotation) * Networking - Game controller (referee) [4], team communication [5] and a debug interface [6] * Behaviour - A hybrid state machine * Walking - Inverse kinematic walk with a balance system [7] Feel free to ask questions. We plan to open source everything (everything) in a month to two months. [1] https://humanoid.science/ https://humanoid.science/ [2] https://www.robocup.org/ https://www.robocup.org/ [3] https://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/ https://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/ [4] https://github.com/RoboCup-Humanoid-TC/GameController https://github.com/RoboCup-Humanoid-TC/GameController [5] https://github.com/RoboCup-Humanoid-TC/mitecom https://github.com/RoboCup-Humanoid-TC/mitecom [6] https://github.com/hellerf/EmbeddableWebServer https://github.com/hellerf/EmbeddableWebServer [7] https://github.com/Rhoban/IKWalk https://github.com/Rhoban/IKWalk EDIT: Bullet points on different lines
- gchokov 7y ago
  A+ for effort
Udo 7y ago
Home automation: it's an offline system I wrote myself to tie together all the different systems where I would normally need separate (always online) controller for each. That includes several soldered-to-GPIO-pins remote controls, and a HomeMatic and a ZWave radio module, although the latter is still controlled by the Z-Way software and I'm just using their API for those devices. It's a Raspberry Pi of the first generation, I'll probably replace the hardware soon. Audio: I'm also using one RPi2 with an attached hard disk as a music player for pen&paper roleplaying sessions, and I have 3 Pis distributed around the house acting as Wifi-enabled Airplay receivers attached to off-the-shelf powered speakers. Retro gaming: I built one RPi2 into an empty Amiga 500 case, it runs an Amiga emulator with many emulated game floppy disks onboard. Fun fact, the Amiga 500 keyboard sends its key strokes over a serial interface, so it's relatively easy to attach it to modern devices. 3D printing / IP cameras: I have drifted towards the Orange Pi hardware recently, mainly because they have a dirt-cheap headless module that costs about 10€. These are extremely useful for all kinds of automation tasks. For example, I'm using them with the Octoprint open source project to control 3D printers. Those headless Orange Pi Zeros are also fantastic as IP cameras, which has become necessary recently because consumer IP cameras that do not send all your data to China have become rare and expensive. Attendance and access control: I'm currently considering throwing out our shitty proprietary attendance and access management system at work, in favor of some simple custom-built Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi-powered panels. I have a prototype ready but haven't had time yet to make more. Lab control: I have an RPi3 attached via serial interface to a chemical analytics device at work, which required reverse engineering the proprietary protocol between the device and its shitty Win32 software. This allowed us to throw out a legacy Windows PC that needed to phone home all the time.
axegon 7y ago
Truth be told I have 5 or 6 raspberries. In all seriousness I think I'm actively using 3: * A rpi zero running several scripts(hooked to slack, telegram and a private mattermost server) to monitor the health of some production services at work from home(in case the network at work goes down and all the services there fail to notify the right people). Has never happened but having it makes sleep at night a tad better. * Rpi 3 b for some throwaway code/testing/place to store stuff at home and using it as an access server to access my home network. * Rpi 2 b pretty much glued to my parents' router so I can access the network at their place every time there's one of those "My computer is telling me something, what do I do?". I'm sure most of you are aware that those messages are surely gonna cause the end of the universe and need to be resolved as soon as possible and could not possibly wait 2 hours.
missjellyfish 7y ago
At one point I stuffed 40 of them into a rack mount and built a cluster to use for teaching at my university. Never gotten any publication out because it‘s fairly uninteresting from an academic point of view, but as a teaching tool to learn ARM assembler or parallel programming / how to execute stuff on supercomputers / OpenMPI it’s an invaluable tool. Recently there have been some odroid c2 added to the cluster, so it‘s not only RPis anymore. More info: https://www.caps.in.tum.de/en/himmuc/ https://www.caps.in.tum.de/en/himmuc/ Some Beautyshots at my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/BcA1QdFgWuk/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BcA1QdFgWuk/
- princekolt 7y ago
  Really cool! I feel this is the kind of project I have no use for, but would love doing just for the sake of assembling computer parts together haha
agumonkey 7y ago
here's what I used mine for: - znc bouncer - tiny public http server - attempt at osmc/kodi - see how low (Hz) can it go while still be emacs capable (https://monkeyplush.blogspot.com/2012/09/raspberry-pi-underclock.html) plans that never realized: - pi as electromechanic controller - pi as atmel flasher (thinkpad bios fix/coreboot)
codetiger 7y ago
I used my Raspberry Pi 3 B+ to control all Fish tank equipments remotely. We live in a city (Chennai, India) and my family usually goes to our native for 2 months every year during summer vacation. During these times, it find it very difficult to manage the equipments. The Raspberry Pi controls 2 Lights, 2 Filter pumps, Cooler, Fish feeder, and CO2 cylinder. Am planning to attach a camera and some sensors to the system as well. Right now, all these components are controlled by simple scheduling, but am planning to extend the control through a server in future. The Pi is connected to a 8-Relay board and is attached to a extension power board. So this setup can control just any equipment. Source Code: https://github.com/codetiger/AquariumControl https://github.com/codetiger/AquariumControl
- TimeOutBoss 7y ago
  I always wanted an aquarium and this was the sole reason I never got one, thanks I'll look into it. Can you tell what are your equipements and whats the setup like? (sorry, if already mentioned in github I can't open at work)
  - codetiger 7y ago
    The config file in GitHub already has the schedule for each component. Equipements: 1. Lights 2 (One for plants and another colour LED light that came by default with the tank) 2. Filters 2 (One Canister filter and another top filter) 3. Cooler 4. CO2 cylinder 5. Fish feeder (Built myself) Currently, some equipment are always ON but planning to allowing to control remotely in future for triggering automated maintenance routine. The Pi is controlling an power extension box using a 8 relay module.
sirLoaf 7y ago
I created a toilet bot for our office. We only have one toilet, which caused a lot of people to walk to the toilet to check if it's free. I connected the Raspi with GPIO door controller and created a python script which makes use of the UCWA library from skype for business and hooked it to a blynclight (status indicator). Now ever coworker can add a specific contact to his Skype for Business favorites and will immediately see if the toilet is free or occupied.
shocks 7y ago
- One running my home automation setup (zigbee2mqtt, home assistant, influxdb, grafana, and nose red) - OctoPi for my 3D printer - RasPlex (Plex client attached to TV) - Lakka, an emulation OS for retro gaming
lamby 7y ago
I tried making a "travel access point" with mine, so I could have all my devices already setup to access a single access point and funnel all the traffic through that. I was previously using a $20 router, but curiously the Pi 3B just didn't want to play ball, dropping packets / connections and generally sucking. :(
Fradow 7y ago
At one point, I figured I wanted some lighting for my bar, which consists of about 70 bottles on shelves (about 1.2m wide and 2m height). But a simple on/off is not good enough. Instead, I went with individually addressable LEDs (NeoPixels strips to be exact), and developped my own back-end to manage those LEDs, with a simple front-end. So far, it supports lighting bottles individually, by category (rum, vodka etc...) and some simple animations across the whole bar. It's a nice ambient lighting, and it serves as a show-off for guests. Plus the whole thing runs on a second-hand computer power-supply. The Pi runs on the power-supply power-on line so that when no LED is on, the main power-supply is shutdown to reduce electricity consumption.
- fisle 7y ago
  That sounds super cool, I'd love to see some pictures if you have any!
INTPenis 7y ago
Like most people on here I have several raspis that I don't use. Two raspi zeros are wild life cameras for my dog. I like to see what she's doing when I'm not home. One raspi 3 is a camera covering the entrance to my apartment.
iuguy 7y ago
Things I use Raspberry Pis for: * Pi-hole * Home Assistant * Processing assistance and PPP/Serial and tcpser connection for an Amiga 4000 * MyCroft personal assistant * Octoprint for 3D Printing * MotionEye camera management (Moving across to a NUC) * A 4 node pi-zero cluster using a ClusterHat for distributed Pi approximation optimization I normally run once a year on Pi day. Much of this is due to the segregated way my network is set up, and the Pis have largely replaced previous OpenWRT devices, although some of these Pis have now or are in the process of moving to other more reliable systems.
mlang23 7y ago
As a braille user, I was always fond of "laptops" without a built-in display, simply to save ssace, weight and power. I found a braille display which features a small compartment with micro-USB inside. Used a Pi Zero (these days 0w) to transform that braille display into a full-features Linux laptop. I documented the first version here: https://blind.guru/brlpi.html https://blind.guru/brlpi.html
- djbelieny 7y ago
  This has got to be one of the coolest uses of pi ever. Amazing !
- benj111 7y ago
  Cool. You make reference to fonts. I assume this isn't font in the traditional sense, ie the look (feel?) of a character.
  - mlang23 7y ago
    Nope, I actually do refer to fonts as you know them. Long story short, prior to linux kernel 4.19 and brltty 6.0, only those characters that are mapped to a glyph in the currently loaded console font can be backtranslated to the actual codepoint. So to be able to read unicode braille (0x2800-0x28FF) I needed to load a braille font in addition to the standard latin glyph. This dependency on the loaded font has been removed with linux 4.19 and brltty 6.0. Now, there is a new device (/dev/vcsu) which can be used to read the unicode codepoints of characters on the console, without having to go through the loaded font.
    - benj111 7y ago
      Interesting. I assume its for differing reasons? You would want an X to always be an X and what feels most like an X to you, and not be worried about whether the X is Ariel or Times New Roman. Does it extend further to do italics and such? I had naively thought the screen would do all the heavy lifting in this situation, feed it text, and it converts it to braille.
- 7y ago
gvalkov 7y ago
A device that waits for the SSID of my Olympus WiFi-enabled camera to show up and then sync all new photos: https://github.com/gvalkov/olympus-photosync-server https://github.com/gvalkov/olympus-photosync-server https://github.com/gvalkov/olympus-photosync https://github.com/gvalkov/olympus-photosync
- gchokov 7y ago
  That's cool!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
orhmeh09 7y ago
I am going to use one to try to replace my Echo Dot with. I only use Spotify, TP-Link lightbulbs and power plugs, timers, reminders, and weather, so I think replicating this functionality with RPi and Mozilla IoT Gateway should be a fun little project.
ajs1k 7y ago
I rigged up something where by I can see and operate the garage door at home. It even works by talking to Siri to get it to do its thing... https://imgur.com/a/Gd54E https://imgur.com/a/Gd54E
twooclock 7y ago
I monitor several solar plants with old syntronic inverters using node installed on rpi. Works 24/7 without any problems.
Quequau 7y ago
I have a few Raspberry Pi boards and since I've seen folks doing stuff similar to what mostly do I thought I comment on something I hadn't seen yet. I struggle with tinnitus distress and Ménière's. One of my coping strategies is to continuously play some sort of background sound in the areas I occupy. I have a first gen RPi with a set of USB powered speakers in my bedroom that plays long form background soundscapes I get from YouTube on loop. This is the lowest tech I could muster. YouTube-DL is a command line tool that fetches content from places like YouTube and recodes it. I use mpg123 to play the resulting audio file on loop... and because I'm already using ssh for all sorts of other things as go about my day this workflow is basically completely integrated into my normal day-to-day activities. When I first started doing this I changed the audio track on a fairly regular basis. Sometime to suit my mood, other times for the weather. These days it's more of a seasonal thing. It works great. It's proven to be really reliable and it was really, really cheap.
- mad_tortoise 7y ago
  As someone newly with tinnitus, and with fading hope that it will go away at some point, I've been playing around with ideas of doing something like this. I was thinking of using frequencies to cancel each other out, but I think this might work much better.
  - Quequau 7y ago
    I don't think that it's possible to use certain frequencies to 'cancel out' the perception of tinnitus because for the over whelming majority of folks dealing tinnitus the noise isn't a real sound.
    - blunte 7y ago
      Even an imagined sound has a frequency (and probably?) a phase. It might be possible to generate a tone at the same frequency and shift the phase until it's 180 degrees out of phase with the imagined sound. Perhaps the brain would do the math and cancel the imagined sound? This can't really be automated since there's no way to measure the imagined sound, but it might be possible to make a little box with knobs - pitch, phase, and volume - that would all one to tune a cancellation frequency.
RedNifre 7y ago
I used a Raspberry Pi to solve the problem that the trash can in front of the building where I lived was often overflowing when I tried to take out the trash: I connected a 20x4 character LCD to the Pi and put it next to the bathroom mirror. The display displays some useful info: - Estimated garbage can levels (interpolated based on the trash calendar) - weather forecast - cryptocurrency prices So when I notice that the trash can level is low I can take out the trash without troubles. (These days I use my Pis for more simple things like RetroPie+Kodi and PiHole)
johnobrien1010 7y ago
I built a device that pulls the weather from Darksky and displays it on electronic paper every hour.
fps_doug 7y ago
I'm still using an old 1B (512MB version) for Kodi, almost on a daily basis. Playing back stuff from an NFS share. I'm limited to 1080p but that's still fine with me, I'd need a TV upgrade first anyways. It's showing its age though, and I had to hack up some stuff to use it properly: I'm controlling Kodi via Yatse (Android app), and mostly just use the file mode to browse Movies and TV shows. I have them sorted and named properly anyways so that's not that much of an inconvenience to me. Using the fancy views that show artwork and IMDB metadata is still working but a little to slow. But even in plain "file mode" Yatse was a little to slow and sometimes timing out when listing directories with 200+ items. This is where the hacky stuff comes to play: I built a simple proxy that intercepts the requests from Yatse and modifies them, namely, when Yatse is listing a directory it sets some field in the JSON that says "media type video" for example, when browsing for videos (forgot what the key is called exactly; currently at work). So I simply strip that key entirely from the request, and now listings take 1-2 seconds for large directories. While I was at it I also started to intercept links to youtube videos and instead call youtube-dl to download them first and then have Kodi play them back via NFS. This way I get 1080p instead of just 720p and also have a history of everything I watched on YouTube, in case I can't find it anymore, or it gets deleted etc. It's pretty brittle since it doesn't properly track state or prevent you from triggering a second download while the first one is still active, also if you request a 50min video it will take a while until playback actually starts, since it needs to download it fully first. But at least it recognizes if a video has already been downloaded and just starts playback instantly. Turning this into a proper project is on my TODO list, but that list is mighty long.
slumber86 7y ago
Beside the classical setup of homeassistant I have a telegram bot that parse the website of a local used camera gear. Sometimes you can find good deals, but they last a couple of minutes, so having the new deals on time is vital.
cgrf 7y ago
Among other things, I use it for a cycle-exact emulation of the Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive: Firmware: https://cbm-pi1541.firebaseapp.com/ https://cbm-pi1541.firebaseapp.com/ Hardware: https://www.hackup.net/2018/07/pi1541io-revision-4/ https://www.hackup.net/2018/07/pi1541io-revision-4/ https://github.com/hackup/Pi1541io https://github.com/hackup/Pi1541io
Aromasin 7y ago
I have a (basically non-existent) side business selling LED strips and RPi lighting controllers for surfboards! If you've seem some viral videos with guys surfing around at night, they were probably using my gear :-) Briefly put, I use the Glediator and Jinx! control software on an RPi, which communicates with an Arduino, which drives the LEDs. I put them in a permanently sealed box, water proof it as much as I possibly can, then cut some IP68 RGB LED strips to size and strap them to the rails of the board. I can remotely access the RPi via Wi-Fi to change lighting schemes, and there's a wireless charging coil inside the box which I can use to charge the batteries, so I never have to open it up after waterproofing. It's basically bomb-proof, and simple enough that I can teach a surf bum how to use it in about half and hour. Start thinking of the RPi as more of a powerful microcontroller and suddenly a world of opportunities open up. I did my dissertation on it! Titled 'Home Automation and Monitoring using a Raspberry Pi', I basically used an RPi as a master node to control a bunch of Arduino slave nodes, using I2C protocol. With just two wires and an Pi, I run about 20 Arduino's all over my house, doing everything from feeding my fish, to monitoring air quality, to starting my coffee maker. I can access it remotely via Wi-Fi too, so I can do things like water my plants while I'm away. Aiming for a full Wallace and Grommet home in the near future. Raspberry Pi's are awesome.
- petercooper 7y ago
  Is it this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqgLaMc9IVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqgLaMc9IVA
  - Aromasin 7y ago
    No, but very similar! I made mine as a product you could attach to any board, as opposed to the strips being embedded and shaped into the board like the one in this video (which normally cost thousands to buy...) A few of my friends rode them at a contest in France though [1] Alas, at the moment it's just a kick-starter pipe dream I'll never have the time to put into production. [1]https://www.adventuresportsnetwork.com/sport/surf/night-surfing-contest-france-surfers-rode-led-boards/ https://www.adventuresportsnetwork.com/sport/surf/night-surf...
LukaD 7y ago
I'm using a Raspberry Pi 3 as an airplay receiver for music streaming at home. The software is called shairport-sync and is open source. My other Raspberry Pi 3 is a Retropie retro gaming console.
b3lvedere 7y ago
1 x Rapsberry Pi 3 as RetroPie/Kodi/Printserver for an old Dymo Labelprinter 1 x Raspberry Pi Zero W as Dakboard (http://www.dakboard.com http://www.dakboard.com) I think i want to make useful wireless NAS out of a Pi 4 once.
mikosty 7y ago
I use it mainly for music streaming via Spotify (raspotify) and airplay. It's paired with an 10-year old EMU 0202 USB DAC which haven't had working drivers for OS X since Snow leopard or something.
glup 7y ago
Controller and logger (temperature, humidity, time lapse photos) for making tempeh (90F oven). https://github.com/smeylan/tempeh/blob/master/tempehrature.py https://github.com/smeylan/tempeh/blob/master/tempehrature.p...
bjoerns 7y ago
I've built a mobile airpollution sensor together with a few other parents and their kids at my 8-year old son's primary school in London. Air pollution is a big topic as the school is right next to a busy road, a lot of children are suffering from asthma and Islington has been pretty useless in collecting/publishing data. So we've started taking things in our own hands and built a handful of raspberry pi based monitors in class rooms, the playground and children take it with them on their school run. geo-tagged data is automatically uploaded to little influxdb/grafana based web service wheneve the pi has a wifi connection. Makes it an interesting project for kids to look and interpret charts and stuff as well. Currently we're measuring PM2.5/PM10, temp and humidity only, haven't had the time yet to look into NOx sensors yet... https://github.com/bstiel/airpollutionpi https://github.com/bstiel/airpollutionpi
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
xbhatnag 7y ago
I'm trying to write my own micro-kernel from scratch that runs on a Raspberry Pi 3B. It boots up and has support for virtual memory, interrupts, timers and very basic multi-threading. You can take a look at the source code here -> https://xbhatnag.com/xyos https://xbhatnag.com/xyos
ozkatz 7y ago
The Pi Zero W can act as both a USB host and a USB HID device, i.e. can act as a keyboard/mouse. This makes it a very capable bad USB/rubber ducky/automation tool with Wifi enabled. I've created a small repo to demonstrate this. Connect a zeroW to a computer, the Pi will expose a hidden Wifi network that by connecting to it you'll be able to send remote keyboard commands (or execute ducky scripts) on the host computer: https://github.com/ozkatz/pi-remote-ducky https://github.com/ozkatz/pi-remote-ducky
TigerAd 7y ago
I have it set up to run a project where a subreddit has control over the watering of a live plant in my apartment. The pi runs a reddit bot that reads the votes, and can switch on a pump to water. It also collects data about sunlight, moisture, temp and humidity to help inform the decision about watering. Despite many people's preconceptions about the goodness of the internet, I must admit that they do a wonderful job caring for my plant! website: https://www.idealzanussiservice.com https://www.idealzanussiservice.com subreddit w/ voting: https://www.idealzanussiservice.com/blog/%D8%B5%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%8A%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%B2%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%89-%D9%81%D9%89-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%87%D8%B1%D8%A9 https://www.idealzanussiservice.com/blog/%D8%B5%D9%8A%D8%A7%...
stzup7 7y ago
I use one as a hardware ad blocker on my home network (the project is Pi-Hole) I also attached a webcam for home security (motion-project) that sends me a gif over telegram.
nairobi222 7y ago
When I was younger I worked at a retail store and I remember being thrilled to discover I could telnet into a cash register and echo text directly to the attached receipt printer.[0] I became a small time hero at one point when I used this power to alert our sister store that their phones weren't accepting calls during the middle of the holiday season. [0] Also interesting is the time I discovered that sending a special escape code to the printer caused the cash drawer to open, but that's a tale for another thread. https://whitewhalemaintenanceeg.blogspot.com/ https://whitewhalemaintenanceeg.blogspot.com/
GnarfGnarf 7y ago
Watch TV shows.
speleding 7y ago
I hooked up the raspberry pi to an old monitor I hung over the kitchen table. It boots up shortly before dinner time for an hour and then displays "Find my Friends" on Chromium in kiosk mode. (Inspired bij the Weasly family clock from Harry Potter). It's a fixture I couldn't live without anymore. When family members travel you still feel connected. It has a tiny ruby script to rotate through pages, during breakfast it displays the kids' upcoming class schedule.
rjo 7y ago
I use them to convert old industrial equipment into oddball control surfaces. For example http://www.digitalesoterica.net/projects/honeywell.html http://www.digitalesoterica.net/projects/honeywell.html
dirkc 7y ago
Currently: * I use a Raspberry Pi Zero-W and a neopixel strip to tell me the time at night. This post describes part of it: http://www.thebacklog.net/projects/smart-light/ http://www.thebacklog.net/projects/smart-light/ * Run a piHole at home. Things I've done in the past: * Use a Raspberry Pi as an intervalometer to do time lapses with a DSLR camera * Make a photo booth for a 2 day workshop. * As a cheap computer to run coding tutorials * Monitor water levels in a hydroponics system using a ultrasonic sensor * As a WiFi access point to access a wired network from my phone
unhammer 7y ago
one as a baby monitor (shoutcast + microphone) and one for my weechat irc bouncer
cameron_b 7y ago
For those of you commenting about the mechanics and pitfalls, I've found that a Pi3B+ with the 7" screen and a keyboard/trackpad is a wonderful tool for provisioning new cards. I do headless system configuration on that, then swap to the Zero or whatever it'll actually use. Since the BSPs for every board are tiny, there's no reason to limit yourself to something that can't work on all of the boards out there. It makes troubleshooting a lot easier. Also, don't buy crap SD cards, and probably have 2x the number you'd like to have running. This stuff is cheap so that you can have multiples for testing.
tnasemelward 7y ago
I started a company that constructed booths which used 70 accurately sync'd Pis with custom PiCams (fitted with lenses) to take pictures of human subjects, for turning them into avatars like this: https://maintenancearistonalex.blogspot.com/2019/06/blog-post.html https://maintenancearistonalex.blogspot.com/2019/06/blog-pos... At the beginning of the project, I'd barely powered up the Pis I had collecting dust in my drawer. By the end, I was a legitimate domain expert in several niches within niches of Pi dark arts. For example, since Pis do not have hardware clocks, you have to rely on NTP. However, you need to take pains to make sure that each Pi is getting the same amount of voltage or else they will run at different speeds. If you want to power 70 Pis in a constrained space, you need to devise a customized power distribution system with adequate heat venting. https://indesitmaintenance.blogspot.com/2019/06/blog-post.html https://indesitmaintenance.blogspot.com/2019/06/blog-post.ht... Due to the thin effect, voltage drops over distance, so the distance a Pi was from the power would impact the voltage and therefore the speed. The major breakthrough came when I realized that I could start with a high end power supply outputting 14 volts and terminate each parallel line with a device known as a UBEC. They are used primarily by drone enthusiasts to make efficient use of battery packs. A UBEC is designed to drop down a supply voltage to 5v without bleeding off the excess voltage as heat. Since this could also describe a fuse, we felt comfortable bypassing the Pi's MicroUSB power supply and attaching the UBEC's pins directly to the top pins on the Pi's GPIO breakout. That's just a tiny example of the hijinx. The Pi is an incredible tool if you're patient and clever. What a rollercoaster.
kylegordon 7y ago
Pi Zero running a digital picture frame that I made from a discarded 17" laptop screen Pi 3B running adsb-receiver and feeding flight data into Flightaware, ADSB-Exchange, ADSBHub, FlightRadar24. Pi B Rev 1 running node-red with a Jeenode decoding weather station data from my weather station. Sends data over MQTT to Home-Assistant. I have a BananaPi M2 Zero running Armbian and doing nothing at the moment. It's likely going to be put in a box close to the ADSB antenna and take over ADSB duties in order to free up the 3B for AIY/Snips.ai experimenting.
mr_mitm 7y ago
I use one with an extra wifi card as a wireless router. I'm living in hotels a lot and sometimes I find their wifi too restrictive. The built-in wifi card connects to the hotel wifi and the external wifi card acts as an access point to which all my other devices connect to. This way I only need to pass the captive portal once (and only pay for one device ...) and I can enable a VPN to my home router in case I want to use Netflix or Amazon Prime in a foreign country. Another raspberry pi I turned into a listening device to analyze and modify traffic. I call it Lauschgerät: https://github.com/SySS-Research/Lauschgeraet https://github.com/SySS-Research/Lauschgeraet
alvern 7y ago
I've bought every board that comes out since the 2B. Most of them get gifted to relatives as Kodi boxes. The three I currently use are a 3B that runs the [0] LivPi CO2 and environment monitor, a zero W that has a noIR camera pointing at my plants under lights, and a 2B+ that runs piHole. I recommend the odroid [1] XU4 (desktop) or [2] HC1 (nas) if you have anything that requires constant read writes. Pi SD cards do go bad over time unless you set it to run the OS from memory. Odroid made a smarter choice going with eMMC early on. The con of odroid is you have to hack everything that was already done on a pi to work. [0] http://www.livpi.com/ http://www.livpi.com/ [1] https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4-special-price/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4-special-price/ [2] https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/
skocznymroczny 7y ago
Buy it, think of the cool projects I'll make with it, then hide it in the cupboard. Every few months I'll take it out, set up a webserver on it and after few days hide it again.
moron4hire 7y ago
I have the original Pi. With it, I started a collection of various organic and inorganic particulates. The collection site is a shelf in the corner of my basement.
tomrandle 7y ago
At Geckoboard we have a Pi hooked up to a thermal receipt printer so that remote participants can print off their retrospective cards through Slack: https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/building-a-slack-printer-for-remote-retrospectives-8de0282e5791 https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/building-a-slac... (We've upgraded it a bit since that post! - We also use it to ping a Slack channel for when it's standup). We also use Pis to run some of our dashboards: https://support.geckoboard.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023924372-Set-up-Geckoboard-on-a-Raspberry-Pi https://support.geckoboard.com/hc/en-us/articles/36002392437...
noisy_boy 7y ago
After reading the replies in this thread, I just feel so inferior. I can't solder to save my life and here people have made amazing things. :(
sbouma 7y ago
A few years ago some of my coworkers used a Raspberry Pi to instrument our work foosball table. They had badge readers so all the players could badge in, and IR sensors for autoscoring. They found some open-source foosball leaderboard software that they ran on the Raspberry Pi as well, so we had an auto-scoring, auto-ranking foosball table. Best Raspberry Pi project I've ever seen :)
sbouma 7y ago
Another friend of mine also used a Raspberry Pi with MagicMirror (https://magicmirror.builders/ https://magicmirror.builders/) to build a smart mirror. That was a neat project.
glenscott1 7y ago
I installed the Pi-hole ad blocker (https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/) on a Raspberry Pi Zero, and have it as my DNS server on my home network. It has improved general browsing speed tremendously.
ruuki 7y ago
I pulled a prank at the office with my RPi. I built a very simple circuit to listen to 5V pin of HDMI and I hid RPi and the circuit under the desk of a colleague after work and turned off video output of RPi. Colleague's laptop -HDMI> RPi -HDMI> external display. when the colleague comes to work and turn on the laptop, my RPi turned on its video output and external display showed the website I made for the occasion.
boyband6666 7y ago
I'm giving my son a classical education with it. Using Retropi Every now and then we play "Daddy's games", so he has NES megadrive, and MAME (PacMan mainly). As he starts to master those, I'll add the next generation to it. If we've played some of the same games, hopefully it gives us some form of common framework, and him an interest in how he could code something similar i.e. a gateway in to computers. If he decides he doesn't like it, that's fine too. So far it's goign well - we set off on the adventure 6 months ago when he was 4. I'll also get another microUSB card and try trhe same with my daughter when she's a bit older (currently she's 2).
totalrobe 7y ago
Installed raspbian then stored it in the closet for 4 years unused
pknopf 7y ago
I use it as a test camera source. https://github.com/pauldotknopf/raspberry-pi-camera-source/releases/tag/2.0 https://github.com/pauldotknopf/raspberry-pi-camera-source/r... I can't wait for my Pi 4 to get in so that I can have a test 4k60 source.
- datagram 7y ago
  I do the same thing with game footage to test my capture cards.
northernman 7y ago
1. Pi3 controlling my swimming pool pump (basically a fancy timer) 2. PiZero controlling a mousetrap (servoe controlled trapdoor with IR sensor)
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
My father built this wild automatic glass cutter with one. https://twitter.com/Eric_WVGG/status/1010952072139890694 https://twitter.com/Eric_WVGG/status/1010952072139890694 [edit: I'm a dummy, this is built on an Arduino] He also built a solar panel that's mounted on an upside-down bicycle frame, slowly turns all day to keep facing the sun. Lot of interesting math to track the sun across the calendar year. I'm boring, just building a NAS with Nextcloud Pi. Although it will likely be built on a different board that's better-suited for NAS…
abdullahkhalids 7y ago
I have been trying to build an Rpi+eink screen laptop, using https://github.com/joukos/PaperTTY https://github.com/joukos/PaperTTY But haven't touched the project in months now.
TomMasz 7y ago
I've got a Zero running my PedalPi guitar pedal from ElectroSmash and a 3 running with a USB dongle as a digital radio hotspot (soon to be upgraded to an MMDVM board with PiStar).
jmhobbs 7y ago
I used mine to build an egg incubator this year, http://www.velvetcache.org/2018/03/04/chicken-cam-incubator-edition http://www.velvetcache.org/2018/03/04/chicken-cam-incubator-...
heisthefox 7y ago
I have a live stream of my bee hives, the pi reads the stream from the camera and frame copies it to the correct format for YouTube live: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2E5s3LTU9ObXjiOL7K8KPg/live https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2E5s3LTU9ObXjiOL7K8KPg/liv...
- riledhel 7y ago
  ffmpeg right? can you elaborate a little more on your setup please?
ngaut 7y ago
Running a distributed database cluster TiDB as a Demo.
djbelieny 7y ago
I setup a pi 3 running OpenLighting Architecture (OLA) connected to 2 ENTTEC USB->DMX adapters, connected to 2 Wireless DMX transceivers as an ARTNET->DMX gateway to allow our team to remote control all the stage lighting at the church via software without running cables to all the lights. Pretty cool setup.
markfchapman 7y ago
We use them in our stores for digital signage - we use 60" screens in the store front and behind the food counters. We created web app that allows our Marketing team to allocate posters/menus/videos to stores or groups of stores. Changes are pulled by the store from the server every 60 seconds. If the store loses network connection it will just continue to cycle the existing images/videos until the connection is restored. Even with the price of the screens it's very cost effective compared to commercial offerings.
fsargent 7y ago
My wife and I went to Paris, and in our AirBnB there was a fantastic little radio. We'd turn it on and listen to Radio FIP and just leave it going. I had forgotten the pleasure of listening to what was on, rather than picking, or worse, skipping songs. I hooked up my raspberry Pi to a small LED header with directional buttons on it. Each button was a different french radio station's m3u stream, output to speakers. It perfectly simulated the radio. I want to put in a delay where it would be time synched with California so the theme is more aligned (slow night time music at lunch is noticeable).
coverclock 7y ago
I do embedded, real-time and distributed product development for clients in the commercial, enterprise, aviation, defense, and big science domains. I probably own two dozen Pis of various vintages (and just ordered one of the new Pi 4 models). It's my go-to platform for prototyping, especially for ARM-based systems. I keep one on my LAN just to regression and unit test software that I otherwise developed on an Intel platform. I've also used Pis in devices that are more-or-less permanently deployed, like an NTP server that uses a GPS-disciplined chip-scale cesium atomic clock as its oscillator, and a home-built WWVB clock. I'm currently using three Pis in a Differential GNSS system I'm prototyping.
immnn 7y ago
I‘m running Bind9 and ISC-DHCPD on my Pi. Having set a bunch of DNS blacklist zones to completly eliminate necessary of ad blockers on all my devices. Following, I have set up dhcpd, thus I‘m not bothering about setting static IPs.
- e12e 7y ago
  How do you maintain the blacklist? Is there a good community project around dns blacklists?
maddentim 7y ago
To run Kodi as a frontend to my Mythtv backend. The 4 out I am wondering how I could replace the backend desktop with a Pi. I would need to find a way to connect a TV tuner to it. That seems the biggest hurdle. My current card connects through PCI slot as I recall...
a_lifters_life 7y ago
call me a little paranoid but - a RPI security camera. I have it running locally on my network, capturing still pictures of cars/people/things walking by (I live near a train). Its really just a passive monitor, but I'd like to add more difficult things to it like tell me if someone comes within x feet of my house - phone me, or something, it works for now though.
- tru3_power 7y ago
  got any tutorials you can point me to for something like this? I want to make a front door peep hole camera after someone recently stole a package from my apartment entrance.
batoure 7y ago
Besides the standard PiHole VPN so on I have several RPis I use. 1. I run Samba to manage access to provide AD to my home computers and manage the attachment of various network shares. 2. I have a RPi with an attached set of 12v switch controls that I use to manage various things in my Airstream trailer such as internal/external lights a backup shut off valve for my LP tanks as well as a watering system for plants that I keep in the trailer that I don't always get around to watering.
gatesphere 7y ago
I had one of the original 2012 Model B's (with the 256MB RAM) serving as a simple web server for years. I just recently retired it in favor of a VM. Other than that, I have: - A RetroPie attached to my living room TV - A Zynthian (http://zynthian.org/ http://zynthian.org/) - A PiDP-11 (https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11 https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11) In the past, I've played around with them, making: - A touch-screen enabled stand-alone SunVox synth - A home audio server attached to my stereo - An experiment to read MIDI files from floppy disks, also attached to the stereo I have a couple spares laying around waiting for use cases... but I'm not really antsy to get to them. I'd love to build an OTTO (https://github.com/topisani/OTTO https://github.com/topisani/OTTO) when it's ready for prime time. I'm also considering building some sort of portable RetroPie.
jonotime 7y ago
Internal network services. Mostly UniFi controller, Emby, Syncthing.
ramy_d 7y ago
I'm making a toy that prints a nice message through a receipt printer to my coworkers when they scan their key cards on it.
jonotime 7y ago
UniFi controller, Emby, Syncthing
rolandblais 7y ago
I use it to monitor a Tilt submersible hydrometer to keep track of the fermentation status of my beer. It displays the data on a small oled display and pushes it to a couple of Google sheets.
- xcubic 7y ago
  Source?
chriscareycode 7y ago
It's an addiction, I have 17 and a Pi4 on order 1 - (pi) pi - temperature sensor 2 - (pi) woody - garage door opener - custom web interface 3 - (pi2) white - Unicorn hat blinking lights 4 - (pi2) pi2b - OpenVPN server, pihole DNS 5 - RetroPi - Games (Pi 3) 6 - bigwood - Freeswitch phone system, Nagios4 (Pi 2 Model B v1.1) 7 - (pi) unicorn #2 - unicorn hat blinking lights 8 - pi2 motion - motion sensor, camera, blink(1) light- blink shows red or orange when motion is sensed and takes photos 9 - Slack Bot - (at work) 10 - zero (on desk at home) 11 - green3 - camera - garage wide angle (old cam) 12 - infra - camera front door 13 - infra2 - camera garage wide angle 14 - infra3 - camera front door far view 15 - zerow-cam with infrared usb adapter displaying cameras on tv - change cameras with remote control 16 - zerow-cam1 - camera back yard 17 - zerow-cam2 - camera back yard 18 - Pi4 4GB is backordered but I found a Pi4 2GB which I hope will serve well as a file/backup server. Hoping to utilize the USB3 to get better I/O to a couple external disks. Running Bitwarden on a VM right now but will probably move this to a Pi4 in the near future I have all of these connected to a custom command-and-control web interface (socket.io) where I can send commands, perform updates, monitor load average, version, uptime - and can reboot if needed
senectus1 7y ago
PiHole for one and Media player for the other. Will be buying the new one to up my media player then I'll have a spare :-D
neelkadia 7y ago
Feed my rat online – http://neelkadia.com/feedmyflash http://neelkadia.com/feedmyflash
Magnitopic 7y ago
I have a Raspberry Pi 2,3 and 0W. 2 as a media and games center with RetroPi and Kodi. 3 as a Web server using LAMP and Wordpress. And 0W as a server for my non wifi printer.
Magnitopic 7y ago
I have a Raspberry 2, 3 and 0W. 2 as a media server with RetroPi and Kodi. 3 as a web server using LAMP and Wordpress. and the 0W to work with my non WiFi printer.
FerretFred 7y ago
Good question! I have quite a few Pi sipping small amounts of power here, so... Web server, mail server, gopher server, key server, NTP server, SMS gateway (with SMS hat), NTP client network reference clock (Pi Zero), MQTT server, Flightaware box, PiHole, XMPP server.
antirez 7y ago
Retrogaming
elroyjetson 7y ago
I just recently went on a vacation that included two 14 hour days of travel. I setup a Raspberry Pi as a Wifi hotspot for the car, added a 128GB USB thumb drive, loaded it up with movies, attached it to a 20,000mAh battery pack. My wife and son were able to watch movies on their iPads using the VLC iOS app for the whole trip.
capnnemo 7y ago
I'm using a raspberry pi as a low latency server to organize and provide a bridge between esp8266's that are running LP flame effects for Capn Nemos Flaming Carnival. You know, for the kids! I've open sourced various aspects, and though it's all a bit disorganized as it is primarily me that uses it, you can find codey bits at https://github.com/burntech https://github.com/burntech, and cool pictures and links at http://capnnemosflamingcarnival.org http://capnnemosflamingcarnival.org. Yeah, it's kind of a Burning Man thing. But long term, I hope the tech can serve as a small fast network that controls potentially timing critical things (eg shutting off fire reliably, music-controlled effects, and etc.).
atum47 7y ago
I have used it as a server to control electronics, among other things.
erlemantos 7y ago
A programmable, annoying, rotating alarm. Triggered every time a Jenkins build fails. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgXXkwVXqvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgXXkwVXqvI
erlemantos 7y ago
A programmable, annoying, MQTT-triggered rotating alarm. Used to annoy people when a Jenkins build fails. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgXXkwVXqvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgXXkwVXqvI
Xelbair 7y ago
Absolutely nothing. Because i still need to buy a micro HDMI cable :) The plan is to setup a piHole, make a SMB share on usb HDD, and if it has enough juice left - connect it to TV and setup it with some streaming services. I would love to have a small home server rack but both power costs and space constraints prevent me from setting it up. i might do it on multiple RPI's - and maybe add a NAS for storage later on.
neumann 7y ago
All headless: One for Kodi+VPN. With yatse on Android I have my own Netflix and Spotify for my own owned content on demand whenever. Another for a baby monitor that feeds TinyCamPro with audio and video A third that is a slave Kodi to play music in different part of the house as well, but mainly to operate the electric gate from my phone. About to buy a rp4 to build a synth with a keyboard I just got.
neop1x 7y ago
HTPC for local home IPTV, another one as a wifi camera photo forwarder (security camera), another one as ADS-B receiver for adsbexchange.com and flightradar24.com
efazati 7y ago
Better media center with Raspberry PI and Dropbox ( or whatever you like ) -> https://medium.com/@efazati/better-media-center-with-raspberry-pi-and-dropbox-or-whatever-your-like-bd716d272357 https://medium.com/@efazati/better-media-center-with-raspber...
argimenes 7y ago
I use it run RISC OS on the metal.
greenido 7y ago
I created this project with my kids: https://greenido.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/raspberry-pi-as-security-camera-with-motion-detection/ https://greenido.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/raspberry-pi-as-se... Fun stuff!
gregpaton08 7y ago
I’m using one as a smart lock so I can get in my house using my phone. I have another one running HomeAssistant with a USB z-wave adapter as well as some esp8266/tasmota switches.

1741 points by xylo 7y ago

I have Raspberry Pi and I mainly use it for VPN and piHole. I’m curious if you have one, have you found it useful? What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

polskibus 7y ago

Check out hass.io

swsieber 7y ago

I'm working on turning it into a IR emitter to control some stuff that I have that lack remotes. I have another I've loaded snips onto an will be experimenting with soon - I'm currently using a PlayStation eye for the experimentation, but will have to get a better microphone/speaker. I wish I could hack a dot/echo/etc. and use their microphone/speaker, but meh, I'll take what I can get. Also, the IR pi will probably drive some ambient light as well.

shock 7y ago
> I'm working on turning it into a IR emitter to control some stuff that I have that lack remotes That's really neat. Please share some details – I was planning on buying a Broadlink IR/RF device for that purpose.

tyilo 7y ago

Unpowered in a drawer.

robin_reala 7y ago
Yep. As much as I’d like to play around with it, I have no projects in mind that aren’t pure-software and easier on my laptop, or just end up filled with pre-made solutions to save on support time. Shame, but there you go.
elagost 7y ago
If yours has wi-fi (Pi 3 and above or Pi Zero W) you can always just leave it plugged in somewhere innocuous as a pi-hole. It's super useful and takes almost no time to set up, provided you can change the settings on your router to use it as DNS.
- elcomet 7y ago
  I'm scared that if the pi is down then the whole internet is down (i'm not always home with my family, so if I'm away I couldn't fix it). How do you manage failover ?
  - iforgotpassword 7y ago
    How do your manage your router failing? Do you have a second one in hot standby? Sure, the pi would add a second point of failure but personally I never had a router or rpi fail, so I think the advantage of running a pi hole outweighs that increased risk.
  - stordoff 7y ago
    FWIW, I ran Pi-Hole on a RPi for about six months, and it was flawless (long enough for me to forget the root password :p). One option would be to set up two Pis, and distribute both IPs in DHCP. If one is down, or can't resolve, clients will fall back to the other one. The chance of both being down at once (unless it's something that takes your network down) seems low, and the cost of a Pi Zero W (~$10) wouldn't add much.
  - elagost 7y ago
    If necessary I can SSH in (if the pi is on) and troubleshoot. No one runs a business out of my home so Internet isn't super critical, and the smartphones have data connectivity if need be. I have a couple fresh SD cards in storage and take quarterly SD card images, so if it fails I don't have to rush out and buy anything. If the pi itself blows up, I can talk my wife through changing the DNS server on the router config page from her laptop, or she can just wait until I get home. Not a huge hassle. Even so, normally you can set a fallback DNS server on your router, and you could have two little Pi Zeros on a plugstrip in a closet somewhere! (Or just set the fallback at opendns or something)

RobertRoberts 7y ago

Media player connected to tv. (Kodi or Elec, I can't recall which) What I found really neat about this is that if you use the HDMI connection, there is some automated setup/control that allows my tv remote to control the PI. (through the HDMI connection) But also, the smart phone app for Kodi remote control added a new layer of interaction with the media player that is just sort of unique and unexpected. (everything worked so easily)

colechristensen 7y ago
The remote control tech is CEC. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control
- RobertRoberts 7y ago
  Thanks, forgot what it was, and didn't have time to dig around in the docs where I first ran into it. The fact that this is not widely advertised as a feature is surprising. It made remote control automatic instead of having to hack something together.

tlack 7y ago

Does work-in-progress count? I have two with cameras I am attempting to rig up as a frontend/backup camera in my Humvee (very necessary!), hopefully w/ UI on iPhone

maplewizard 7y ago

I use it to build a cloud backup system. My files in the computer will automatically sync to Raspberry Pi.

keehun 7y ago
What software do you use for your setup?

messe 7y ago

DNS and DHCP server running on NetBSD.

photoangell 7y ago

I have several, I use them for multiroom audio with snapcast (mostly with USB DACs although one has a DAC hat. Some have temp and humidity sensors, one has the rpi cam. One has a always on vpn connection and transmission running. For a while I used one with a Parsec client and cloud gaming. However, I use a Odroid XU4 for all the big stuff (home assistant, NAS, nodered, mopidy, etc.)

onion2k 7y ago

I spent a while figuring out the cheapest possible way of doing front end dev for a series of blog posts (that I never wrote) . The result was using a Pi3B+ and a lot of open source tools, Github and Netlify. It works so well I'm still using it for a ton of dev.

mvip 7y ago

I got a bunch of them running Screenly (https://www.screenly.io https://www.screenly.io), so I'd say that's a good use :) Also, I'm using PiHole and Home Assistant. Disclaimer: I'm the author of Screenly.

vanadium 7y ago

Pi-Hole, RetroPie, and for my 1st-grade son I installed Kano OS for his first computer. I see a couple of Pi 4s as upgrades in my future. Also looking to get my SDR rig up and running on one of the other Pis i have waiting to be used.

dgacmu 7y ago
Anything you've learned to share about having it as a computer for your first grader? I recently set one up for my daughter, same age, but haven't put much thought into the software side yet. She's played Minecraft-pi a couple of times, we made the cat meow in Scratch, and we used it to watch a movie the other day, but that's it so far.
- vanadium 7y ago
  Since I only installed the Kano OS image on a bog standard Pi 3, it's basically this without all the accessories. https://kano.me/store/us/products/computer-kit https://kano.me/store/us/products/computer-kit It's great that Kano makes it available standalone. Kano OS has all the activities built into the image, including visual coding of Minecraft and other tools, and guided lessons around using the Terminal. Chromium and LibreOffice are also installed by default. There's also a curated app "store" like experience to add new games. Installing CUPS to add our printer to the Kano OS Pi was pretty straightforward, so he also uses it for personal writing and printing out stories. It's really engaging for our son, and provides ample time for parent-child learning opportunities to boot. We ended up getting the Pixel Kit while we were at it, and Kano OS picked up on it immediately and exposed all the lessons for it. Hoping their move to Windows 10 doesn't leave their Kano OS image locked to a Pi 3, though. I'd love to upgrade his Pi to a 4 soon. Kano OS Image: https://hello.kano.me/downloads/ https://hello.kano.me/downloads/

blago 7y ago

VPN

carry_bit 7y ago

Media center & TV PC. I have a 4 TB external hard drive connected to it (and swap on it). Using a custom compiled kernel with zswap support, browsing the web isn't that bad with the 1GB of RAM on the 3B. I've also hooked up an RTL-SDR to it and ran rtl-tcp instead of needing to run a long USB cord.

amingilani 7y ago

I used it to monitor ADSL device status[0], also created a DIY timecapsule for MacOS[1] — these were all in the past, though. Currently the Pi is on my roof, connected to an SDR. I sometimes run rtl_server on it, and listen around. Although it's been a hassle, since I have to run upstairs and disconnect it everytime there's a storm. Also, listening to the device over WiFi means I get really laggy control over my SDR. I'm planning on replacing the Pi with something better powered. [0]: https://github.com/amingilani/scruffy https://github.com/amingilani/scruffy [1]: https://github.com/amingilani/chronopill https://github.com/amingilani/chronopill

valent1ne 7y ago
You could probably automate cutting the power with a relay switch also connected to the pi. Just scrape weather data, and if you expect the storm, trigger the switch.
- amingilani 7y ago
  I'm actually more concerned about lightning strikes hitting the antenna, frying the Pi, traveling down the Ethernet cable and frying my router. I'm still a ham in training but I've been told that it's best practice to disconnect the antenna and isolate it from your setup. Some hams as far as placing their connectors in glass jars. I don't want to use a relay on the antenna cable because 1) it'll pick up RF interference, and 2) if a direct strike hits it, there'll be enough energy to jump the gap in the relay anyways. I might figure out a more permanent solid-state solution in the future though. Like I said, still learning :)
  - wrycoder 7y ago
    Ground the antenna.
    - amingilani 7y ago
      That is easier said than done, unfortunately. I live in a developing country. My house does home have a home grinding rod.

hlfshell 7y ago

I've made some interesting projects over the years - only a writeup on a few of these, and some are in pieces and in various states of disrepair after moving so much. Some write ups on larger projects: 1. I used a raspberry pi to coordinate the firing of multiple cameras, and then had the pi upload to a cloud service that would stitch them together to an "infinite zoom" super selfie. https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/gigasnap- https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/gigasnap- a-prototyping-story-efed72099d32 2. I created a library that made it dead simple for a raspberry pi to communicate to arduinos, and used that to control a lot of hardware projects, like little robots. https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/serial-synapse-94a114aa271e https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/serial-synapse-94a114aa2... 3. Raspberry Pi's controlled the heartbeat detection (controlled lights and music of your booth) and conductive paint controller (I built it and still don't understand the meaning) for this art piece. https://vimeo.com/207047769 https://vimeo.com/207047769 4. I had a video / text message doorbell a couple of apartments ago. https://github.com/hlfshell/doorbell https://github.com/hlfshell/doorbell 5. Used one as an MQTT hub for numerous IoT projects. I created https://github.com/hlfshell/mqtt-scheduler https://github.com/hlfshell/mqtt-scheduler to schedule MQTT jobs for things like the arduino powered garden controller (lights + water pumps) I built for my wife. https://github.com/hlfshell/garden-relay https://github.com/hlfshell/garden-relay 6. This never got off the ground, but when Pokemon Go had first launched and was super popular, I wrote a slackbot that would alert everyone in the office when pokemon (outside of the super common Rattatas and Pidgeots) was nearby. I was repurposing that code to make a portable Pokemon radar that would jump a false account around the area around you, thus hunting down pokemon for you. https://github.com/hlfshell/pokemon-tracker https://github.com/hlfshell/pokemon-tracker It never got far as the game got super stale quick.

lloydpick 7y ago
Disney now have exactly what you described in your first project as a photo opportunity at the Magic Kingdom. https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2019/05/enjoy-new-disney-photopass-experiences-at-walt-disney-world-resort/ https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2019/05/enjoy-new-dis...
- hlfshell 7y ago

youeeeeeediot 7y ago

Running piAware for flight tracking https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/ https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/

sucrose 7y ago
Is there a benefit to personally tracking flights instead of querying 3rd parties?
- matthewmcg 7y ago
  Most of the services (FlightAware, Flight Radar 24, ADSB Exchange) get much of their data from volunteer-operated receivers. If you feed your own data to these networks, you get several benefits including multilateration capability (computed location for planes that don't send their own GPS location data) and free business accounts on FlightAware and Flight Radar 24.
- gleenn 7y ago
  Perhaps they are in a remote location that doesn’t have data?
- markdeloura 7y ago
  FlightAware in particular gives you access to a greater level of data and services on their site if you're an active contributor via a PiAware. Also, honestly, it's just fun fooling around with the antenna and software setup to maximize the number of flights I can see :)

adrianvega 7y ago

print server for an older printer

zoul 7y ago

https://pi-hole.net https://pi-hole.net. Just installed, very happy so far.

Tehchops 7y ago
How do you deal with it breaking things like Amazon-based UI(Fire, Mobile shopping etc...)?
- apazzolini 7y ago
  I'm not OC, but my solution there would be to seek non-Amazon based UI :)
  - Tehchops 7y ago
    Of a number of different solutions, Amazon has consistently delivered the best UX for streaming, shopping, and wireless music playback. Why would I switch?
    - apazzolini 7y ago
      I'm sorry, what? Have you tried searching for a show with multiple seasons on Prime video? It's a fucking joke.
      - Tehchops 7y ago
        >I'm sorry, what? "Of a number of different solutions, Amazon has consistently delivered the best UX for streaming, shopping, and wireless music playback. Why would I switch?" I view shows on Prime with multiple seasons all the time.
- zoul 7y ago
  So far I have not found anything broken yet. I think I would go for a whitelist in that case.

cheeko1234 7y ago

Homeassistant (Hass with mqtt and grafana), Octoprint, MotionEyeOS, pihole, pivpn, Donkey car, Robot operating system (ROS), and a wireless controller for my crazyflie quadcopter

WhompingWindows 7y ago

I'm totally naive with Raspberry Pi..can someone comment on the following project: Is it possible to put a glass eye behind a portrait of a one-eyed pirate and make its eye move around/follow whoever enters the room? A friend has a glass eye but nothing to do with it.

amingilani 7y ago
Lemme think. A camera that observes the room from the portrait, anyone that walks in is a dot on a plane, and it points the eye at the point on the plane. Should be doable. Yes, the Pi should handle that fairly easily. The part that you'll have to figure out is making the eye ball rotate. There are GPIO pins on the Pi, so you can get the commands out, but you'll need to build the eyeball component yourself.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
  Probably not. Servocity has x-y gimbal controllers. If you can find one small enough, it could control the eye.
fizzledbits 7y ago
If I hadn’t started this startup and had time, I would want to start making this right now
cheeko1234 7y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/6y55zw/robot_eyes_that_follow_you_around_raspberry_pi_3b/ https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/6y55zw/robot_... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLxbPB3CHwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLxbPB3CHwQ
shearskill 7y ago
Totally possible. https://youtu.be/0o_9CHYeRvI https://youtu.be/0o_9CHYeRvI Make it play the Spongebob theme and you’re set.
monocularvision 7y ago

jchw 7y ago

Right now: I use it as a Flashrom rig, for flashing BIOS chips. The new Raspberry Pi looks powerful enough to use as a media center PC, I ordered one and want to see if it can do that well enough (read as: I’m curious to see emulation performance.)

fsagx 7y ago
I've been happy for a year or two (not even sure, now that I think about it...) with two Pi3s running openElec. Both run over wired ethernet to SMB media server. I'm generally stingy with my storage, so I usually opt for the 1080p file sizes. I don't know how well or if it can handle 4K.

SteveNuts 7y ago

Pi-hole, and my home backup target using an external HDD and Samba.

egn 7y ago

I have a small Internet kiosk for one-off browsing and guests. Currently, mine is running on an ODROID-C2 but the Pi 4 should have more than enough performance for one. My setup is a stripped down install with a minimal window manager. There's only one icon for launching Firefox which is configured in an amnesic mode. The DNS is set to my Pi-hole.

rjmunro 7y ago

We use it as a front end to our Church's AV system. It runs a GUI written in Python with PySide that controls our cameras, hyperdeck recorder and vision mixer. It also controls the power switches for the system, and the blinds.

llamataboot 7y ago

1) PiHole 2) Wired one into a rotary phone to make a weird steampunky smarthouse controller (Dial '0' to turn off all downstairs lights and music, etc) 3) Various LED controls for fun, and Christmas 4) Always experimenting with MycroftAI to stay away from Alexa

sergiomattei 7y ago
This sounds so cool.
Gabriel_Martin 7y ago
2 sounds amazing
- llamataboot 7y ago
  Thanks! A first version of the code is on github: https://github.com/estiens/confessional_booth https://github.com/estiens/confessional_booth It was originally part of a confessional booth taken to Burning Man in 2015. Since then it has evolved and become part of my smart home stuff. I was intimidated when I started as it was my first "hardware" project, but the rotary phone part was pretty easy! Just a little switch that turns on and off the number of times of the number dialed basically. It actually has a (new) microphone wired into the mouthpiece and it uses the receiver original speaker ired to the pi sound output. (At the time I knew nothing about Linux so I think getting pulseaudio working correctly took as long as everything else!) Those aren't working currently, but eventually I plan to integrate both the rotary dials and voice recognition and "scenes" So like, dial "721" for light control. Voice: "And what are we doing with the lights today..." Me: "Make the outside light purple" and it is done. I have custom voice recongition for things like that working with Mycroft, so it will just be a matter of joining the two projects!
  - llamataboot 7y ago
    As a bonus, since it was originally designed to work in the desert without a screen, it can do things via a weird analog interface. For example, if I press the hangup button 10 times in a row and then dial a number, I can get a report of how much memory is left on the device, etc.

LeonM 7y ago

I use my Pi2 as a media player (LibreElec), and just ordered a Pi4 4gb which I'm planning to replace my ageing server and NAS with.

pixelmonkey 7y ago

Primarily, an always-on node to run wake-on-lan (via etherwake) on other home network nodes, and to act as an SSH bastion when other entrypoints are failing.

seanalltogether 7y ago

I used mine as a dlna server and file server, but I was constantly having to restart it or delete the database to get it to pick up new files I had recently dragged on to it. Has anyone been able to use one successfully for serving media?

sirius87 7y ago
I run minidlna on it to host music. No issues scanning for new files, but IIRC detecting new files was an issue when I ran Plex under docker on it.

Klathmon 7y ago

I use them as controllers/monitors for remotely managing a 3d printer farm. At about $40 total extra per printer for the pi and associated hardware, and an open source utility called "octoprint", i'm able to remotely upload, monitor, cancel/pause, and have a camera feed to each printer. They also give some additional nice-to-haves by allowing me to upgrade the printer firmware remotely, and get very accurate print completion estimation times.

Malcx 7y ago

Using it to run an order scheduling system in store of an automated coffee chain startup we're developing.

ryandrake 7y ago

Mine is running in my attic, hooked up to three antennas on my roof: 1. A GPS antenna which provides an accurate “stratum 0” time source. The pi runs ntpd and provides time for all devices on my network. 2. A home built ADS-B antenna for receiving position reports from local aircraft and airliners. Interfaces to the pi with a USB SDR. Pi runs dump1090 to provide a web visualization of local air traffic. I also feed FlightAware with this info. 3. A home built VHF antenna for listening to airband transmissions. Second SDR. Pi runs scanner software and an IceCast server for clients on my network to connect and listen. The pi also has a temperature sensor that logs once a minute so I can plot my attic’s temperature and I can have it alert me if it gets too hot.

cheesymuffin 7y ago

I don't use it, I never got around to it because I'm not actually all that interested in computers, at least not in the sense that I thought I was.

__lm__ 7y ago

My Raspberry Pi 3 works as a CUPS print server connected to a laser printer, as a pi-hole DNS server to filter ads, and as a ssh entry point (with dynamic DNS). I would use a Pi zero, but Ghostscript is not too happy when printing large documents on a single-core processor with 512 MB of ram. I still have to find the time to set-up a backup server on it (and decide which software to use).

gsruff 7y ago

1. I used a Raspberry Pi Zero W to flash Coreboot onto my Lenovo X200. 2. I have a 3 B+ running RetroPie. 3. I use a model 1 with USB Wi-Fi adapter as a wireless print server for an old LaserJet printer.

crankylinuxuser 7y ago

I built the RadioInstigator, a mobile SigInt attack platform for around $150. https://hackaday.com/2019/06/05/mobile-sigint-hacking-on-a-civilians-budget/ https://hackaday.com/2019/06/05/mobile-sigint-hacking-on-a-c... If it wasn't for F5OEO's Rpitx library, I would have been stuck with non-SDR Tx. https://github.com/F5OEO/rpitx https://github.com/F5OEO/rpitx

ykl 7y ago

Low-cost Aarch64 development machine! I run Aarch64 Fedora on a Pi 3B+ for porting personal projects to Aarch64 and for testing. When mainstream desktop ARM arrives (ARM Macs perhaps?), I’d like to be ready in case I have to make a switch from x86-64.

kageneko 7y ago

I'm building a CarPi. I'm using a bluetooth OBD-II adapter and Python-OBD to monitor my car's diagnostics and record them. I'm planning on adding a GPS adapter and probably a gyroscope/accelerometer so I can track location and motion at the same time. It's mostly just for fun. Maybe one day I'll add some kind of analysis to it. It might be interesting to track location, motion, and car status in order to predict mileage or if the engine light will turn on.

NickBusey 7y ago
Please open source this.
- gchokov 7y ago
  Please do

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago

I used it as a ad hoc game camera last summer (we had something coming through our back yard, so wanted to see what it was, and I won't say no to buying more electronics I'll use once), but that's about it. Been powered off ever since.

jononor 7y ago

Doorlocks of our hackerspace has been RPi controlled almost since the original RPi came out, maybe 2013. Nowadays we got 4 doors on 3 RPIs (internal and external), with over 200 members that has access. Using MQTT to communicate with our membersystem since 2016 or so.

Tomte 7y ago
Please think about failure modes, and don't take these guys as an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10302686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10302686
- jononor 7y ago
  Of course. Our system controls electronic latches in the door frame, while the door-bolt is unmodified - so all doors can be opened from inside without any electronics. Additionally there are separate fire-exits from all our rooms.

postit 7y ago

main pi: pihole and google cloud print spare pi: retropie loaded with all the good goodies.

elagost 7y ago

I used mine as a NAS for a while with an external USB HDD and a samba share. It was also set up to be a VPN and pi-hole. I have a pi zero that I use to flash coreboot on laptops. My PS3 isn't doing so hot as a media server client for my NAS's movie library - the network connection is poor, the interface is fiddly, and it can't load subtitles embedded in files. I was going to buy a pi3 to replace it as a media server client and hook up an external DVD player, but now I'll be getting a pi 4!

KingFelix 7y ago
Check out ROckPro64, I just set mine up. Running plex with an internal HDD on a PCIex4, 6 core processor and 4gb ram. Using Dietpi, I am interested in checking out the Pi 4 as well, but looks like it might be a few months until its available

bitlax 7y ago

1. simple server for backup and git repos 2. xbmc for videos on main tv 3. retropie (I had fun with this for about a week but haven't used it lately) 4. pihole for blocking ads and time-wasting sites 5. various small projects: security camera, motorized window shade, etc. I run Home Assistant on my desktop to communicate with a few of the other devices in the house but I might move that over to a Pi so I don't have to worry about restarts and performance. I'm thinking about consolidating this setup somewhat but I'm waiting for my next move.

gattr 7y ago

I got a RPi 3B+ to build and test some open-source amateur astronomy tools I contribute to - everything has been working quite nicely so far (I use Fedora on my computers and it also works fine on the Pi). I'm eyeing the RPi 4 with interest.

riston 7y ago

I have several Raspberry Pi's in use: - One Zero with AudioQuest Dragonfly for PiMusicBox - RPI v1 with a camera for motion detection - RPI v3 for HomeAssistant Hub

quartz 7y ago

The coffee machine in our office is controlled by blockchain NFTs and a Raspberry Pi: Once authenticated, an owner of the NFT can select their coffee type on their phone which then signals the Raspberry Pi to make whatever coffee type was selected by jumping the contacts that used to be pressed by the machine's buttons (which have been removed). It's a cool gimmick, fun to show off to visitors, gives us a nice record of who is making coffee (since each NFT's owner is unique and trackable), limits users to those with the NFT without us having to build usernames/passwords, and is also how I make my coffee each afternoon.

Piskvorrr 7y ago
Is it HTCPCP-enabled? Inquiring minds want to know!
- jtolly710 7y ago
  Hopefully including HTTP Error 418 too!
amelius 7y ago
> gives us a nice record of who is making coffee Is that allowed by GDPR?
- coolspot 7y ago
  If you don't serve cookies it is okay.
- quartz 7y ago
  If an EU user tries to make coffee we redirect them to a "this content is unavailable in your region" page so I think we're 100% good to go with GDPR compliance.
notdang 7y ago
What coffee machine are you using?

netsectoday 7y ago

In production since 2016 with 3 x Raspberry Pi 3s. Very reliable - they only need a reboot once a year. These guys are hardcore - processing bursts of thousands of records from a serial interface 24 hours a day 7 days a week and shuffling it off to the cloud.

fsagx 7y ago
Did you do some work to run 100% from ramdisk after boot? Conventional wisdom says that the SD cards should fail eventually from log writes, etc.

davidb_ 7y ago

I've got 5. I only actively use 3 of them. 1. Media player connected to projector running RasPlex - this software is outdated enough and buffers on some high bitrate content that I should buy a replacement device, but it still works well enough. I tried upgrading to a newer raspi and wasted an hour trying to get it to run, then gave up. So, I still use my old one. It still gets used daily and works well enough (only issue is the buffering on occasion). 2. RetroPie - I rarely game, but it's cool to be able to turn this on and have a library of all the games I played (and those I never had) from childhood. 3. I use the third one as a networked LED marquee controller (HUB75 panels) with this software: https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix The other 2 I just have sitting on my desk and occasionally use for small dev projects or to test out some new project I read about on here, hackaday, etc. An ongoing project that I haven't made much progress with is an automated turret that squirts squirrels with water. I made something similar in college (a "paintball gun" turret with openCV blob detection/tracking) that had decent performance. Now that openCV on rpi can outperform my old college laptop, I want to setup the pi to detect squirrels, track them, and keep them away from a bird feeder/plants in my backyard.

ncarroll 7y ago
Would that turret will work for pigeons landing on my balcony? Or better yet, to protect my air space by squirting them on a fly by? That'd be some sweet fun. :-)
- mft_ 7y ago
  This makes me sad. Pigeons get a bad time, but they're lovely birds of you spend some time observing and maybe even interacting with them. We had an obviously-paired couple visit our balcony most days for a couple of years. Please don't be (thoughtlessly?) mean to them.
  - sersi 7y ago
    I like Pigeons and don't mind them except when they visit my balcony at 7am in the morning and wake me up (we only have single pane windows and no way to change it since we're renting).

ge96 7y ago

I have three always on One Pi3B+ connected to anemometer and single solar cell, uploads up to 60 secs of analog data reading every minute by CRON, then has other CROn stuff for emailing One Pi Zero for home security camera attached to motion sensor/rapid shutter mode, uploads to S3 bucket One Pi zero for reading HN news out loud in the morning by Amazon Polly, tracking solar cells on window, and then more scheduling stuff I have another one powered by USB, I intend to use it as "swappable dev stacks by sd card" through USB SSH

kawfey 7y ago

I have a few. 1) PiHole. I'm upgrading this to a RasPi4 and seeing if I can also merge 2) 5) and 6) into it. 2) NAS/VPN/Media Server/Hass.io 3) RTL-SDR for ADS-B Receiver feeding to numerous data warehouses (Flightaware, ADS-B Exchange, PlaneFinder, etc) 4) Connected to RTL-SDR and running rtltcp for generic HF/VHF/UHF radio receiving which was previously part of a SATNOGS automatic cubesat/Amsat/ISS receiver build I've not completed yet. 5) Debian desktop on my workbench 6) A Pi Zero W running a ZNC IRC bouncer 7) Experimenting with remote ham radio control but linux-based ham radio software is still a bit too frustrating, so this isn't an active project. 8) Two extra RasPis and three PiZeroW's just lying around because Microcenter always has them for ridiculously low prices.

madengr 7y ago

Using one for a DMR (ham radio) hotspot. Plan on using one for a GPSDO data monitoring. The problem with the RPi is the SD card file system. It’s just not reliable enough. I have had better luck with the Beaglebone Black, which as on-board eMMC.

chandlermayo767 7y ago

I use it to control my 3D printer: https://octoprint.org/ https://octoprint.org/

sunmaker 7y ago

I am using The Pi for 1) video security system using zoneminder 2) text and email me alerts 3) Automate lights/devices using 433MHz RF sockets, crontab and RF433Utils 4) A cloud storage for my files using owncloud

corporealshift 7y ago

I build an RC (with the goal of making it autonomous) car. I got as far as giving it edge detection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-o8Uzi5o1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-o8Uzi5o1k but haven't continued the project. It's a great platform for exploring controlling hardware and prototyping ideas!

westondeboer 7y ago

pihole and instapy

cartoonfoxes 7y ago

1. Trello displays in conference rooms. 2. Admin terminal that sits on my desk.

codingdave 7y ago

I just set up pi-hole on one this weekend. It was my first time trying a Raspberry Pi, and I loved it. With the news about the latest version and the improved specs, I'm considering setting up a couple to replace my kids' computers, which are all old and under-powered.

beanjammin 7y ago

1 - Kids' desktop (Raspi3) 2 - Kodi (Raspi2) 3 - LAN print/automated backup server (Raspi1) I've order a 4GB Raspi4 to upgrade the kids' desktop and 1 GB Raspi4 to upgrade the automated backup server (Gb ethernet + USB3!). Kodi will get the old kids' desktop.

yashwanthcp 7y ago
Hi can you share more details on the kids desktop setup? What applications do you use?

albumdropped 7y ago

Tracking aircraft within radio range and feeding data to ADSB Exchange and Flightaware.

pfalafel 7y ago

I run a Newsreader server. It collects news from many hundreds of places and at any time offers a beautiful timeline view for all my screen devices: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=238133 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=2381...

peternicky 7y ago

PiHole service is the only project I run on my raspberry pi. Setup is not as user friendly as we are accustomed to these days, however, with a few hours you will have a robust ad/analytics block system in place.

djhworld 7y ago
I've been using the docker version of pihole for a few years now https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole It made the setup process really very simple for me

camhenlin 7y ago

I use one to control a 3D printer with https://octoprint.org https://octoprint.org and another to integrate some smart home devices that are not homekit compatible with my homekit setup, using https://homebridge.io https://homebridge.io.

arrakeen 7y ago

1. pihole and unifi cloud key (not pleased that this is a requirement, but glad i can run it alongside my pihole) 2. retropie 3. commodore64 disk drive emulator! [1] [1] https://cbm-pi1541.firebaseapp.com/ https://cbm-pi1541.firebaseapp.com/

ixtli 7y ago

Pi Hole!

realshowbiz 7y ago

retropie, pi-hole and running misc temporary servers like minecraft

ladberg 7y ago
How does it perform as a Minecraft server? Do you use any mods or just vanilla?
- realshowbiz 7y ago
  Vanilla. It’s so-so performance wise. A raspberry pi 2 has been good enough for our 6 player games. Newer models I’m sure would perform better.

sbhn 7y ago

Zabbix Proxy https://youtu.be/i2b1DfscSqo https://youtu.be/i2b1DfscSqo

djhworld 7y ago

I have 3 running right now 1x Raspberry Pi model B (from 2012!) - runs a reverse proxy to things in my local network, and runs a dynamic DNS service. It's showing its age as its ARMv6 and I guess at some point updates won't be as frequent so will eventually have to retire it, but it works fine for now. 1x Pi model 3 - runs various services, inc. GOGS a private git server, ZNC, a service to control my TV, a service to control my 'smart plug' lamp through a private API, a private docker registry, a voicemail system connected to Twilio 1x Pi model 3 - running Pi-Hole and wireguard I love all of them very dearly and looking forward to reading this thread!

smkelly 7y ago
Do you have any more information or a write up on what you're doing with Twilio and voicemail? That sounds sort of interesting.
- djhworld 7y ago
  No write up unfortunately, I actually made it a few years ago as I was getting a lot of recruiter spam calls, but ever since the GDPR came in that has stopped. I don't receive that many calls these days. I have my (cell) phones voicemail set to my Twilio number. When a voicemail request hits Twilio, it calls an endpoint hosted on my Pi, which then just calls the Twilio APIs to 1. tell the caller to leave a message after the beep 2. record the message 3. use the speech-to-text API to transcribe the message 4. send me an SMS message with the transcription It's really just an ersatz visual/text voicemail service that I think iPhone users get. Also the Twilio speech-to-text transcriptions are hilariously bad, I don't think it copes well with UK accents :)
- chrismeller 7y ago
  You can actually do voicemail within Twilio for free using their TwiML Bins and Functions, you don’t need any extra hardware to maintain. Just did this for a couple of numbers I set up with SIP. The docs were... confusing and inaccurate but I finally got it to work.

castis 7y ago

Quadcopter pet project https://github.com/castis/currant https://github.com/castis/currant One for running Retropie https://emulationstation.org/gettingstarted.html#install_rpi_retropie https://emulationstation.org/gettingstarted.html#install_rpi.... Next one is for playing with https://www.zoneminder.com/ https://www.zoneminder.com/

cbm-vic-20 7y ago

SSH/IRC client for a VT420.

jedberg 7y ago

A lot of folks have said "pihole". I have a linux server at home that does my DNS and a bunch of other stuff. I also have a pi3 still in the box. Would there be an advantage to me running pihole on the pi3 instead of on my linux server?

TheGRS 7y ago
I don't see why, its just neat to have a little dedicated device next to your router IMO.
jki275 7y ago
Not at all. I run the service in a VM on a windows server.
NikkiA 7y ago
I still don't understand how pi-hole became so popular whereas privoxy didn't
- jedberg 7y ago
  Better marketing and a cool name.
- dgacmu 7y ago
  A filtering DNS server is much easier to add into your network - don't have to play with proxy autoconfig, and because it's not mucking with the http content, very lightweight.
atonse 7y ago
Energy use, probably. I bet the RPi uses a ton less energy than your linux server. But in this case that's not really a tradeoff since you'd be running your server in addition to the RPi.

alanbernstein 7y ago

I have 5 or more in my house, some bought, some inherited. One of them runs pi-hole. I'm in the middle of setting up octopi for a new 3d printer on another one. Two of the others are pi zeros (no wireless), no plan for those any time soon. I also have one of the older models, RCA video output instead of HDMI. I'm not sure I'll ever find a use for that one.

epmaybe 7y ago

I'm using a Raspberry Pi (Gen 1, Model B I think) to run a smart mirror. It pulls up my daily commute, news headlines, weather, and calendar. I take no credit for the software (https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror) I also had one connected to my Motorola LapDock back in 2012 to run a portable raspbian laptop. It worked surprisingly well.

drieddust 7y ago
This is a cool project I was completely unaware of.
ashurov 7y ago
Doing this as well as we speak! Also using a Pi as a RetroPi.

shriphani 7y ago

Mine drives an LED pixel frame in my living room: https://www.instagram.com/p/BIgFP9dhkPZ/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BIgFP9dhkPZ/

Ftuuky 7y ago

Have any of you done something with machine learning on rpi? Like face recognition or some fun robot. I'm looking at rpi4+google coral and it seems impressive enough to run interesting projects.

2sk21 7y ago
I have a script that retrieve photos from an attached camera and then uploads the images to an AWS GPU instance and train an image recognition model there. This is all for controlling my model trains :-)

s-macke 7y ago

Pihole and tvheadend

ebrewste 7y ago

A bunch: - Ubiquiti network controller, Pi Hole - Temperature controller to knit an ancient hydronic in floor heater and a new-ish mini split together to act in unison. Pings local national weather stations to get more accurate data than I care to replicate at my home. - Octoprint for my 3d printer - 4x for a hobby project stitching together video from multiple cameras

kingnothing 7y ago

It was bought with the intention of using it as an emulator for old games, but it just sits unused in a closet.

lavoiems 7y ago

I use it as a visualization server for my research!

thecodemonkey 7y ago

1x Raspberry Pi 3 installed in my car within the internal network as a bastion box and to run software that let's my interact with the entertainment system 1x Raspberry Pi 3 running Home Assistant with a Z-Wave USB Dongle (Home Automation) 1x Raspberry Pi 3 running OctoPrint (Host/remote-control for 3D Printer) 1x Raspberry Pi 3 running FullPageOS (Full-screen Chromium in kiosk mode) displaying a server statusboard in our home office Next project: 1x Raspberry Pi Zero W to run Unifi Controller I have a couple of original Model B+ sitting around unused right now - just not powerful enough for any of the above projects. (Update: Formatting)

exhilaration 7y ago
FYI - I had to buy a Pi 3B+ to run Unifi Controller, the forum posts said the Zero W didn't have enough juice.
- thecodemonkey 7y ago
  Boo! Might have to reconsider then. I used the Pi Zero W for FullPageOS for a while but performance was absolutely terrible, recently switched it out with the Raspberry Pi 3. The Pi Zero really has an awesome form factor, but many of the projects I come up with either require more performance (i.e. needing a Rasperry Pi 3) or are simply better suited for a microcontroller such an ESP32 or ESP8266.
  - tjoff 7y ago
    I guess it depends, but having the unifi controller on wifi isn't always the best of idea. If you misconfigure the wifi or just change the ssid/password the controller looses access as the settings are applied. And now you can't even connect to the controller to fix it.
    - thecodemonkey 7y ago
      I’m using an Ubiquiti gateway but not for access points (yet). So that’s not currently a problem. But that’s good to know!

cstuder 7y ago

Mine is running Hypriot OS (https://blog.hypriot.com https://blog.hypriot.com): Everything on it is dockerized. The coolest application: An Airconnect container (https://github.com/philippe44/AirConnect https://github.com/philippe44/AirConnect) which upgrades my mediocre Internet radio device with AirPlay.

Kaway 7y ago

I use it for a personal project implying scraping some websites. One of these websites was behind Cloudflare (I think), and thus was blocking request from my OVH server. Therefore I used my Raspberry to do the job, on my own connection. I also put recently a Pi-hole on it.

warp 7y ago

1. A raspberry pi 3 on which I use git-annex to archive data on a bunch of large USB disks. 2. A raspberry pi 2 at a different location which provides off-site backups for the data archived by the first pi 3. A raspberry pi zero to run magic mirror on a leftover screen (I cannot be bothered to turn it into an actual smart mirror though) 4. And I recently added another raspberry pi 3 to play with RetroPie

hanklazard 7y ago

1. Retropie 2. Pi-hole 3. Bluetooth presence detection 4. Previously ran a Hassio instance on one 5. Wireguard server 6. (HiFiBerry + Volumio) x 3 great for multi room sonos-like system

jepler 7y ago

- LED Light alarm - Living room music player & "radio" streamer -- I need to set this up as an A2DP audio receiver too - octoprint server - Stratum 1 NTP server (GPS referenced) If I didn't also have a "big" linux system running 24/7, it would be doing things like DHCP, DNS, MQTT server, etc.

prkr 7y ago
I'm interested in learning more about your LED light alarm set up—I had a similar idea a while back but am less familiar with the world of Raspberry Pi.
- jepler 7y ago
  Thanks for asking! I haven't documented it anywhere, and the source code isn't suitable for consumption by others. But, I can tell you about the basics. I bought a "12V" LED strip intended for automotive use, and created a simple circuit with a +12V DC supply and an NPN transistor. By hooking the NPN transistor to a PWM output on the Pi's I/O (via a resistor), I can control the LEDs from nearly full darkness to their maximum brightness. Here's a tutorial that covers the same ground: https://dordnung.de/raspberrypi-ledstrip/ https://dordnung.de/raspberrypi-ledstrip/ There's also a switch for "disable alarm no matter what" and "turn light on/off right now". (I also use it as a nighttime reading lamp, with the added bonus that it starts ramping down the brightness after about 25 minutes and turns off after 30: a good reminder to go the f--- to bed) This all hooks to some not very interesting software to listen to the buttons, carry out an alarm schedule, ramp the LED intensity up and down, and so forth. In my case, it's written all in Python in a sort of timer-and-event-driven style. Since this pi has wifi, one part of a traditional alarm clock is missing: it sets the time from NTP and applies the standard DST rules to obey summer time; there are no controls to set the time, and even after a midnight power outage it'll generally alarm at the right time in the morning, as long as power came on at least a few minutes before the appointed minute. I've had a number of variations on homebrew light alarm over the years, AVRs and arduinos, TRIACs switching standard incandescent lamps, RGB LEDs simulating the sunrise color sequence, etc. It's the sort of project you can always do again and explore more of the problem space and find what works best for you.

flexer2 7y ago

I wrote up a Medium post about what I do with mine: https://medium.com/@adamargo/how-i-use-raspberry-pis-for-homekit-automation-ed69df8d8be7 https://medium.com/@adamargo/how-i-use-raspberry-pis-for-hom... Mostly home automation. 1x homebridge server, ffmpeg transcoder for security cameras, 1x for controlling an electric fireplace using an IR shield and power monitoring outlet, 1x for controlling model train switches and bridging that into HomeKit

TheGRS 7y ago

There was a time I was super into a project where I had a streaming server that used my Spotify account and would allow anyone with access to the server to change the song. I was basically trying to replicate what Sonos does with a Pi. It worked, but I abandoned it after a few months of not using it.

ravenstine 7y ago

I'm not really using one regularly right now, but here are the few things I've done with my Pis: - Hosted a blog using Rails and a Cron that updated the A record on my Route53 domain to point to my local IP address. I'm not sure anyone ever read it, but I had it up for about a year. - Attempted to reverse engineer a treadmill controller with the UART pins. I successfully figured out the baud rate and captured bytes, but never figured out how to control the treadmill motor board. I have a feeling the motor board had a problem. - Connected a piezo element to GPIO and made a controllable alarm device. Nothing that cool, really.

guilhermetk 7y ago

I have 3 use cases for my RPi: -PiHole as an ad/tracking blocker (adding PiVPN tonight to VPN into my home network) -Plugging sensors to measure temp/humidity and controlling AC state (on/off) via IR Led (https://imgur.com/a/pYugqXz https://imgur.com/a/pYugqXz) -Unifi Controller

luckylion 7y ago

Two things, working on more. VPN router and a doorbell to desktop-notifications box. I like listening to music on noise cancelling headphones sometimes when I work. I wouldn't hear the doorbell in that case, so I have a pi with a mic that sits close to the doorbell. If the noise level goes past a certain threshold for a few samples, it sends a command to my workstation where a script sits and triggers a desktop notification. Works pretty well with very few false positives and all "I might miss the package delivery guy" anxiety is gone while I enjoy music.

koolba 7y ago

Coincidentally there’s another story on the front page about using a Raspberry Pi to hack NASA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264774

slim 7y ago
thats not a coincidence. That's a well coordinated product launch with a good PR agency doing it's job
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  A PR agency that hacks NASA to boost your product launch, sign me up! ;o)

xmichael999 7y ago

1x House power monitor 1x Solar power monitor 1x DVBT airplane tracking (flightradar.com) 1x Fridge temperature and humidity graphing for Salami chamber 1x Pi-hole (I also run a second pi-hole on a VM)

Tempest1981 7y ago
What sensors for your power monitor?
- Tempest1981 7y ago
  This project shows some $8 sensors: http://www.the-diy-life.com/simple-arduino-home-energy-meter/ http://www.the-diy-life.com/simple-arduino-home-energy-meter...

2sk21 7y ago

Using several Raspberry Pis to monitor CO2 levels in my house. Each Raspberry Pi has a CO2 sensor - wrote a little Python script to retrieve data from sensor and upload it to a server Which is also a Raspberry Pi.

jdsnape 7y ago
What sensor did you use? All the ones I’ve seen tend to be pretty expensive
- 2sk21 7y ago
  Yes - the sensors are a bit expensive at about US$ 90 apiece but as I explained in another comment, I think that it has paid for itself
- anfractuosity 7y ago
  You can get cheap NDIR based sensors from aliexpress (around $20) such as MH-Z14A, which I've used with a Pi, via the UART interface. I just hooked it up to the 5V line on the Pi pin header and then used the Pis UART lines for the data, as that runs at 3.3V.
mef51 7y ago
which CO2 sensor do you use?
inson 7y ago
I am also interested in your CO2 sensor. What kind of CO2 sensor?
- 2sk21 7y ago
  This is the sensor that I'm using: https://www.co2meter.com/collections/desktop/products/co2mini-co2-indoor-air-quality-monitor https://www.co2meter.com/collections/desktop/products/co2min...
  - 7y ago

pinjasaur 7y ago

I run Pi-hole off a RPi Zero W on my local network. Set it up over Ethernet with a bit of cron automation [0] and later expanded Gravity (the blocklist) along with firewall NAT rules to redirect all DNS queries to go through the Pi-hole [1]. [0]: https://paul.af/adding-pi-hole-to-my-local-network https://paul.af/adding-pi-hole-to-my-local-network [1]: https://paul.af/pi-hole-revisited https://paul.af/pi-hole-revisited

thedjinn 7y ago

I built a guitar stomp box using a Raspberry Pi Zero to trigger samples with a foot switch. Runs on 9 volts and has a very bright OLED display so I can still see what it's doing when I'm playing in a dark venue.

unforswearing 7y ago
I have been thinking about doing something similar -- would love to hear more about this if possible!
- thedjinn 7y ago
  It's basically a Pi, a buck regulator, a tiny COB USB audio interface and an SSD1306-based 128x32 display. Removed all connectors and replaced them with soldered wires so it packs neatly into a tiny box. The software is all custom and written in C, using Jack for low latency audio and my own driver for the display (Adafruit makes a Python driver but it eats half of your CPU and is not optimized for i2c bandwidth or high framerates).

F00Fbug 7y ago

- WiFi garage door controller - OSMC x 2 - Stratux I had PiHole, but moved it to a tiny VM in an effort to minimize cables.

ohazi 7y ago

I use one as a hub/gateway for untrusted IoT devices. It hosts a separate, isolated wifi network via hostaod/dnsmasq. Clients aren't given routes to the primary network or the broader internet - they should only see the Pi and other clients (I'd eventually like to restrict access to other clients as well, but haven't played with that yet). Access to the devices is via a web server running on the Pi that relays commands and responses. Right now it's a page full of hard-coded buttons and indicators, but I eventually want to turn it into a flexible firewall-like system to make it easier to add/configure/remove clients and rules.

DanTheManPR 7y ago

I use mine to run and monitor my 3D printer remotely. I use octopi and the little webcam extension. Since I have a permanent use for it now, I'll probably be buying a second to play around with.

asatterfield54 7y ago

Meat curing fridge, plant watering system, LiDAR controllers on my truck

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

zlalanne 7y ago

I have one hooked up to my TV on an HDMI port to display all my home surveillance cameras in a grid. Works with any cameras that support RTSP. https://selfhostedhome.com/raspberry-pi-video-surveillance-monitor/ https://selfhostedhome.com/raspberry-pi-video-surveillance-m...

guyromm 7y ago

A client that I'm consulting was being ripped off by a local IT provider with pricing for on-premises servers & MS software. I proceeded to rent cheaper equivalent machines off-site. The IT provider claimed the hardware firewall (Fortigate) was not configurable for site-to-site to the new machines directly (could be, not an expert on those). Therefore, I ended up purchasing several Raspberries and configuring them as OpenVPN routers that opened up the office LAN to said machines. Quite satisfying, as it allowed to break the client out of the proprietry software/hardware/vendor chain at a rather small expense.

weaksauce 7y ago
Fortigate is pretty configurable. I’d be really surprised if it couldn’t do site to site or site to client with a little configuration.
the_angry_angel 7y ago
You can absolutely configure IPSec tunnels on Fortinet. Can I ask, do you perform updates and maintenance on these boxes? How do they perform in terms of throughput with openvpn?
- e12e 7y ago
  I'd be more interested if wireguard is an option, and how it performs. Since they're already on linux/oss.
  - the_angry_angel 7y ago
    IPSec is pretty much the standard interop still - pretty much everything talks it Cisco, Juniper, pfSense, Fortinet, etc. You name it I’d be surprised if it didn’t have support. I’d love to see wireguard implemented in the networking world, but I think it may take some time to get there :/

scottlamb 7y ago

A security camera NVR. (Help wanted! I'm developing it here: https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr I'm proud of the design but it's still far from a polished system that does everything a reasonable person would expect. Lots of opportunities to extend it if you're looking for a fun Rust + Javascript project.) A Raspberry Pi 2 will run a working setup; the new Raspberry Pi 4 should be a lot more pleasant in terms of being able to recompile it in a reasonable time, transfer video segments quickly, etc. I think the biggest missing piece is a real-time clock. Faster flash, builtin SATA, and a builtin NPU would also be great of course but not realistic for $35. A home theater control system. The Pi uses HDMI-CEC, my Samsung TV's EXLINK (their protocol over RS-232), Roku's HTTP interface, etc. and an Android app is the frontend. I wanted to make this into a nice polished thing other people could use but have given up on the idea for now. The thing is that media components are super finicky, many things need special support written just for them, and you really have to extensively tweak them to see how they function as a whole. (eg does your TV turn off your stereo receiver when it turns off itself. The answer varies based on the model and settings of both components.) HDMI-CEC doesn't live up to its potential in this regard. [edit: fixed hyperlink]

j1elo 7y ago
You got a '>' as part of the URL, which goes 404! Just removing it should do.
aloer 7y ago
Moonfire NVR looks like an amazing project that I can learn a lot from for an entirely different project with streams and stuff that I’m interested in and have zero experience with! Also great that it’s written in rust Is there any way to test it without rpi/camera? If I understand the readme correctly, you store frames individually (as jpegs?) on disk and construct flexible mp4 streams on the fly. Naturally I would have assumed that this would be inefficient so I’m wondering if I got this right, not very familiar with stream/video/codec tech
- scottlamb 7y ago
  Thanks! > Is there any way to test it without rpi/camera? Without a Raspberry Pi, yes. It should run on any Unix-like OS. I've tested Linux/arm32, Linux/x86-64, and macOS/x86-64. (For the last, install ffmpeg via homebrew first.) Without an IP camera...hmm, there are probably some public RTSP live streams somewhere. Not sure offhand. > If I understand the readme correctly, you store frames individually (as jpegs?) on disk and construct flexible mp4 streams on the fly. Naturally I would have assumed that this would be inefficient so I’m wondering if I got this right, not very familiar with stream/video/codec tech No, I store the video stream in the compressed form the camera gave it to me. Currently that's H.264; it wouldn't be hard to add H.265 support as well. I break it apart into roughly one-minute segments at convenient locations. The schema design doc talks about that here: https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/master/design/schema.md https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/master/design... .mp4 serving will aggregate those together (maybe clipping the start and end segment) to give you a .mp4 segment for any time range of interest. It comes up with a mp4::File struct which knows what video segments to serve and maps byte locations to parts of the .mp4 container format. I don't have a good doc about how this works other than the source code right now. https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/master/src/mp4.rs https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/blob/master/src/mp... [edit: and you probably won't be successful in understanding it without having a pdf of the ISO/IEC 14496-12 specification open next to it.] Here's some debug output for generating a five-minute video segment: https://pastebin.com/Wzfz7BF7 https://pastebin.com/Wzfz7BF7 Storing individual frames as jpegs would be inefficient I agree in all sorts of ways: recording CPU (you have to decode the H.264 and re-encode it as JPEGs), disk space, disk seeks, playback bandwidth, browser CPU, etc. My understanding is this is how Zoneminder currently works. I imagine it worked better with the cameras Zoneminder was originally designed for: low-resolution, low-qps webcams that didn't do their own H.264 encoding.

jachee 7y ago

Pi hole. SSH server for tunneling gogs Anything else that needs a tiny Linux box.

Notorious_BLT 7y ago

1. PiHole (seems popular in this thread) 2. OctoPrint for my printer (with a touchscreen because I hate using the knob-based interface on the printer when I'm leveling the bed or doing maintenance) 3. Sitting on my desk because my Terraria server was freezing when saving the world file. Might set it up for emulation in the living room

jon-wood 7y ago

There's a thousand or so of them scattered around Europe which were the foundation of the company I work at, acting as IoT hubs to communicate with devices designed to alert insurance customers of floods, intrusion, and fire in their homes. We hadn't ever really planned to get into building our own hubs, but the RPi ecosystem meant that when we were forced into that corner on short notice (thanks Smartthings for shutting down app approvals at the last minute) we were able to go from zero to working product in a matter of weeks!

personjerry 7y ago
the things network?

gen3 7y ago

I use a B+ to run a print server. Its wired directly over serial to a receipt printer. Since it exposes a standard CUPS interface, I have a few bots that call it to print out things. (messages, memes, weather, diagnostics)

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago

1x nailed to my wall and acting as a jump box for my home network and a DNS server 1x running OctoPrint by the 3D printer 1x responsible for remote serial access to and cycling power on my RISC-V board 1x updates the weather on an e-ink display every 20 minutes

rjakobsson 7y ago

I run PiHole on a raspberry 1 rev b. Going to get the new model to run a bitcoin node at home (instead of running it on my old laptop).

elihu 7y ago

I'm using one as part of a midi controller project: http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/jik/keyboard.html http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/jik/keyboard.html The controller has 156 pressure sensitive keys. The raspberry Pi runs a program that reads from a bank of 20 8-channel ADCs all wired up to a SPI bus (it runs at 2mhz, and I'm able to get about 90 samples per second), and then generates MIDI commands that are sent over a USB-MIDI adapter. I could use a microcontroller for this, but it's kind of convenient to be able to plug other USB-MIDI devices into it and have it work, and to be able to run a Linux-based synthesizer locally if I want. (I've been planning on using a Teensy for the next version.)

oddsockmachine 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this, it's great to see your process. I'm working on something vaguely related, a grid-based synth-controller/sequencer with a bunch of i2c shift registers and laser cut hardware. I've been thinking about building a pressure-sensitive hex-layout keyboard next, you've given me a bunch of ideas and inspiration.
- elihu 7y ago
  Thanks. Pressure sensing is actually pretty simple and cheap, unless you have a really large number of inputs (like I have). I was planning to switch to a matrix layout in the next version to reduce the number of ADC chips I need, but then I'll have to figure out how to mitigate ghosting. I haven't used any of Sensitronic's producs, but they do have a lot of good information on their site about the various ways to use force-sensitive resistors.

cameron_b 7y ago

I have a pair of Pi Zero Ws set up as timelapse cameras that I keep in the garden - Cucumber vines and flowers opening is pretty interesting at 1 frame per minute I recently did a project with a pair of RPi 3b+ and cellular modems as construction cameras. I set up RetroPie on a 3b+, but it wasn't enough for the N64 games my wife and I wanted to play the 4 could change that Currently my security cameras are recorded using Orchid VMS on an Odroid XU4 ( Cloudshell with 2x 4T SATA) Its a great little tool for learning Bash, and groking your systems - testing portability? - without invoking AWS resources.

jwong_ 7y ago
What do you use for the camera? I have some plants I'd like to monitor but the cameras I'd use always ended up dying due to the heat.
- cameron_b 7y ago
  one is the latest Pi camera, I also got one of the m12 mount cameras that use the same interface. I have a wide angle lens that has some distortion, but its a nice look for some things. I use a little box that I glued a tripod mount to, keeps the rain out.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jsilence 7y ago
What is your take on the cloudshell? Genuinely curious.
- cameron_b 7y ago
  Its a great little box. I have 2 or three cameras recording 24x7, a large chuck of the spinners is a Samba share, and Webmin tells me that I'm usually at 10-20% cpu and 25% memory. I've got an SSD connected to USB also, and it really makes the spinners feel slow ( WD Red Pros ) but that's mostly because they spend a lot of time idle and the first access is delayed. Of course it isn't perfect. It holds on to dust a bit too well, and it isn't super easy to connect another USB device once you get it all dressed in place. I don't use the screen. I did at first, but I'm not black-belt level at managing HDMI devices and it doesn't present as much value as the light pollution it causes. The RockPro64 would probably best it in most tests, but I already had the Cloudshell. I have dreams of incorporating it into an all-ARM Linux domain classroom.

nategri 7y ago

Current and former use cases: 1.) Arcade emulator box for a custom control panel I made 2.) Host machine for a twitter bot 3.) Octoprint server 4.) Virtual disk drive for an Apple II computer 5.) Internet connection quality monitor

h4waii 7y ago

1x Raspberry Pi 3B+ running OctoPrint, velcro-attached to my printer. 2x Raspberry Pi 2B running OSMC (with Kodi) for streaming from NAS to office TV and living room TV. 1x Raspberry Pi Zero W running OSMC (with Kodi) for streaming from NAS to bedroom TV. Provided HEVC H265 decoding works as it should, I suspect I will eventually upgrade all 3 of these to Model 4. They're great for a media center -- low power, small, and provide a local-only player for TVs I don't want to connect to any network. Also have 2 OG B+ models that sit in a drawer unused, since they don't have enough power for the above tasks.

dokument 7y ago

- Hosting personal website from my DMZ at home. - SDR and packet radio (Direwolf) projects - Kodi - rpi zeroW with usb serial for connecting back to my house from work/travel. I had more projects, but I've been able to replace them all with ESP8266's. Rpi is overkill to do simple things like toggle a gpio pin or take temperature readings. Use it if you have it, but it's nice freeing up extra rpi's with a $2 ESP.

inson 7y ago
I am planning to build Voip server using raspberry pi. Any idea how to start with this?
- mytdi 7y ago
  Take a look at RasPBX (http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org).

vs4vijay 7y ago

I have setup RetroPie on my Raspberry Pi....

localhost 7y ago

I use a RPi Zero W to run DakBoard: https://dakboard.com/site https://dakboard.com/site which my family uses to organize our life. I'm planning on adding another Pi as a Pi Hole device as an experiment in parental controls via low TTL values to provide scheduled access to specific DNS names. For example, my kid gets distracted beyond all that is reasonable by Discord and I'd like to let him use Discord, but only at specific times. Anyone with an interest in this, please let me know!

codealchemy7 7y ago
You can probably run it on the same Pi Zero using screen? Am not sure if it will have enough juice to run both though.

guggle 7y ago

I have 2 Pi3. Nothing special, one is for retrogaming (recalbox), the other is for files server / backup (raspbian).

hawaiian 7y ago

Hack NASA, mostly. Also it makes a great pihole and man-in-the-middle for phone apps.

auiya 7y ago

RetroPie to run video game console emulators and MAME. Maybe the new version can finally run a proper N64 emulator?

michelb 7y ago

I made a fairytale phone as a present for a colleague's kid. I played with Arduino's before and this was my first Pi project. Pretty fun to do. Roughly followed this tutorial: https://www.instructables.com/id/Fairytale-Phone/ https://www.instructables.com/id/Fairytale-Phone/

Rebelgecko 7y ago

Use a small software defined radio to listen to ADS-B messages (real time airplane telemetry— even with a crappy $10 USB SDR dongle I can sometimes see planes that are 100+ miles away) Host my website (if I ever got any actual traffic it might be a problem, but since 99% of the traffic is me it's ok) Various web scraping/archival tasks

KingFelix 7y ago
I have been working on my own hosting as well and I wonder where the tipping point is, and if it's in regard to multiple users at once, or just consistent website hits?
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  For my use case (almost entirely static content), I think the bottleneck is SD card IO. I can handle at least a dozen hits per second no problem though

johnpowell 7y ago

Pi-hole and Syncthing. And I have Apache installed that just spits out a list of upcoming Doctors appointments since I have a few of those a week and they frequently change. I don't drive and my sister drives my to appointments so it helps her keep track of things.

diarmuidc 7y ago

1x RP3 running OSMC https://osmc.tv/download/ https://osmc.tv/download/ 2x RP2/3 with HiFi Berry DAC driving an amp. https://www.picoreplayer.org/ https://www.picoreplayer.org/ connecting to http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Logitech_Media_Server http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Logitech_Media_Server 1x RP2 running PiHole and Apache + Owncloud 1x RP3 running RetroPie The OSMC and music players get daily use and have been in use for a few years

aylmao 7y ago

I haven't built it yet, but I want to buy some clickable rotary encoders, some knobs and build a light switch for my smart lights. A knob you can click to turn the lights on or off, and turn to control the brightness. A knob you can click to toggle between "natural light" and "color", and turn to control either the warmth or the hue. Not sure if I need a whole Pi for this or if I should attempt it with something more bare-bones, but that's the project I have in mind.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

I think I'm just going to nope out of this one before the over-engineering makes me want to burn the world.

GuyPostington 7y ago

1x 3b+ Retropi cabinet 1x 3b+ Prometheus metrics scraping + grafana 2x 3b+ Volumio

JudgeWapner 7y ago

* DHCP server for my LAN * DNS server including pi-hole * headless bittorrent client (transmission daemon) * NFS and miniDLNA media server * git remote

NortySpock 7y ago

I've got a RPi 2 running PiHole and a SAMBA server for a bit of in-home file-swapping convenience. ("Just throw it on the server and I'll pull it from there!") Currently my problem is that samba will fail to write files greater than around 100+ MB uploaded to the server. (Writing to a USB drive). It still handles multi-gigabyte downloads ok. I've been able to work around it with SFTP uploading, so it's just a minor annoyance, but I wish I knew what was going on.

KingFelix 7y ago
I have mentioned this is a few comments, check out the RockPro64, its got 6 core processor 4gb ram, and runs Dietpi. It has a PCIe port, you can install 2 sata drives. I just installed an SSD and it's awesome so far. https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/ https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/ 80 bucks for the 4GB, includes all the stuff on the new pi though. Interested to see how the pi4 stacks up

adrianrocamora 7y ago

2 RPis running Octoprint for the 3D printers 1 RPi connected to the laser cutter which I'm currently fixing 1 RPi that I take with me and connect to from my phone through ssh (moving to mosh and a Bluetooth terminal when I get the chance) 1 RPi that I leave in the lab so people can play with it with numpy/scipy/octave 1 RPi that I'm setting up with something like Jellyfin for my home media server

plicense 7y ago
If you don't mind me asking, which laser cutter do you have?
- adrianrocamora 7y ago
  Hey, some random Chinese one from Alibaba that we assembled. It works great but we are using LaserWeb on a PC and I want to have the RPi handle it.

Isamu 7y ago

Stepper motor control - I use the Adafruit DC & Stepper HAT https://www.adafruit.com/product/2348 https://www.adafruit.com/product/2348 Pretty easy to use, so far I like it.

forinti 7y ago

1 runs RISCOS so I can run old beeb games on and emulator; 1 keeps a log of temperature/pressure/humidity using sense hat; 1 has a backup of my photos on an external hd (and also has an sds011 dust sensor (https://github.com/glgraca/sds011 https://github.com/glgraca/sds011). But my best project has been a picture frame using a Pi Zero W that receives photos via Telegram. My kids' grandparents have this also and they love it (https://github.com/glgraca/PiFrame https://github.com/glgraca/PiFrame). I once took one on a holiday to watch Netflix at night.

bloopernova 7y ago

I have a Pi3 in a case that looks like a NES. I'm running RetroPie on it with a few ROMs I've found around the internet. It works pretty flawlessly. When the pre-order frenzy for the Pi4 has died down, I'm going to buy a 2 or 4GB model and use it to replace the old and slow crappy Windows 10 box we're using to stream Amazon Prime stuff to our TV.

linuxguy2 7y ago

I use it to take up space in my drawer of useless electronic stuff because I can never find a combination of power supply and SD card that doesn't eventually end up corrupt and unbootable.

pnutjam 7y ago
pxe boot
arbitrage 7y ago
You could try not buying cheap components. Storing it in a drawer probably doesn't help either.
- icebraining 7y ago
  My drawers have been pretty good on my electronics. Where do you store them?

mindcrime 7y ago

I have one set up with the RetroPi distribution, that I carry around with me, along with two USB game-pad controllers, so I can engage in retro-gaming wherever I'm at (assuming there's an HDMI display available). I'm also dabbling with embedding one in the gutted out shell of an old boom-box, and making it a portable Alexa-like "smart speaker" of sorts. Looking at using something like Mycroft[1] or something of that ilk. But outside of running Mycroft or whatever, I want to load this thing down with sensors (microphone, webcam, GPS, SDR, accelerometer, temperature, humidity, ultrasonic, infrared, whatever I can) and stream the data to a server where I can do more intensive AI related work. The idea is that this thing is the front-end to experimenting with "embodied AI" and having an AI "thing" that can really sense and experience it's environment. This whole thing is very incipient, but I'm looking at seeing what I can do with something like OpenCOG, or SOAR or ACT-R, coupled with various ML techniques, to give this thing some level of smarts. [1]: https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/

felepeg 7y ago

3 rpi w 8mb camera to create a HD CCTV. 2 rpi to serving to 2 viewsonic touch screen 1 backing up PROD server

mpettitt 7y ago

I have one running pi-hole and Ubiqiti controller (powered by my router's usb port), one sitting under the TV running Kodi connected to a NAS, avoiding the need for discs (big plus when you have small children), one sat next to an old hi-fi which also links to the NAS and lets me stream music to the hi-fi, and a couple of older ones which aren't connected to anything having been replaced with newer models. Oh, and a Zero, which I've never found a use for.

covercash 7y ago
I also do the PiHole + Ubiquiti controller w/ PoE, it’s a cheaper and more robust solution to the CloudKeys!

zadler 7y ago

I have one with a DAC running shairport-sync to recieve audio from iPhone and one running pihole.

gensynackbar 7y ago

One RPi 2 for RetroPi, one RPi 3 for PiHole & PiVPN and one RPi 3 running motioneye as a security camera.

el_benhameen 7y ago

I love and hate this question! I've always been curious what others do with them, but I just convinced myself not to buy a 4 and I'm sure this thread will give me reason to reconsider. -1x Raspberry Pi Zero W in my garage running my drip irrigation (a relay board connects it to standard 24V irrigation solenoids) -1x Raspberry Pi 3 B+ in my office running a dynamic dns script and sitting behind a forwarded port for easy sshing. I have also used this to play with pihole and Apache Guacamole, plus whatever other networking stuff sounds interesting -1x Raspberry Pi Zero W hopping between my garage and car running a program that collects and displays OBDII and GPS data -Nx of most other Pi revisions collecting dust in my closets and storage areas. They're cheap enough that I've compulsively over-purchased them over the years...

myhay 7y ago
>>1x Raspberry Pi Zero W hopping between my garage and car running a program that collects and displays OBDII and GPS data This is what I also want for my car. I am planning to collect the GPS and car data and answer the eternal question I have .. Which road to work is more efficient in time and gas. :)
- knd775 7y ago
  Why do you seem to be shadowbanned with two comments? Your first comment was dead before I vouched for it, too.
  - myhay 7y ago
    To be honest I don't know... I'm usually just reading on HN, nothing else...
- prometheus76 7y ago
  I tried something similar and was astonished at the amount of variance caused by stoplights and weather. Because of that, it's hard to get a good dataset for comparison. In the end, because of the variance caused by external factors, there was no clear winner in my case, so I now use an app from random.org to flip a coin and follow the results accordingly. That's not because either way is better, but this way if I have a long delay for some reason, I can blame it on a bad coin flip.

callahanrts 7y ago

I have one set up as a sprinkler timer (https://github.com/callahanrts/sprinklers https://github.com/callahanrts/sprinklers). Scheduling my sprinklers with cron jobs gives me a lot more flexibility over water times. It also runs a local webserver so I can turn a zone on for just a few seconds when I'm fixing a leak.

atomi 7y ago
You should check out Open Sprinkler. I've got mine running on a Zero W in a docker container and it's been solid.

sawmurai 7y ago

One raspberry pi to water the plants on my balcony every night at 4am

jandrese 7y ago

I have one hooked to a RTL-SDR that pulls down Earth snapshots from NOAA weather satellites.

jquinby 7y ago

Pi3 runs piaware (aircraft tracking via rtl-sdr), pivpn, and pi-hole. Another Pi Zero runs an RF hotspot for ham radio stuff.

andrey_utkin 7y ago

Wearable computer with head-mounted display (Vufine+) and one-handed keyboard+joystick (Twiddler 3).

joemi 7y ago

My work has a really old phone system which I became the admin of. I discovered it had an audio input for Music-On-Hold, so I set up a spare RPi Zero that I had as a music player so that we'd have hold music. Low effort but wonderful improvement for work. Every now and then I go back and tinker with it to improve it a bit. (Next step is to make it controllable via a web interface.) I have a RPi 3B+ that I use for some emulation, though I hardly ever play with it. Setting it up was plenty interesting, though. And I have a Zero and a Zero W that I use for random tinkering/testing, both semi-permanently attached to a breadboard for ease of use. (I've got a big list of projects I'd like to try or develop, but the above are the only things I've done so far.)

youeeeeeediot 7y ago
Did you also acquire an ASCAP/BMI license for the music-on-hold? A lot of people are unaware that is classified as a public performance of the music and requires a license. Unless you are playing royalty-free music, in which case you are fine.
- joemi 7y ago
  I purposefully sought out royalty-free music. As the person who set it up, I did not want to risk being culpable for anything. (When it was first set up, my boss kept requesting that I add various catchy songs he heard on the radio to it, and I kept having to explain it's not legal.)
  - knd775 7y ago
    I use the hold music that zendesk made. I think it's pretty neat. I doubt anyone really loves it, but no one seems to dislike it.

whalesalad 7y ago

For a while I had a doggy puppy cam running with a real old Pi. Just grabbed a 3b+ to use as a dedicated Pihole DNS server for my home network.

ddmma 7y ago

- MagicMirror - Nodejs IoT Azure Gateway - Lamp server for Greenhouse

spiderfarmer 7y ago

I have 4 raspberries running 24/7: - 2x Raspberry PI 3B+ in my office running 2 custom dashboards with info related to my web projects. One also runs Homebridge. - 1x Raspberry PI 3B+ running pivpn.io - 1x Raspberry PI X running an energy monitor (bough it as a kit I threw my first Raspberry Pi in the trash just last week.

sjs382 7y ago

I have 4 running at home as servers: - an OctoPi server, which allows me to manage my 3d printer remotely. - a VPN - a Plex Server, serving media to my TVs and phone. I just ordered the new 4GB Pi4 to replace this one. I’l probably re-purpose it as an OctoPi-like box for managing a CNC. - a seldom-used retro gaming box, that’s actually been mostly by a hacked Playstation Classic

_zachs 7y ago
Would you mind going into your Plex server setup a bit? I tried using a Pi before but could barely get it to trasncode anything, and playback was miserable. Now I'm using a Kimsufi server, but I'd prefer to have a locally running server (that isn't my main PC) as my Plex media server
- thedanbob 7y ago
  I'm using a NUC rather than a Pi for Plex, but I avoid transcoding on the server by just transcoding everything up front. Nearly every client these days can play H.264 natively.
- sjs382 7y ago
  If you have total control of the media files and the clients, you can avoid transcoding altogether. Everything on my server plays on all of my clients without transcoding. From what I understand, an “Atomic Pi” is inexpensive and can handle a few transcodes at once, if that’s a requirement of yours.

milofeynman 7y ago

I have one pi3b+ running Dark Ice transmitting my local police scanner to broadcastify. I built it manually on raspbian and it was a bit of a pain to get setup.

joaomoreno 7y ago

I got it running an OpenVPN server, love it!

RubberShoes 7y ago

I run a grid of about 250 Pi 2 and 3s across several offices and datacenters. They are the backbone of our graphics playback system (i.e. slates) and low latent IPTV system. Users can subscribe to any channel necessary without expensive re-encoding or RF antenna systems. I absolutely love them and 4k60 HEVC is a huge upgrade for the 4!

elcomet 7y ago
Wouldn't it be less expensive and simpler to buy a few real servers ?
- RubberShoes 7y ago
  Not at all. $35 for a pi and $200 for HDMI>SDI converter is significantly cheaper than any media server with that many broadcast outputs. For IPTV - each TV needs a decoder. Hard to beat $35 per set. Plus running our own stack means we can tune for latency unlike an app on Roku/ATV
dredmorbius 7y ago
Nice. I'm looking at a streaming media system of some sort which repurposes existing audio hardware where possible. This turns out to be ... somewhat frustratingly difficult. There are numerous Bluetooth-based systems, some WiFi-based ones. The hard part is sorting out the interface to control the system -- there's nothing quite so frictionless as either on-device controls or a remote, though going with an iPad or cheap tablet seems the best option.
cameron_b 7y ago
Tell us more! My team is currently looking for a digital signage option that would include cable/IPTV of some variety.

bmurphy1976 7y ago

At home: emulating old games, wifi hot spot (not needed so much these days) for hotel rooms with wired internet, and a plex server to serve videos to the kid's iPads in the car during road trips. At work: show Grafana dashboards on our 4k monitors. Currently using model 3 which doesn't like 4k so much. I'm looking forward to upgrading to the 4 in this case, see if they are more reliable. The 3's like to crash/reboot periodically and really struggle to drive the 4k display at a decent speed.

smush 7y ago

Pi Zero W running Pi Hole Besides having to hit the reload button 10 times day or so, it works a treat

inson 7y ago

I haven't used RP before but I am planning to get one and use it as Voip server. I wanted to start with blogs but most of them are outdated.

KingFelix 7y ago

- pi hole - NAS - Plex server working on super interested in the work Nick Busey has been workingon HomelabsOS tons of cool stuff, lots of awesome software to install. I have been enjoying the open source community a lot lately https://gitlab.com/NickBusey/HomelabOS https://gitlab.com/NickBusey/HomelabOS

jsight 7y ago

I use one running OpenWRT as a router. Its an old 3B, so it barely keeps up now that our internet has been updated to 100Mbps. It will soon be replaced, possibly with a pi 4. Of course, it also runs some other things. I have OpenVPN running on it as well as a little nginx instance that I can use for reverse proxying if need be. And the wifi turned out to be surprisingly solid as a (slow) access point, so I have sometimes used it as a Internet of Things Access Point with routing rules to keep all of those devices off the internet. Its a surprisingly powerful little network box even with its significant limitations.

yumraj 7y ago
Don't you need two Ethernet ports to use it as a router? Are you using USB as the other Ethernet port?
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Any two interfaces. Ethernet+wifi is enough. (Technically, RPi's integrated ethernet port is also connected over USB) I have once seen a single interface both for external and internal network, but that was an abomination.
- jsight 7y ago
  Yes, you do need two and it does significantly limit throughput since both the internal and external Ethernet adapters are routed through the same USB bus. The 3B seems to top out at about 90Mbps. I'm not sure what the throughput on a 3B+ would have been, but I'm sure it would have been much lower than its maximum of ~270Mbps. Having said that, much of the US is restricted to <100Mbps internet and there are some nice advantages to having a relatively powerful little computer running right at the edge.

zantana 7y ago

I was bullish when I got my first Pi to run Home Assistant (before hass.io), but got discouraged when the sd card failures were gas-lighting me by silently reverting my code changes. That and the lack of hardware clock hampering some of the diagnostic tools I usually use, kept me sticking with VMs on a NUC and a fanless Celeron for Kodi for my main compute uses. In time I have gotten more Pis, but mainly for hardware aided projects such as the Pidp/8: https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8 https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8 The rejuvenated Nabaztag: https://www.ulule.com/le-retour-du-nabaztag/ https://www.ulule.com/le-retour-du-nabaztag/ The seasonal Xmas tree hat: https://thepihut.com/products/3d-xmas-tree-for-raspberry-pi https://thepihut.com/products/3d-xmas-tree-for-raspberry-pi And a Mycroft Mark I: https://mycroft.ai/mark1/ https://mycroft.ai/mark1/ which is Pi based inside and the only one these projects which is always powered on. The 4 seems like it may finally have the horsepower to make me try to give it a go again and possibly replace my various x86 pucks as they age out.

avh02 7y ago
oh jeez the SD card story just gave me flashbacks. I changed networks (uni to home) and the RPi running pihole would constantly keep my uni DNS settings after a restart. Took me a good few hours to figure it out given that I thought the DNS settings were getting copied in from elsewhere on startup. I think i finally figured it out after i re-installed rapsbian from scratch and to my horror was booted in to the old system. PSA: Bad SD card can make you feel crazy.
- wil421 7y ago
  The SD card was failing to write? It would have blown my mind if I reinstalled raspbian and the old config popped up. I’ll have to keep this in mind.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    I had an SD card once that would not fail to write (i.e. kernel does not show write errors) but when you read back it gets the old data. Tried it on multiple operating systems with the same behavior. It was a more expensive SD card because I see more issues with cheap ones. But it seems to me that SD cards suck at all price brackets. Maybe even some of the expensive ones are counterfeit?

advertising 7y ago

We used a few to power kiosk touch screens and other commercial display applications using network broadcast video. Made a seven screen display each with their own pi that sync’d individual videos running on each to create some video art pieces. Also made a bullet time rig with 15 pi’s and each with their own webcam. There was a guy who did this already with lots of documentation but using his own pi-interface hardware he created. We did it without the pi controllers.

tylerjaywood 7y ago

I have it set up to run a project where a subreddit has control over the watering of a live plant in my apartment. The pi runs a reddit bot that reads the votes, and can switch on a pump to water. It also collects data about sunlight, moisture, temp and humidity to help inform the decision about watering. Despite many people's preconceptions about the goodness of the internet, I must admit that they do a wonderful job caring for my plant! website: http://www.takecareofmyplant.com http://www.takecareofmyplant.com subreddit w/ voting: http://old.reddit.com/r/takecareofmyplant http://old.reddit.com/r/takecareofmyplant

consumer451 7y ago
This is one of the coolest uses of reddit/community sites that I have ever seen. Out of curiosity, how did you come up with this idea?
- tylerjaywood 7y ago
  Trying to impress a girl with my plant-keeping abilities ;) --We had a collaborative message thread reminding everyone to water our plants based upon a set schedule which I was going hook up to a pump to automate, and at the time Twitch Plays Pokemon was a big thing, so I just kind of combined the two ideas. If you have interest in doing something similar, come check out the subreddit and feel free to DM me on reddit or twitter. Always happy to talk about plants and automation
  - rishiloyola 7y ago
    So finally did you impress that girl or not? :D
    - tylerjaywood 7y ago
      No... but some people on the internet thought it was cool, so I can live with that :)
      - 7y ago

orpheline 7y ago

One Pi 3 running Pi-hole: One Pi 3 hosting a Picroft instance; One Pi 3 with a camera to experiment with simple video capture; One Pi 3 and several Pi zero W's on a custom network ( the Zero's act as temperature sensors in different rooms, reporting back to the Pi 3 as a control node; eventually it will be running our HVAC).

hsnewman 7y ago

Mine runs my game http://decwars.com http://decwars.com (or telnet decwars.com 1701)!

mhandley 7y ago

One runs CUPS and is my printserver for an ancient but very reliable HP laserprinter. One is our Internet radio in the kitchen. One Pi 3 with a PiNoir infrared camera is used in a home-made camera trap for recording the local wildlife. Two Pi Zero Ws are used in my son's high altitude balloon cosmic ray high school experiment, recording video, and reporting GPS altitude and Muon count rates via 50bits/sec RTTY. One is used in a beetbox I built for a BBC TV show. Not this one, but pretty similar: https://newatlas.com/beetbox-vegetables-musical-instrument/25462/ https://newatlas.com/beetbox-vegetables-musical-instrument/2... Then there's assorted robots, but none of those are currently operational.

oceanghost 7y ago

I have several running 3d printers-- OctoPi or NanoDLP. I've been able to modify OctoPi to run several printers at once, but it is way more work than its worth. I also made a media player for my daughter that has all of her kids shows on it. I designed/printed a case for the RPI+vesa mount. I'm super excited about the new RPI that was announced todayish-- because it has a hardware h.265 decoder meaning, I'll no longer have to transcode some things. I tried PiHole and I really liked it, but it caused some problems with some sites my folks frequent, and it broke mDNS discovery on my network. I may reinstall it and just exempt their devices.

gerpsh 7y ago

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 that functions as a multi-purpose home server (Pi Hole, laptop backups, data scraping jobs, etc). I have another 3 running MotionEyeOS that I keep pointed out the front of my house to catch package thieves.

oulipo 7y ago

Hi! If you are interested in a 100% offline and private-by-design Voice AI, you should take a look at what we are building at https://snips.ai https://snips.ai, it is 100% free for Makers This allows you to do a 100% private Home Assistant, or add voice control to any of your projects :) It works for english, french, german, japanese, spanish, italian, and more coming, and runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 (and iOS, Android, Linux) You can take a look at our blog to see how to get started https://blog.snips.ai https://blog.snips.ai We would love to publish on it what you are building with it!

jaboutboul 7y ago
This would have been more interesting had you highlighted some of the projects your community built and are showcased on aforementioned blog.

khnov 7y ago

pihole, nodered domoticz mosquitto for home automation, plex sonarr bazarr radarr jackett emby deluge for home media server, all in one little rpi3 and dockerized

LameRubberDucky 7y ago

I think I have at least one of every variant. I had fun playing with all of them. But in the end, I wanted to use one for a Linux development machine and it was always just a bit too slow to be useful. This one sounds like it might have just crossed into the lower realm for laptops so I'll give it a try. And yes, I know, using it as a development machine was not really the intended purpose, but a $55 machine is so tantalizing.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I have several * Pie-hole and runs Nagios to collect information about things going on inside the network. * One running a PiDP-11 (pdp 11/70 emulator) as well as providing MOP service to boot my DEC terminal multiplexor (it provides the boot image when the mux comes up) * One is a stratum-1 time server using an Adafruit GPS module with PPS output. This because I got tired of both the reflection attacks and trying to manage ntp access from inside the house to outside. * One runs RasPBX and talks to the VOIP phone that is my home "business" line. * One sits on my electronics workbench and runs OpenOCD and allows BlackMagic Probes to export GDB as a service over the network. That lets me debug from anywhere without burning a USB port or adding additional software. * One runs a very simple time series database and is the collector for IOT type devices that are sending various bits of information (energy use, temp, humidity, particulate levels, etc) * One drives a display which has a dashboard of various things that the others are doing (like Nagios alerts, data trends etc) This one is a candidate for replacement as the 4K monitor would be nice here. * One runs the waveforms live software from Digilent and hooks to an Analog Discovery 2 on my workbench. (scope, logic analyzer, etc) EDIT: And its important to know that I boot them using the network and run them off NFS from a NAS box, the idea being that when they break I can easily swap the CPU part with a new one.

fnigi 7y ago
In term of electricity consumption and maintenance is worth to run so many PIs?
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  The lowest power "x86" server I have found runs at about 30W, that is equivalent to about 8 RasPis (typically about 4W each, the PiDP-11 is an outlier at 8W) in the current configuration, and the RasPis are fairly distributed around my lab which would have to be done with wiring otherwise.
vardump 7y ago
> This one is a candidate for replacement as the 4K monitor would be nice here. You might be able to run 4k display with an old RPi at about 8-10 Hz.

H1Supreme 7y ago

I have a Pi 3 running Kodi, and I have another that I'm using as a border router for a thread mesh network. I'm going to get another at some point to run piHole.

teekert 7y ago

RPi2: Hass.io, switches the lights and reads my electricity/gas usage from mqtt. RPi1B: sends smart energy/gas meter values over mqtt to RPi2. RPi3: Recallbox, mainly for Mariokart 64 and GranTurismo 2 with my son but also does Kodi. Probably will be replaced by a 4 soon :)

matco11 7y ago

1x Raspberry Pi 3 to power a weather station sampling wind direction, wind speed, air temperature, soil temperature, air humidity, rainfall and push data to Weather Underground. 1x Raspberry Pi 3 to teach the kids how to code in Python and do math games.

keybits 7y ago

Airplay server connected to my hifi using https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync Here's a setup guide: https://thepi.io/how-to-set-up-a-raspberry-pi-airplay-receiver/ https://thepi.io/how-to-set-up-a-raspberry-pi-airplay-receiv...

beezlebubba 7y ago

Pi Zero W running Pi-Hole - Pi 3 running Retropie - Rock64 as a shell box/dev box - RockPro64 as an occasional desktop/dev box

guruz 7y ago

We're actually running multiple of them (different generations bought at different times, one is even some similar product) * company ownCloud server * company wiki, company IRC server * private RaspberryMatic instance for doing smart home (HomematicIP) without cloud

babyslothzoo 7y ago

There are tons of great comments and use cases here. Perhaps I'll have to dust off my old Raspberry Pi and repurpose it.

geddy 7y ago

I just use one as a Plex server. Can't beat the cost of running it, which is roughly $6/year worth of electricity if I remember correctly. Previously I was running my Plex server on my gaming rig which cost a relative fortune to have running 24/7.

KingMachiavelli 7y ago
Do you otherwise not leave your gaming rig on? Me and all of my roommates leave our desktops on... they draw about 50-60W so abbout 1.5kWh a day which is less than 15c a day each. Perhaps your conflating the extra cost of the GPU activity incured what actively transcoding files? Which the Pi really can't do so Plex ends up just being a dumb DLNA server.

daxorid 7y ago

1. Buy 8 of them with large-capacity SD cards, hoping to make an awesome Ceph cluster. 2. Build said Ceph cluster. 3. Become disillusioned with both SD and USB I/O. 4. Place all of them in storage. 5. Buy 8 Tinkerboards, hoping to make an awesome Ceph cluster....

megous 7y ago

Networked sound card that can also play by itself via ssh/screen/mpv when the main workstation is down. That was the easiest way to avoid ground loops in my home audio setup.

vonmoltke 7y ago
What software are you using for the virtual sound device, and does said software work with Windows?
- megous 7y ago
  Pulseaudio with network plugins. It does not. Maybe some ancient version does: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Ports/Windows/Support/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Ports/W...

lando2319 7y ago

I have a script check Hacker News every hour for stories on VIM and Tweet them out. Love my Pi. https://github.com/lando2319/HN_Vimmy_Bot https://github.com/lando2319/HN_Vimmy_Bot https://twitter.com/HN_Vimmy_Bot https://twitter.com/HN_Vimmy_Bot

barryfandango 7y ago

Squeakernet FLP is not a cat feeder, it's a feline lifestyle platform. Current features are largely focused on kibble deployment though. https://github.com/buzzcola/squeakernet/ https://github.com/buzzcola/squeakernet/

elitistphoenix 7y ago
You look like the author of this? Could we get some more info on the scale and dispenser please?
- barryfandango 7y ago
  Yes, I'm the author. Happy to share. The dispenser is a "dry food/cereal dispenser" like the kind you would see at a hotel breakfast bar. They can be found on amazon in various configurations. (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=dry+food+dispenser&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=dry+food+dispenser&ref=nb_sb_noss...). A continuous-rotation servo is attached to the crank, allowing the Raspberry Pi to turn the crank to dispense food. The scale is a cheap kitchen scale (also amazon, I think mine cost $9.) These scales contain a device called a Load Cell. I cut the four wires to the load cell (bypassing all the other electronics in the scale) and ran them to an HX711 chip, which can be had for a few dollars. If you google "raspbery pi hx711" you can see the people's instructions on how to make a Pi scale for various reasons (weighing people, luggage, etc.) So the scale, the dispenser, the servo, and Pi Zero are put together with a few pieces of wood. Most of the work has been getting the software side working. Hope this helps!

sdfjkl 7y ago

It used to run kplex to bridge NMEA data (wind speed, depth soundings, boat speed, etc.) from our SeaTalk network to TCP/IP. Now a GL-AR300M does the job though, along with all the Wifi/GSM routing, saving one computer and power (when running strictly off solar and batteries, this matters).

chris-metcalf 7y ago
Have you by any chance documented how you did this, or could you link me to where you learned how to set this up? This is actually one of the projects I puttered on for a long time with one of my RPis (NMEA-2000 to SignalK) but abandoned because I had too many moving parts.
- sdfjkl 7y ago
  Been meaning to blog about it, but not got around to it yet. Essentially it's just a (bunch of) USB-serial converters and the Seatalk data is converted by a Raymarine E85001. If you have N2k, you need a different converter, e.g. Actisense or better yet, a translator to NMEA0183, which is the de-facto standard for NMEA over TCP/IP.
  - chris-metcalf 7y ago
    Yup, I've got an ActiSense NGT-1 that outputs NMEA 2000 PGNs on USB Serial that I can decode with CanBoat: https://github.com/chrismetcalf/canboat-ansible https://github.com/chrismetcalf/canboat-ansible You can tell by the age of the repo that I got a bit distracted... the distraction just turned two years old.

xt508 7y ago

I created an internet-controlled rover, with live camera feed. Tutorial: https://limitos.com/tutorials/rover https://limitos.com/tutorials/rover .

novaRom 7y ago

I block all YouTube ads using PiHole in my local network.

cr0sh 7y ago

I'm kinda concerned by the number of mentions here of using the Pi to run OctoPrint (I think that's right?) to remotely admin and monitor a 3D printer... I've always been of the mind that a 3D printer should never be left physically unattended - even with monitoring (via camera and such), as they can potentially start a fire if something goes wrong (failed print spewing random filament?). Is this a wrong viewpoint? Are there certain failsafes put into place to make the possibility of a fire non-existent? I can think of a few failsafes (fire/smoke detector to shut things down, encasing the system inside a fireproof cabinet, perhaps with some kind of instant extinguisher system, filament/jam monitoring sensors) - are they enough?

limonkufu 7y ago
Most of the 3d printer firmwares can detect heat spikes and stop heating the extruder to prevent fire and you can control your printer's power with rpi with a simple relay circuit. You can also setup a bot with camera to alert you via mail/message/telegram if there is a fire risk. These are the common precautions I have seen people take.
yohann305 7y ago
that's a very good point. Especially because there is a large community of hackers that love tweaking their printer (I'm one of them). Things like using the wrong voltage on a hot bed or fan can start a fire. Here is an example of what this guy had to go through: https://www.thissmarthouse.net/dont-burn-your-house-down-3d-printing-a-cautionary-tale/ https://www.thissmarthouse.net/dont-burn-your-house-down-3d-...
64cde 7y ago
I always think how i would feel about a known fire in my house. Would i leave my fireplace unsupervised for a longer period? Definitely not, and that is the one place that should be fireproof. I use my Octoprint mainly for three things: 1: Controlling the axis for manual bed leveling (yes i level manually) 2: Upload the gcode files to octoprint (no fiddling with micro sd cards) 3: Watching the picam. So i can sit in another room, but so close to hear if a motor jammed or something else.
7y ago

dividuum 7y ago

Not technically my Pis, but I built a digital signage (https://info-beamer.com https://info-beamer.com) product around it. So I enjoy working with the Pi and making a living from it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

everdrive 7y ago

Pihole, Owncloud, Ambient particulate matter sensor.

daltontf1212 7y ago

I'm partial to PiZero/Ws. I have one connected to a big screen TV with a USB stick loaded with home videos playable using omxplayer. I use Raspicast to control the playback using my phone. Also, like using them for projects using Rust.

anfractuosity 7y ago

https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-tree/ https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-... - A little project I created to 'paint' my Christmas tree lights. https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/diy-inline-refractometer/ https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/diy-inline-refractome... - I'm currently working on an inline refractometer using a pi zero to capture the output and attempt to convert to a digital reading. https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/wildlife-camera/ https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/wildlife-camera/ - I've also got a pi zero setup in an IP68 case, with waterproof USB cable, to capture wildlife in the garden. This uses a simple script using picamera, to detect motion and record video, which I then just rsync to my laptop. I tried to use a PIR sensor, but alas the casing seemed to block IR. I'm planning on using a doppler radar sensor instead at some point.

TaylorAlexander 7y ago

With the Raspberry Pi: I've made a four wheel drive robot called Rover that uses brushless motors and 3d printed planetary gears. It's all CC0 open source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwCkX6bLY3E&t=4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwCkX6bLY3E&t=4s https://github.com/tlalexander/rover_control https://github.com/tlalexander/rover_control https://reboot.love/t/rover-and-skittles-cad-design-files-here/171 https://reboot.love/t/rover-and-skittles-cad-design-files-he... https://imgur.com/a/GqXD2Zj https://imgur.com/a/GqXD2Zj I've made a smaller classroom style robot named Skittles that also uses brushless + planetary and is open source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2-zIUY_kww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2-zIUY_kww I taught a robotics class using the robot Skittles, and the students did a great job picking up Raspberry Pi. There's a lot of tutorials on the web they found to do their work! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pql6ZbPVog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pql6ZbPVog I've made a "fake Philips Hue" light out of a SK6812 RGBW LED strip to go with my existing Philips Hue system. That uses this github project: https://github.com/diyhue/diyHue https://github.com/diyhue/diyHue I made a humidity controlled chamber for mushroom cultivation: https://github.com/tlalexander/humidity_controller https://github.com/tlalexander/humidity_controller I've made an RTK GPS system using two raspberry pis and two $75 GPS receivers to make a GPS system that so far looks to be accurate to within a few centimeters (when you have clear sky). http://rtkexplorer.com/how-to/posts-getting-started/ http://rtkexplorer.com/how-to/posts-getting-started/ I replaced our dodgy bluetooth audio sink on our stereo with an Airplay node using this software: https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync I've added a wireless front end to some of my 3D printers using Octoprint: https://octoprint.org/ https://octoprint.org/ What else? Well I just keep going. Professionally I'm a robotics prototyping engineer and I cannot tell you how much joy I get from the Pi and the things I can make with it. :)

philjohn 7y ago

I wrote a small network monitoring system to check jitter, packet loss, RX and TX speeds (single and multi threaded) on a regular basis. Had some troubles with an ISP a while ago and having metrics like this on hand are useful.

agentultra 7y ago

My most recent use has been teaching game development. I have kids and their friends are often around the house. A couple of them asked if I knew how to program games and I've been teaching them using Pico-8. Many of these kids don't have computers at home so as a reward for finishing their first project I'm making them a home console with some RPi's I have laying about and Pico8.

omgmog 7y ago
That's great! Do you have an enclosure design for the home consoles, perhaps a physical pico-8 style enclosure?

Avamander 7y ago

A DNS server, running MyController, serving media in LAN.

supernova87a 7y ago

I don't have a project yet -- but one I'm really interested in is having a Raspberry Pi run and store historical data from an air quality (particle) measurement sensor. I'm hoping to measure how the air quality outside my home (near a freeway) changes during the day and night with traffic, and also how the indoor air quality is impacted. It outputs UART 9600 baud data (https://sensing.honeywell.com/honeywell-sensing-particulate-hpm-series-datasheet-32322550 https://sensing.honeywell.com/honeywell-sensing-particulate-...). Does anyone have a good link to some simple guides / advice on how to run such devices using a RPi? Thanks!

weaksauce 7y ago
Uart is just serial, you’d connect it to your serial pins on the pi and read serial from Linux like normal. Data is whatever the protocol Honeywell is using. Could be any range of things sent in a predictable pattern. Could be timestamp,temp,air quality,status, and then some kind of delimiter like newline or eor. Note the pi devices use 3.3 volts instead of 5 so you have to make sure Honeywell is not sending too much voltage as a logical high. There’s probably an easy way to convert it though using a voltage devider. How much do those sensors cost?
- klodolph 7y ago
  Minor clarification: UART is “just serial” but when people say “serial” they usually mean RS-232 or RS-422, and these don’t use 0V / 5V like you would for 5V logic. They use anywhere from 3-25V signals, with positive voltages for zeroes and negative voltages for ones. Your PC, if it has a serial port on it, probably sends around +/- 13V (this is typical, IIRC). So don’t hook up 5V logic parts to a serial interface. If you look at RS-232 interface chips they have integrated charge pumps and external capacitors to generate the Tx voltages from Vcc.
- weaksauce 7y ago
  actually I looked at it again and the honeywell uses 0-3.3vdc so you should be ok to use that directly. (obviously double check before wiring) you need to setup the device by sending a few packets to enable sensing/auto-sending of data that is a particular 32byte structure.

lucb1e 7y ago

I will use my first one to power a hard drive that I leave with family or friends. They'll have a small box (mind the inclusion of an external hard drive, still a relatively small box) with my off site back up, and I could host the same for them. This is after a failed plan to use it for Android TV (my girlfriend made the mistake of picking a WebOS TV and I made the mistake of thinking it wouldn't be so bad). The old one was just a little too slow and only did full HD (honestly, it's fine, but if you have a 4k TV it feels kinda silly). Now that the pi4 has a bunch more power and can do 4K at 60Hz, there is another chance for this! I'm also toying with the idea of using it for sensors. Battery powered air quality sensor to see along my walking route (there is a narrow, busy car passage that I'm curious about), or maybe measuring things like electricity or heater usage in realtime. Having a graph showing you when it gets used a lot might help identify some easy wins, since walking to the basement to check the meter is a little cumbersome. But those are just ideas.

cameron_b 7y ago
Regarding your mutual backup idea, I love this and I've wondered why this hasn't taken off as a Thing in response to how many of us are untrusting and DIYers in this era of cheap storage and bandwidth.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  Indeed! I'm not sure why I don't already have three hard drives from friends, it's 10x cheaper than S3 or Backblaze B2 or any such thing. I've had this idea for years, but seeing that someone else built exactly this[1] while also having time for it soon gave the idea another push. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7rjcdn/home_made_non_gmo_cruelty_free_offsite_backup/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7rjcdn/home_ma...

rubberyCycle 7y ago

I use it to automate my weed garden in my closet. It turns on and off the LED lights everyday and waters my plants with a pump based on the moisture level of the soil. I measure the moisture level through a moisture sensor. Weed is fun.

nullbyte 7y ago
This is why NASA needs to get rid of their esoteric drug screening practices. Our space program needs more stoners!
xyzwave 7y ago
Have you looked into nutrient sensing at all? I’m curious if/how others are tackling this.

undersuit 7y ago

I have a RPi2 running as an NFS server. I have a RPi0W with a camera streaming video to said NFS server. I have a RPi1(256MB) in the bathroom streaming music from the aforementioned NFS server. I have a RPi0 attached to the USB port of my router running PiHole. And then I have a shelf of other Pis doing nothing, but you know, one day I will finish all those projects...

dibarra21 7y ago

I have several RPI... I have one that controls the roof of my remote astro observatory, using some level converters drives relays to control two whinchs... When I have to open the roof I launch a python script. I have also another controlling the supplies of the mount, telescope, camera, focuser... These pi's are really realiable (I use Raspian, no X)

dw0rm 7y ago

Currently using Raspberry Pi to expose the speakers through the AirPlay protocol, since my AirPort Express died.

robreilly 7y ago

I'm Dr. Torq and have a Raspberry Pi in my Steampunk conference badge. Use it during my tech talks. I walk into the room, power down the badge, plug in the HDMI, power up the badge and run my slides with a nano-keyboard/mousepad and LibreOffice. Works great. When I'm walking around a show, the badge displays a little promotional video on it's 3.5" touch-screen. Runs on a big cell phone power pack, in my pocket. See my gadgets and hacker articles at https://thenewstack.io/author/rob-reilly/ https://thenewstack.io/author/rob-reilly/.

MrZongle2 7y ago
Wow! That's a heck of a rabbit hole I fell into there. Lots of cool stuff there.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Nothing yet, though I'm looking at possible projects. The router and modem both run OpenWRT, which addresses any number of basic sins one might hope for, including adblocking, firewalling, and media server. I am looking for options to provide streamed media over existing audio equipment in the flat. This might be applied to a media library (DLNA audio and video), podcasts, Internet radio, and borrowed items from libraries (local, online). There's a set of devices which offer to talk to local audio equipment, much of which costs as much, and often several times more than, a RaPi. Seems that a full SoC system might be the better option, particularly if WiFi and Bluetooth are built in.

bravura 7y ago

What I would pay for is: A preconfigured raspberry pi, maybe with case, that automatically saves multitrack audio from a USB card. When you plug it into a Soundcraft Signature MTK audio interface (USB soundcard), at boot it waits for sound and reads all the live input channels and saves them to disk. That way, we could record the full multitrack of our sessions very easily, and not necessarily need to have a laptop computer involved. Edit: I would also pay for this if it shipped: http://www.samplerbox.org/ http://www.samplerbox.org/ which is a sample-box for a MIDI keyboard. So also taking instruments off a laptop and into a smaller device. I don't know why people don't sell prepackaged RPis for a mark-up for installing software that just boots and has sensible defaults.

Kliment 7y ago
I've done this for clients as part of projects (automated firmware flasher sort of stuff) but never thought of offering it as a service. People definitely do do this (I know people have done for HTPC stuff, and as VPN boxes, and for adblocking) but I haven't seen it at scale. If you're interested, email me and we can look into making it a product.

vitomd 7y ago

A security camera outdoors (connected to another webcam outdoor), when there is motion it will send a request to another indoor raspberry (node server) connected to a speaker and will play the sound of an angry dog. The system is working fine for more than a year without breaks. Raspberry is robust.

sdfin 7y ago
Interesting. Would you recommend some brand of security cameras that work well for this kind of projects. Where I live the more popular brands are Dahua and Hikvision. Maybe I have to look for a certain communication protocol, rather than for a special brand.
- vitomd 7y ago
  In my case the security camera is also a raspberry pi with the camera module (it could have night vision), connected with a webcam logitech c170 (really cheap) and the motion software to detect movement (https://github.com/Motion-Project https://github.com/Motion-Project).
  - erklik 7y ago
    If its a raspberry pi with a camer amodule, then why is there a need for the webcam? Sorry if I am misunderstanding.
    - vitomd 7y ago
      To have 2 cameras. 1 the raspberry pi camera, the other the usb webcam.
BMorearty 7y ago
I made the exact same thing with a Raspberry Pi in 2013. For the outdoors part I used a motion detector attached to an Electric Imp that uploads the message to the Raspberry Pi indoors, which is connected to speakers.

georgeecollins 7y ago

I got an AdaFruit servo hat and I use it to drive my hexapod. I used to use a Propeller and then an Arduino. My next project is to integration some vision recognition into my robot. I am planning on using a Jetson Nano for the vision part, but I believe switching to a Pi for the robot was a helpful precondition. I haven't decided if I will just use the Nano to control the robot or use it as a visual co-processor with the Pi. Old video of my hexapod below. Still works great though, because it is really sturdy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=121DuXM5tYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=121DuXM5tYE

odiroot 7y ago

As I mentioned in another post in here I'm running a 4 Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster at work (based on K3S). At home I use RPi Zero W for controlling my media centre in the living room (Mopidy-based) from my kitchen.

jhc_za 7y ago

One runs pi-hole, and maybe soon will also run pi-vpn. The other runs a small Nextcloud instance that I use for org files and such. In the past I also had magic mirror installed on one and used it as a sort of weather/reddit/news dashboard.

dewy 7y ago

I have three connected in a Spark cluster.

MarcScott 7y ago

I work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, in the Education team. We're always on the look out for new ideas and projects to turn into learning resources. If anyone would like to share their code, wiring diagrams and setup processes, then please feel free to email me. marc@raspberrypi.org

MrsPeaches 7y ago
Thanks for sharing your details! We are working on an educational charge controller for students in sub-Saharan Africa. We are currently using an Arduino but I think the Raspberry Pi would be a goot fit as well. You can read more details on our website: https://localelectricity.org/ https://localelectricity.org/ I'll drop you an email with more details.

mytdi 7y ago

1. RPi 1B (256 MB RAM) as my home phone/voicemail system, using Asterisk PBX (with FreePBX). Have used it since it first came out. 2. RPi 1B+ as a car media server with minidlna using a USB WiFi adapter. 3. RPi 2B as an ownCloud server. 4. RPi 3B as a LibreELEC (Kodi) media (streaming) center. 5. RPi Zero W. No use yet. I have used the 3B for RetroPie as well in the past. I am planing on using a RPi for different kinds of webscraping in the future. I would also like to set up a NAS/backup server.

ordinaryperson 7y ago

Four things: 1. Pihole to ad block ads (useful for phone browsing) https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ 2. Custom Weather conditions dashboard, using Dark Sky's API I'd love to replace the weather dashboard with one of my integrated work / personal calendars so I could see what meetings I have each day but work won't expose that data, claims it's a security risk. 3. Custom NYC subway dashboard, showing me estimated train arrivals for trains at the 2 closest stations. The MTA has free apps which also show estimated train arrivals but only for one station at a time. Also, the MTA's train estimation methodology isn't as accurate as it could be. 4. Retro Pie, to play NES and SNES games https://retropie.org.uk/ https://retropie.org.uk/

aoeuidiue 7y ago
Have you experienced any issues using PiHole? I would imagine some apps etc would go to lengths to prevent their use. But if it works I'll set one up for my partner who plays way too many spammy games.
- ordinaryperson 7y ago
  Two areas where I've seen problems. One, sometimes I want to browse/buy things via Google Shopping (or some other shopping interface) but the Pi-Hole blocks it. Two, sometimes for work I will run a docker-compose script that say, downloads a copy of Puppeteer. For whatever reason the domain seems to be on Pi-Hole's blacklist. Granted I could probably whitelist the domains but that seems like a hassle. It has the ability to disable blocking for periods (like 5 minutes or an hour) but that doesn't seem to solve the above problems. Other than that, it works great. It probably won't affect a regular internet user. But occasionally you can run into problems.
  - nprateem 7y ago
    Maybe you could create multiple wifi networks, one that uses pi-hole and one that doesn't.
- yvan 7y ago
  I have two Raspberry Pi with PiHole (for redundancy) and it works very well. But still find something a bit annoying and there is little we can do about it. 1. YouTube Ads are still showing up (you need to maintain a list quite often to avoid those ads) 2. To maintain the software (update is simple), but you better update and then back up the SD card and replicate it to the second Raspberry Pi. In terms of performance, I have not seen anything blocker, no malfunctioning app or the network getting slower. Time-to-time, I got angry wife that cannot click on ad links. :-)

ridaj 7y ago

* Security camera with motion detection, which uploads clips to my personal Google Drive. * Always-on, ssh-authenticated gateway to my LAN. I used it while traveling to tunnel through and remotely control my desktop computer which had some credentials I didn't have with me.

beachwood23 7y ago
How have you set up your security camera? I'm looking to do this myself!
- ridaj 7y ago
  Used "Motion" for monitoring and capturing interesting video clips: https://motion-project.github.io/ https://motion-project.github.io/ ...combined with rclone to copy those to Google Drive: https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/
chadmeister 7y ago
This sounds awesome! Can you share some code for it?
- ridaj 7y ago
  See my answer to beachwood23. Good luck!

hugg 7y ago

Transmission daemon + Kodi + Running home assistant (just preordered the rpi4 4GB)

bobbylox 7y ago

I used it to make a game about High-Fiving, and I got to show it at GDC! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RGjEkkfuwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RGjEkkfuwA

udia 7y ago

Currently have one Raspberry Pi serving as a home git (Gitea) server, incase a widespread GitHub outage occurs. Good to have multiple repositories and take advantage of the distributed nature of Git anyways. https://gitea.io/en-us/ https://gitea.io/en-us/

JackFr 7y ago

Sits on a shelf and uses the NYC MTA NextBus API and flashes a LED when a bus is 4 minutes away from the stop closest to my apartment.

lordelph 7y ago

I have a pi with a Displayotron HAT which is designed to wake me up with a loud klaxon noise if it detects service outage. It also emits a soft glow to show that all is well. Aside from valuing my sleep, I have a lot of incentives to ensure it never goes off, including the fact my wife says she'll divorce me if she ever hears the klaxon :D

kweks 7y ago

We have over 2000 deployed over Europe in locksmiths, providing a form of key service to the public. Challenges include not DDoSIng our APIs, getting a correct configuration to not nuke SD cards, and ensure that a bad firmware push doesn't knock the network offline.

kalev 7y ago
Any links? I’d love to know more.
- kweks 7y ago
  Sure ! https://parklink.asia/ https://parklink.asia/ https://rebadge.eu/ https://rebadge.eu/ We've got a custom PCB which controls the touchscreen and prehipherals (LF and HF RFID readers), placed in a custom, tough ABS case (locksmiths are full of metal filings, which don't play nicely with electronics...)

Inversechi 7y ago

1 x Pi3 running hassio for home automation 1 x Pi3 running osmc for some media

aib 7y ago

An instrument/sculpture thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZswBIsfhVpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZswBIsfhVpg

chrshawkes 7y ago

I turned mine into an old Atari system.

downtide 7y ago

I bought a Pi 0 W. The USB port failed on it. Sent it back, the second did the same. Booted probably about 10 times in all. That was the end of that.

0xADADA 7y ago

I run https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ on a pi-zero.

Perceptes 7y ago

I have several of them: * 1 original model that runs pi-hole for the household * 1 RPi 3 running RetroPie for emulating classic video games * 1 RPi 3 connected to an official RPi touch screen display that runs a Home Assistant UI * 4 RPI 3s running as a Kubernetes cluster, mostly just for the fun of setting it up, but I have a few odd jobs that run on them, such as chat bots I don't have a picture of the cluster all hooked up, but this is what it looks like without any cables attached: https://twitter.com/jimmycuadra/status/846935997619200000 https://twitter.com/jimmycuadra/status/846935997619200000

diehunde 7y ago
How difficult was to setup the cluster using kubeadmin? did you run into too many issues because memory, cpu, etc?
- Perceptes 7y ago
  It's been a while so the details are not fresh in my mind, but it wasn't the easiest thing in the world. I think most of my trouble came from the general lack of polish on Kubernetes (from a cluster operator's perspective) than from the specifics of the Raspberry Pi. One thing I remember clearly is that kubeadm has completely failed to upgrade k8s from one minor version to the next every time I've tried it. I always end up just saving my k8s resources, blowing away the cluster, creating a new one, and resubmitting the resources to the new cluster.

MrsPeaches 7y ago

Not using the Raspberry Pi yet but have been exploring the idea of using it as a way of delivering our educational content to rural areas of Zambia. Idea would be to provide enough information in a booklet to get students to a point where they can power the pi and then teach them the basics of electronics and coding by building a power monitoring system, with the pi at the heart. You can what we are doing here: https://localelectricity.org/ https://localelectricity.org/

roland35 7y ago

My aspirational goal is to make a "mission control" panel for my kids - basically take a bunch of panel mount buttons and switches and combine it with an old monitor to make a fun toy! The Pi would control the monitor but I will need to add/design an input/output board to handle the buttons and switches.

nurettin 7y ago

I have mine set up as a motion detector, weather display, alert scraper for local gas, electricity and bad weather condition alerts.

kasbah 7y ago

Controlling a precision stage and camera on my 3d-printed microscope. https://openflexure.org https://openflexure.org

tau255 7y ago

I have two Pis currently active: 1. Pi3: media server (minidlna), nfs & samba for backup to usb drive, Pi-Hole, weather station with BME280 sensor and gnuplot for graphing 2. Pi2: wifi bridge for my tv box And two (Pi2 & Pi3) waiting for some use.

cuspycode 7y ago

- Network controller for my latest file server and video NAS, which is based on a USB RAID-1 drive. The box that produces the graphics however is a small Intel-based box (not a NUC though). - Network controller (using CUPS) for a very old laser printer that only has USB. - Various hobby electronics projects like controlling an Arduino robot via photo and ultrasonic sensors and wifi, developing networking software for ESP8266, and various other simple electronics experiments.

secure 7y ago

I control my home automation: https://github.com/stapelberg/hmgo https://github.com/stapelberg/hmgo for sensors and valve drives, https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/tree/master/avr-x1100w https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/tree/master/avr-... controls multimedia devices, https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/tree/master/dornr%C3%B6schen https://github.com/stapelberg/zkj-nas-tools/tree/master/dorn... orchestrates backups. I run one as an appliance hooked up to my document scanner which places the documents on Google Drive: https://github.com/stapelberg/scan2drive https://github.com/stapelberg/scan2drive I run two more for automatically testing new releases of https://gokrazy.org/ https://gokrazy.org/ All of this is implemented in Go on top of https://gokrazy.org/ https://gokrazy.org/, without any Linux distribution in the mix :).

sWallo 7y ago

mostly for running pi-hole as a DNS server for my local network on it.

sequoia 7y ago

I run a plex media server on my 3b+. The server is on the wall below my router (attached via ethernet), a 2TB HDD sits next to the server. I put movies & TV for my kids on the server, then they can watch on one of two TVs in the house via Roku. It's good for getting them off trashy Netflix movies & making classics (or what I consider classics at least) available to them. I chose this configuration rather than running plex in the cloud because a) don't want to pay monthly forever for something I use a few times a week; b) less wasting power and c) this at least theoretically can work during an internet outage (though plex authentication may make this difficult). I configured the HDD to spin down after 20 seconds of no r/w, so the whole thing draws very little power while idling (or so I assume). The major limitation of this setup is that the pi cannot handle video transcoding. As long as I transcode to something the Roku supports natively this isn't an issue: transcode once (on my laptop), put it on the Pi, play whenever. I have yet to script this process but that's my next step in the project. It will probably be a year before I realize any cost savings (a friend pays CAD20/mo for a hosted setup which also handles on-the-fly transcoding), but, well, it's a simple server and I just wanted to do it myself, gosh darn it!

cylentwolf 7y ago
How does the HDD connect to the pi? just via usb in an separate enclosure?
- sequoia 7y ago
  Yes.
treelovinhippie 7y ago
What Plex install guide did you use? Few months ago I tried to install Plex to a pi already running Pihole but couldn't get it to work.
- ric2b 7y ago
  You can run plex via docker, if that's ok with you. But it needs network mode "host"

cronix 7y ago

Some use them to get into NASA, so, pretty useful. > The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) this week confirmed that its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been hacked. An audit document from the U.S. Office of the Inspector General was published by NASA this week. It reveals that an unauthorized Raspberry Pi computer connected to the JPL servers was targeted by hackers, who then moved laterally further into the NASA network. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264774

senotrusov 7y ago

I use Raspberry Pi 2 to synchronize files across my ubuntu/macos/windows machines, backup them into the encrypted backup and then upload that backup offsite. I use syncthing to synchronize files. It's fast, stable, cost me nothing and the only limit I have is the size of my disks. Syncthing is decentralized, that means that two machines have to be powered on at the same time to be able to perform sync. Raspberry Pi allows me to have that always-on machine at home which is small, quiet and unnoticeable in my electricity bill. Syncthing works across internet bypassing NAT thanks to the community-ran relays (I also run one of them). I could take my laptop everywhere and file changes will still reach my Raspberry Pi. I hook up an external Seagate USB HDD and it runs just fine without an extra power source. Syncthing keeps up-to-date copy of all my files on that external HDD. I use borg-backup to take hourly snapshots of my files. Those snapshots are encrypted and I upload them offsite without any worries that some cloud provider could possibly read them. I use rclone for that, it can interface with a number of cloud providers out there. It just take your files and one-way sync them into the cloud. The setup of rclone and borg-backup is not particularly complicated but still requires some time. Directories, encryption keys, periodic jobs have to be configured. I abstracted all that into one script which is a bit opinionated but works for me. That script can be run on Linux on on MacOS. I used my Mac for that before Raspberry Pi. It uses system or launchd to run periodic jobs https://github.com/senotrusov/backup-script https://github.com/senotrusov/backup-script I installed Ubuntu server on that Raspberry Pi to have familiar environment. Sadly Raspberry Pi lacks secure boot and have no internal TPM functionality. My external HDD is encrypted but I can't trust Raspberry Pi to hold the encryption key. In rare event of reboot I have to ssh in and manually enter the LUKS key. This setup is still prone to an evil maid attack as someone could replace or modify the SD card to log that key. That scenario is highly unlikely as I am no particular interest to anyone. What is slightly more realistic is that someone could brake into my house to steal stuff. For that my data is secure as the key is lost the moment you power off the Raspberry Pi. Overall I'm pretty happy with that setup. My Raspberry Pi slowly blinks with it onboard red LED to indicate that all that services run well and alarms me with fast blinks if something is not right.

orliesaurus 7y ago

Smart dashboard for TVs

WoodenChair 7y ago

I run my new daily newsletter (btvdaily.com) from a Raspberry Pi 3. It generates the content and mails it out each morning (via Mailchimp) from my house. The website is not hosted on it though. It also runs a Twitter bot I made that takes a picture of my backyard each morning (@walkburlington).

LarryMade2 7y ago

The best use I have so far is for a local TV station have the Pi using a LAMP stack to: a) a Pubic Service Announcement slideshow it autoboots into chrome and hooks in composite NTSC. Can be remotely managed, etc. b) It also serves the station's website which previews the slideshow in a frame, or has a page showing all the slides. Experience: very resilient just cycle power when problems... but learned the SD card is way too sensitive for power cycling - so now has an external HDD for better recovery. Plan to work on one for data collection/receipt for a local recycler, that one will likely use Python with a touchscreen to collect signatures. This is a big disruption to the POS/terminal market as it gives a very powerful/flexible platform that can be developed/deployed inexpensively, and parts can be sourced easily when HW problems occur.

NegativeLatency 7y ago

I run a print server on one of mine, and shairport for AirPlay compatibility

romtx 7y ago

All four of mine sit on a box of wires and parts, waiting to be used. Have for some time now.

drev 7y ago

Playing with retropie

glaslong 7y ago

So many things! 1. Home Assistant for tying together all the various brands of smart home devices https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/ 2. OctoPrint for managing a 3D printer (also has a home assistant integration) https://octoprint.org/ https://octoprint.org/ 3. Magic Mirror that shows me news, weather, commute time estimate, etc https://magicmirror.builders/ https://magicmirror.builders/ 4. PiHole for blocking all ads on my home network https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ 5. The brains of a toy i hacked apart for a friend's robot fight https://www.facebook.com/RobotRiotCompetition/ https://www.facebook.com/RobotRiotCompetition/ 6. PyPortal Twitter feed on my desk https://www.adafruit.com/product/4116 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4116 7. Server for various weekend web projects

jimmaswell 7y ago

I set up a camera facing the door to the apartment with it but I haven't gone farther with motion detection like I planned to. Also got some IR emitters to try to control the AC unit with it but haven't gotten around to it.

novok 7y ago

I run home assistant, unifi controller and to test out restic backup to my nas. I don’t maintain it that well, right now unifi is crapping out for an unknown reason, but my one access point still works fine.

zachpendleton 7y ago

I have a few: - v3 that runs RetroPie - v2 for PiHole - a zero W with a vibration sensor that I use to text me when my washer is done (turned off the washer's alarm so as not to wake sleeping kids)

jonaswi 7y ago

I live in an apartment with quite strict fire-protection standards. Due to the fact that I have a cat that absolutly loves to go outside, I needed to find a solution for him to get outside without a catdoor trough my door. So I installed a fire-protecion-approved door drive that is hooked to a raspberry pi. Another raspberry pi then analyzes a video stream and detects my cat. If my cat is in the frame for n amount of time, a message is sent to the pi conntected to the door drive and the door opens up slightly for him to get in.

dscpls 7y ago
Wow. I literally just sat down to relax after building a cardboard prototype cat door fitting in my open window in winter. You just made me feel partly inferior, and partly like I'm in good company
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Now check out this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A-Nf3QIJjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A-Nf3QIJjM A cat door that can tell if the cat has a mouse it's going to "gift" to you, and locks to keep the cat out.
  - mavsman 7y ago
    I may now get a cat just to set this up.
  - skydv 7y ago
    awesome, tho I am curious are there easier ways like weighing the cat before and after :) Although he can be wet
Havoc 7y ago
That’s amazing
fdjlasdfjl 7y ago
I could actually use exactly that. Do you have a blog outlining how you did it, or the code on github by any chance?

davidbanham 7y ago

I use it to run my automated watering system in my garden. https://github.com/davidbanham/relay_runner https://github.com/davidbanham/relay_runner I used to use an esp8266 but replaced it with a Pi after a lightning strike destroyed it. The Pi is just so much easier to write software for and it's been no less reliable in practice.

OJFord 7y ago
Why would it be less reliable in theory? The obvious argument against is that it's 'expensive' [relative to what you need], not, I wouldn't have thought, that it's unreliable.
- davidbanham 7y ago
  There's a lot more going on with a Pi than an ESP chip. More bits, more failure modes is my reasoning.

lloydpick 7y ago

2 Pis for dealing with ADS-B (airplane data), one for 1090Mhz, the other for 978Mhz. I could run that on the same one, but seemed easier to just split them up given some of the software is a bit picky with device IDs. The 978Mhz is much quieter than the 1090Mhz, so I also run a private SpyServer (https://github.com/lloydpick/docker-spyserver https://github.com/lloydpick/docker-spyserver) for listening to radio transmissions. 1 Raspberry Pi for a running a very stupid sitcom sound thing. Using a camera it tries to recognise who you are, then play a random sound assigned to you out of a little speaker. Think of like the cheering/clapping when a guest or celebrity enters the room in a sitcom tv show, and replace out the clapping with whatever sound you want.

bardonadam 7y ago
Love the sitcom sound thing!
- bigiain 7y ago
  Me too. I've always though I and my friends should all have individual theme songs that play when they enter the room. Now I have another weekend project...
princekolt 7y ago
This reminds me of this project I saw on twitter a while ago where a small arduino with a motion sensor would play the Seinfeld bass riff every time someone entered a room.
samirm 7y ago
Why do you listen to all these radio transmissions?
- lloydpick 7y ago
  For the airplane data, I always liked browsing sites like flightradar24, planefinder etc, and wondered how they aggregated the data, and it sort of just went from there. I also now send the ADS-B data to open projects rather than commercial only entities. In terms of the random radio transmissions, it was simply because I was already installing the two ADS-B antennas in my attic, and thought I might as well just put up the standard telescopic antenna that came with the USB receivers as well. I'm a newbie in terms of radio, so it's just been interesting scanning the bands to see what you can find and listen to. A future project I have is to try and pick up the 443Mhz transmission from a really simple weather/temperature sensor I got from Walmart a while ago, since apparently that's what it uses to talk to the little base station it came with.

oneplane 7y ago

A Pi for UniFi, a Pi as a print server (older model) for a USB laser printer, a Pi as a print and input server for a thermal receipt printer that only has serial (or a 350$ option for a 10Mbit ethernet addon) + a button to fetch a hotspot code from UniFi and print it for a guest for limited guest access. And a free floating Pi for various functions, sometimes as an I2C board, SPI interface, Scan server, placeholder when one of the others is in maintenance etc.

lxe 7y ago

I’m running a series of spaghetti-code scripts to trigger the lawn sprinkler when a camera detects motion, and notify me with a gif using pushover.

marcuskaz 7y ago
You kids get out of my yard!!

marcuskaz 7y ago

I use my raspberry pi to automatically delete my tweets: https://github.com/mkaz/ephemeral https://github.com/mkaz/ephemeral

kefabean 7y ago

1) barcode scanner to put products in my online supermarket’s shopping cart 2) security cam to do facial recognition and drop me an email 3) general purpose remote control website/api for turning things on/off such as tv, amp, dac (typical things that need hw integration: ir blaster, 433mhz sockets, 12v trigger voltage etc). Recently discovered APIs integrate quite nicely with Apple’s iOS ‘Shortcuts’ app for poor man’s voice control!

cheeko1234 7y ago
You can install home assistant and control 433mhz sockets with "hey siri" since it has homekit. It's super fast (<500ms).

dymk 7y ago

It runs OctoPrint for my 3D printer

aurelian15 7y ago

1. Programming AVR µCs via ISP/SPI 2. Home automation based on a 433 MHz transmitter 3. Media centre 4. Small router bridging from WiFi to Ethernet

brunt 7y ago

1. Telegram chat bot from this rust crate: https://crates.io/crates/telegram-bot https://crates.io/crates/telegram-bot 2. Some web microservices that the chatbot communicates with 3. Pi hole adblocking. This is all on one 3b+ with plenty of resources to spare.

Nican 7y ago

I use to control WS2812 LED strip and synchronize it real time with the music being played in the party room. Also- a PiHole.

elvecinodeabajo 7y ago

I've a Raspberry Pi 3B hosting my NextCloud instance. That's the coolest thing I'm doing now with it.

yellowapple 7y ago

I keep buying them, but so far the only thing I've done with one was years ago when I entered an RPi-powered "pumpkin computer" as the IT department's entry to the company jack-o-lantern contest. I keep meaning to buy a bunch of 'em and build a portable Erlang/OTP cluster. So far I've only done the "buy a bunch of 'em" step ;)

loeg 7y ago

Pi 1 here. Sits on a shelf collecting dust. I use lower power or more specialized micros for actual micro work and old x86 parts for higher performance workloads.

tomxor 7y ago

Turned a Pi 1 into a DHCP server at work to replace failed windows server. Got a Pi Zero at home, but only used it to play with GPIO and i2c, i like to poke around in drivers to get more insight into how different hardware interfaces and protocols work over these interfaces.

farmerbb 7y ago

I use my Raspberry Pi 3B+ as an AdGuard Home server, as an OpenVPN server, to wake my PC via WoL, plus as just a basic Linux box that's on my home network that I can remote into from anywhere.

albemuth 7y ago
> that I can remote into from anywhere I've been looking to set up something like this, do you have a static IP or use an external server you could recommend?
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  All you need is a DNS provider with an API, and a check for external-IP change.
  - farmerbb 7y ago
    That's correct. The one I use is duckdns.org - it comes with a script that you can add as a cron job that updates the DNS record every few minutes with whatever your current IP address is.

Scramblejams 7y ago

IIRC Pi3 gave no access to hardware crypto so using it as a VPN server could be slow. Anyone know if that changes with the Pi4?

pretty_bubbles 7y ago

PiHole... Also I have Transmission handling torrent files for downloading entirely legal movies, and keeps seeding them. I use MiniDLNA to stream them to my TV.

tomweingarten 7y ago

My favorite use is in a photo booth I set up. It controls two cameras (webcam for preview, DSLR for the actual photo -- hopefully the RPi 4 will be me enough bandwidth to drop to just the DSLR), outputs to a printer, and drives a monitor. And the whole thing fits in a nice little suitcase.

outlog 7y ago

I use it with Elixir - https://github.com/nerves-project https://github.com/nerves-project various IOT things - plants, HVAC etc etc for real world: deployed "kiosk"/touch POS using https://github.com/LeToteTeam/kiosk_system_x86_64 https://github.com/LeToteTeam/kiosk_system_x86_64

picantePepper 7y ago

Shameless plug but run a basic weather station (currently in my room until I find a weatherproof enclosure) https://alonsoarteaga.me https://alonsoarteaga.me

ultrasounder 7y ago

In the process of moving our Hardware Test infrastructure(Think Selenium for testing hardware)over from Windows SBC based solutions to a R-Pi-Zero based solutions. Applications range from driving stepper motors, sensors and generating pass/fail results. The inital investment is in porting all the code written for Windows to embedded linux but the investment pays off in the long run in cost minimized by moving away from a Windows desktop. Will do a write up of how i achieved it once i have some concrete results.

jeffdubin 7y ago

Currently: Raspberry Pi 1B+: Streaming radio scanner to Broadcastify Raspberry Pi 2B: Octoprint Raspberry Pi 2B: Signage, looping videos on a 32" TV Raspberry Pi 3B: Duplicity "server" (backup software) Raspberry Pi 3B+: Web dev box Previously: Raspberry Pi 1B: Hylafax server Raspberry Pi 2B: Kodi

wferrell 7y ago
What are you using to play the looping videos?
- dividuum 7y ago
  If you need a professional solution for more than a single screen, consider taking a look at https://info-beamer.com https://info-beamer.com (my companies product). Otherwise omxplayer has a -loop argument IIRC.

jonathankoren 7y ago

mine gathers data from my weather station and uploads it to various places. I’ve been thinking about using for some robotics recently though.

gus_ 7y ago

I've been always fascinated with sunrises and sunsets, so I built a picam to take timelapses: https://hackaday.io/project/28694-yet-another-raspberry-picam/details https://hackaday.io/project/28694-yet-another-raspberry-pica... youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkH0MTHo-LlxOL_W_3Qeq9Q https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkH0MTHo-LlxOL_W_3Qeq9Q https://www.flickr.com/photos/bentretea_picam/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bentretea_picam/

deepsy 7y ago

https://github.com/deepsyx/home-automation https://github.com/deepsyx/home-automation That's what I do :)

harrylepotter 7y ago

Use it to bring Android Auto to my old car stereo: https://medium.com/@bendavey/bringing-android-auto-to-audi-navigation-plus-rns-e-using-a-raspberry-pi-3d7d3bd97d7a https://medium.com/@bendavey/bringing-android-auto-to-audi-n...

Waterluvian 7y ago

I have a wall mounted 20" TV in my garage above the corner of my workbench. Use it to look up stuff or watch how to videos or just play music. I love minimalism and part of my minimalism approach is not having vulnerable things in vulnerable places. So if the Pi gets destroyed because a workshop is fairly volatile, no big deal.

Havoc 7y ago

Experiments mostly. Yesterday I tried steam link. Previously a vpn AP. Also a air quality mon. And a flightaware station. And a file server. ie i Format it quite often and start from scratch

erredois 7y ago
Which sensor did you use to measure air quality?
- Havoc 7y ago
  Don’t recall. Nova something. Like 15 bucks off amazon. Looking at the pictures they all seem to be same thing rebranded. Measures 2.5 and 10. Def works ie reacts to window being opened but I wouldn’t stake my life on accuracy Good for a project though
- Havoc 7y ago
  Right...back on a laptop - I purchased the item linked below. Amazon should have similar for a couple bucks more. Integration part was easily...bit of hackey python does the trick. Noted very slight buzzing sound which was irritating if next to bedstand. Not a major concern. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32606349048.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.8edd4c4dm17zE7 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32606349048.html?spm=a2g0s.9...

chris72205 7y ago

- 1x Raspberry Pi (older, not sure exact model) - exposed to the internet and acts as a bastion host for ssh'ing into other devices on my home network - 1x Raspberry Pi Zero W - monitors several Wemo Insight Switches around the house and turns them on if they are in an off state (if the power goes out, the Wemo switches do not turn back on so I have to do it manually) - 6x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B - running in a k8s cluster (1 master, 5 workers) doing nothing until I can find time to continue working on this project... found out I need to build Docker images on an ARM host so my CI/CD first choice did not work :(

kkapelon 7y ago
I work for Codefresh, a CI/CD solution that has ARM support. Maybe it can help you? https://codefresh.io/docs/docs/incubation/arm-support/ https://codefresh.io/docs/docs/incubation/arm-support/
- chris72205 7y ago
  Nice, I'll have to look into this further!

wolrah 7y ago

I have a bunch of them scattered around my house. 2x LibreELEC media players 1x RetroPie emulation station 1c OctoPrint/OctoPi 3D printer controller 1x Home Assistant automation controller 1x Car PC project 1x retrofitted old alarm clock 1x hosting RTL-SDR stick in attic One of the media centers is actually a Tinkerboard, but that's been annoying due to half-assed support and I'll be replacing it with a Pi 4 as soon as I can get my hands on one.

geophile 7y ago

Stuck a 2TB disk drive on it and I’m using it as an offsite backup server.

abhinuvpitale 7y ago

I have a pi with a small display that keeps generating inspiring/funny quotes from various books that I have read. https://github.com/abhinuvpitale/goodreads-quotes-raspberry-pi https://github.com/abhinuvpitale/goodreads-quotes-raspberry-...

clord 7y ago

I use 2, one controls fans and pumps, linear actuators, and sensors for my greenhouse. The other does likewise (plus heaters and heat lamps) for my chicken coop. I prefer rolling my own to ensure it works without internet.

scottlocklin 7y ago

Stratum-1 time server using a GPS module; was a pain in the neck to set up; reminded me of the old days, compiling kernels on a 386, or building things on Ultrix. Served its purpose for a trading project though. I should probably do something else with it as its been gathering dust for years now.

algaeontoast 7y ago
Could you maybe go into more detail on your "trading project"? Very interested!

janvdberg 7y ago

Mine runs Domoticz. To monitor gas and electricity usage via a USB-P1 cable (which plugs into my meter).

jlarocco 7y ago

I played with mine for a few weeks and got bored with it. It's on my desk here somewhere, possibly still running. I setup a headless Linux distro and tested out the ARM port of SBCL. Not surprising, really, but I was able to setup Emacs, Slime, and SBCL and develop Lisp over SSH pretty comfortably. I ended up writing a Common Lisp binding to WiringPI [0], and then another package which used it to read data from a GPS module [1]. I didn't really have a plan, just seemed interesting. I haven't done much with it since then. [0] https://github.com/jl2/wpi https://github.com/jl2/wpi [1] https://github.com/jl2/pigps https://github.com/jl2/pigps

noise 7y ago

1x Raspberry Pi 3: Retropie powering a converted cabinet 1x Raspberry Pi 3: Home-assistant.io, perennial WIP 1x Raspberry Pi 1b: Prototype of Pandora streaming box w/pianobar and an LCD char display 1x Raspberry Pi 2: WIP for next rev of Pandora box

strags 7y ago

I discovered that my 17-month old son loves to mess with stereo controls. So I bought a few rotary encoders and neo-pixel rings - build a wooden enclosure with a plastic faceplate, and wrote some code to generate fancy light and audio effects when he turns/clicks the knobs. He loves it.

Sileni 7y ago
Watch out, you'll have a DJ before you know it.
1024core 7y ago
I'm thinking of doing the same for my kid. Any photos/description?
- strags 7y ago
  It's actually quite a bit louder than this now. Also, the lights aren't quite as infant-retina-searingly-bright as the camera would have you believe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtE8oE9GOsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtE8oE9GOsM Currently it's still running my test code, which just lets him mess with volume/pan/pitch. I need to get around to writing something a bit fancier. Tech deets: It's just a RPi3 with most of the stuff written in Python. I tried to get a bunch of Python audio libs working, but gave up and wrote my own C++ module for sample mixing. The NeoPixel rings are driven via the SPI output, and the rotary encoders/switches are just hooked up to random GPIOs.
  - syspec 7y ago
    He really does love it. Amazing! Hahaha
  - MrZongle2 7y ago
    That's awesome! Great job!
ryanmercer 7y ago
Tread carefully, you're creating a young Look Mum No Computer! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafxR2HWJRmMfSdyZXvZMTw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafxR2HWJRmMfSdyZXvZMTw

dlevine 7y ago

* A Pi3 running RetroPie. Might upgrade to a 4 if I can find a use for the 3. * An original Pi that I gave to my brother in law because he was interested in setting up a PiHole (he might have used it for RetroPie, though).

alistproducer2 7y ago

I have two. The main reason I love them is I can leave them on all the time using very little power. Our would be surprised how much u can supercharge your home network by having always-on Linux boxes on it. One runs nextcloud and serves as a nas. I use freeddns to give my nextcloud instance a legit URL for free. I use letsencrypt to host my cloud over https, again for free. The other runs emulationstation, deluge (torrent) which only runs when the box is connected to a VPN running on a vps, and serves up my movies and shows via minidlna. I've also got some cool chron jobs that backup important stuff ((encrypted of course) to Google cloud and do some other things. I also serve up a keepass password database via webdav and do some neat stuff regarding keeping my keyfile separate fr my internet facing box but I won't get into exactly how that works.

evancordell 7y ago

I run OSMC[0] which is really just raspbian + kodi + updates. Because it's just debian, I also run homeassistant in a docker container started with systemd. I like this because: - OSMC ensures it boots into kodi and keeps kodi up to date - systemd/docker makes it very easy to manage my homeassistant config by scp'ing a new image over to the pi. Nothing out of the ordinary given the other responses here, but thought I'd share because it's been an especially stable setup for me. [0]: https://kodi.wiki/view/OSMC https://kodi.wiki/view/OSMC

ewoodrich 7y ago

I use a Pi as a bridge to control some lights using an Arduino and a 433mhz transceiver. It has a simple web API that IFTTT hooks into so I can use them with a Google Home.

geerlingguy 7y ago

I play around with K8s on ARM: http://pidramble.com http://pidramble.com It's been a fun hobby project over the past 6 years, and I also do some other things like home environment (temp, PM2.5, etc.) monitoring. I also have a few Pi Zero W's strapped to USB batteries I use for impromptu time-lapses, using a little set of scripts here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-timelapse https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-timelapse I love being able to tinker with software/hardware easily... The Arduino and FPGA's require a deeper investment, and I like how I can do everything I want in Python on a Pi, for more hobbyist projects that don't have more power/processing constraints.

rcarmo 7y ago
Have a look at k3s.io. I love it.

withinrafael 7y ago

I use an older Pi with a USB DAC to bring in audio and data from my radio scanners, for a slow-moving side project. Goal is to mux the audio with time sensitive radio metadata, like talk group and location (surprisingly difficult given messy state of formats, containers and playback options) and deliver this to clients on the network for easy listening and other processing (e.g. speech-to-text, mapping, etc.). Learned a bunch of gstreamer in the past half year, hoping to pick this all back up with the Pi4.

rcarmo 7y ago

I've done digital signage, controlled servos, used them as cameras, the works. Right now I have: - A 5-node Pi 2 cluster running k3s.io (https://github.com/rcarmo/raspi-cluster https://github.com/rcarmo/raspi-cluster), and a separate Pi 2 I use as a Docker build box and local Docker registry. - A Pi 3B+ as a "lab" desktop computer with an USB oscilloscope and FTDI cables to flash ESP8266 and Arduinos - A Lakka.tv arcade/MAME box for the kids with a PS3 controller (no room for a proper PiCade, we just use the TV( - A Pi 3A+ with a mic array for playing around with Google Assistant - A Pi Zero W taped to the inside of my electricity meter trying to estimate power consumption (we have a spinning disk mechanical meter) - Another Pi Zero W that I use to demo Azure IoT solutions - An ODROID U2 (Could be a Pi) running HomeKit and Node-Red for home automation, as well as a bastion container (all dockerized). Edit: forgot about the 3B hooked up to my 3D printer running OctoPi And the list goes on. I have many older Series Bs lying around, and once used one to revive a dead synth whose MIDI keyboard still worked (I set up timidity and a sound font on it and it became the kids' piano). I also ran a Plex server on one until it became obvious that I needed to think about transcoding (but it worked fine for music). You can do a _lot_ with Raspberry Pis, and I fully expect to get a beefy Pi 4 to use as a lab computer. I just hope they also beef up the Zero at some point (power envelope will be a problem, but a Zero with Pi 2 specs would be great).

1-6 7y ago
What SW do you use for digital signage?
- rcarmo 7y ago
  The first one I did (back in the original Pi era) was this: https://github.com/rcarmo/digital-signage-client https://github.com/rcarmo/digital-signage-client We then iterated upon that over the years, tried Android boxes, etc.

Zaskoda 7y ago

I used several Pi Zeros with EnviroPhat sensor hats to monitor temperatures and light levels in my Bitcoin mine. I have a Pi 3 setup as a game emulator in the basement. And I used to chop up rc toys from the thrift store to make RPI robots to chase my cats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Set6z566-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Set6z566-s

VectorLock 7y ago
Are the light levels important for your Bitcoin mine?

mnem 7y ago

There are so many amazing projects here, all of which are more impressive than what I actually get around to doing with mine! I really just use mine a simple way to play around with assembler in a simple environment.

smilesnd 7y ago

I have a rpi2 I use as a low power server that keeps me connected to my irc server and runs tasks for me. I have a rpi3 installed in my truck that acts as a media player. It also reads my OBDII so I know how my engine is running and other diagnosis information. I also use it to map wifi/bluetooth spots and other random data as I am driving.

toolboc 7y ago

I use a Raspberry Pi to stream PlayStation 2 backups over SMB by networking the onboard Ethernet port of the Pi to allow access to a Samba Share service running on the Pi. This allows for seamless playback of games with heavy Full Motion Video sequences as the Ethernet transmission is faster than the max throughput of the USB2.0 ports provided on the PlayStation 2. It -also supports auto mounting and sharing of external drives to allow for seamless drive swapping if you have a large library. Using the same technique, games can also be streamed to PlayStation 3 and original Xbox. I added some additional support for Xlink Kai so that you can play LAN enabled games over the Pi’s WiFi connection by plugging a compatible game console into the Ethernet port of the Pi or by connecting to an access point that is auto created when a secondary WiFi dongle is attached to the Pi. I learned that there are usually a hundred or so people in South America who play Halo 2 using Xlink Kai and this makes it very easy to connect to them for lag free multiplayer on original hardware. This feature also works on Nintendo Switch and PSP with a bit of extra work. The project is open source and [available as a flashable SD image on Github](https://github.com/toolboc/psx-pi-smbshare https://github.com/toolboc/psx-pi-smbshare). Youtuber VersatileNinja recently published a detailed video on [how to get started with the project](https://youtu.be/Ilx5NYoUkNA https://youtu.be/Ilx5NYoUkNA) if anyone is interested in taking it for a spin.

idonotknowwhy 7y ago
How fast is streaming cut-scene heavy games like MGS4 to the PS3 using this setup? Also, for the PS2, how does it compare with HDDLoader and an internal HDD. Relevant for games like Fatal Frame, where you have to open doors a lot, and on the DVD, it takes like 5-10 seconds, but on the HDD, it takes <1 second. I didn't know we could steam to the Xbox OG, sounds pretty useful compared with the 1hr process to open it up and upgrade the HDD...
- toolboc 7y ago
  In my tests using iftop, speed on PS3 seems to top out around 60 MB/s which is slower than HDD but should be sufficient for most games. On PS2, the speed to access SMB is also slower than HDD at around 6 MB/s, however, this is nearly 6x the speed of the USB. Although it is slower than HDD access, it allows for playback of most games without stuttering. Good point on calling attention to the OG Xbox, as I should have been more specific there. OG Xbox games can only be played back via HDD or Disc due to a limitation in the system itself, however, a number of emulators support SMB paths for playing backups.

mgaitan09 7y ago

at an Airline, we are designing a IOT feed for Aircraft Turn Around processes (RFIDs, Cameras, Sensors, etc), fed to a Pi per gate and transmitted to a MongoDB with a custom made GUI, it's a prototype/lab kinda thing though not made for full production...

Lammy 7y ago

I use a Pi 3 running FreeBSD 12 and CUPS as a print server for my Brother laser printer. The printer has an option for a network card, but finding one is many times more expensive than the Pi, and it's so old I wouldn't entirely trust it on my network anyway :)

dheera 7y ago

Make little fun robots like this Pixar lamp: https://hackaday.com/2019/05/25/little-lamp-to-learn-longer-leaps/ https://hackaday.com/2019/05/25/little-lamp-to-learn-longer-...

teh_klev 7y ago

Keep them in a drawer.

bromonkey 7y ago

...plug it into networks I'm not authorized to with the default password and forget about it... but I actually use one w/ octoprint for my 3D printer, really like it.

DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago

I have an old Raspberry Pi 1 that runs headless raspbian with a set of cheap speakers plugged into it and an old usb wifi adaptor. It has only one purpose: to play a wav file of a telephone ringing for one minute. My spouse does not ever have the ringer on her cell phone. So when I am out and I need her to look at her phone, I VPN in to my home network, ssh into the pi using Terminus on my iphone, and 'aplay' the wav file. The real reason we ever wanted to get a landline was because of this issue, so instead of wasting money I just used spare parts to make an alert system I can activate remotely. I can also use the 'say' command for text-to-speech, but that's not really effective. The old school phone ringer wav is perfect.

daedalus_j 7y ago
This is brilliant. I have the same problem, and an extra gen1 pi hanging around, and I'm quite excited about this solution. Thanks for posting. :-)
chrsstrm 7y ago
You could automate this even more with a Twilio number, ngrok running on the Pi and a small webserver to trigger the audio playback. Then instead of having to ssh in you can just send a text.
- HoppyHaus 7y ago
  Or if you wanted to get even cheaper, depending on the carrier, you could text a personal E-Mail server.
- pfundstein 7y ago
  Is ngrok the new dnat?
  - chrsstrm 7y ago
    Expose your server endpoint to the public web however you like. There are lots of options and many have been discussed here recently. I just happen to be a fan of ngrok and use it daily for all sorts of cases, including on some of my Pi’s.

nonsens3 7y ago

I stream live video (no audio) and watch how my dog chills at home while I am at work :) Sometimes I catch him on the sofa!

dpcan 7y ago

Ours ran various things in our escape rooms: 1) I ran a browser in kiosk mode with a mouse that was used with some custom software on a computer in the room. 2) We had it connected to a remote keypad that opened a magnetic lock, popping a drawer open, when the sequence was correctly entered. 3) We had one connected to a magnetic sensor that would open another cabinet when items were placed correctly. 4) I ran the clocks and hint systems in the rooms from RPi's as well, which allowed me to run mini web servers on them that I would access from the control room to mess with the time if the game called for it, or to send hints in to the rooms, or to trigger sounds or videos. 5) Finally, we ran our lobby slideshow system with one, and also played our orientation videos on them. Yes, we could have used Arduino for some of these, but I always liked RPi's because I could SSH into them to do the resets or to trigger the doors remotely if needed from my computer at the control center.

hosteur 7y ago
I'm currently working on developing an escape room environment using RPis as well. I would love to hear details about how you set yours up. Any way to get in touch?

sparker72678 7y ago

I have 13 in service right now: - Outdoor irrigation control via OpenSprinkler Pi: https://opensprinkler.com/product/opensprinkler-pi/ https://opensprinkler.com/product/opensprinkler-pi/ - Z-Wave home automation via ZWay: https://z-wave.me/products/razberry/ https://z-wave.me/products/razberry/ - 2 Custom HAVC thermostats using: https://github.com/jeffmcfadden/PiThermostat https://github.com/jeffmcfadden/PiThermostat - An NTP server with GPS attached for a time source. - 2 for weather monitoring (one directly attached to sensors, one that aggregates the data from a few sources and provides reporting) - A sort of centralized "workhorse" Pi that runs a lot of random cron jobs, etc. - An Alexa gateway for home automation - An NES emulator - An infrared-remote source for turning on/off surround receiver, TV, etc. - Monitoring of HVAC temperatures/performance - An intranet server Assuming I didn't forget anything.

erklik 7y ago
>2 for weather monitoring (one directly attached to sensors, one that aggregates the data from a few sources and provides reporting) So, I hear people doing this alot. However what exactly does this help with? Like, is the extra information really more useful than just the standard old TV weather forecast?
- sparker72678 7y ago
  I do this primarily because I'm a weather geek. I don't _need_ this at all. I do find it interesting to see the differences in temperature (and humidity, etc.) in the microclimate around my house compared to the city and greater metro area. I also use the data to measure the performance of my home's HVAC system. Doing this _does_ require real-time local temperature and humidity data. But again, this is all for fun. I just enjoy it.
  - ianai 7y ago
    What sort of sensors are available? Just the stuff off the pi site?
    - 7y ago

alexcabrera 7y ago

RetroPi + [8bitdo N30](http://www.8bitdo.com/n30pro-f30pro/ http://www.8bitdo.com/n30pro-f30pro/) controller is the best gaming box I've ever owned.

girvo 7y ago

I'm using it to build a modern take on a "word processor", a hardware keyboard + microprocessor that only writes text to its onboard memory. My current roadblock is getting a relatively high resolution rather wide aspect ratio screen. Hard to find, it seems.

inamberclad 7y ago

I'm running CoreFlight on a rapsberry pi zero and I want to mount it on my bike with a GPS (and maybe some other sensors) to track my rides.

ulzeraj 7y ago

Personally I have a Model B running Alpine and SSH to receive incoming connections at home. I’ve also convinced the company to buy 8 3B. Each of those is connected to a 1080p display through HDMI and each one of them boots raspian with chromium-browser in kiosk mode into one specific Grafana panel or playlist. I control what URL each of them boots into from Saltstack states.

bborud 7y ago

Lots of things, but the most useful yet is the RPi Zero USB stem which turns it into a dongle that gets power and network from my Mac. Very useful for quick and easy access to GPIO pins for ad-hoc use.

just_myles 7y ago

ctrl + F 'emulator'. lol only 3.

phiresky 7y ago

We hacked together an automatic door opening system controllable via smartphone that notifies you on ringing and sends a video, then opens the doors on button press with a Lego contraption [1]. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/bwdv36/a_smartphone_door_control_system_hacked_together/ https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/bwdv36/a_smar...

ei8htyfi5e 7y ago

Is collect dust an option?

simgim 7y ago

I have 1 in my dmz running wireguard (VPN for safe public wifi browsing) and nextcloud on ubuntu 18.04. Another inside my network running Freedombox for Privoxy and Searx.

rayraegah 7y ago

I used to turn my pi into low power consumption devices and donate them to the solar berry project [0]. Side loaded with rachelpi [1] software that brings the better part of the internet to kids in dark regions of Africa. [0]: https://turingtrust.co.uk/home/our_work/solarberry/ https://turingtrust.co.uk/home/our_work/solarberry/ [1]: http://rachelfriends.org/ http://rachelfriends.org/

lyagusha 7y ago

Tor relay with Display-O-Tron Hat to visualize the tx/rx speeds. Wardriving rig with GPS puck that runs kismet, airbash, and bettercap to steal PMKIDs and also 4-way handshakes from nearby networks for offline cracking and data visualization. Also has UPS supply for backup power. An aborted project to make a Hindustani raga time-of-day player, based on a Pi Zero W with a 128GB SD card, that would stream a continuous loop of music appropriate to the specific time of day (8 distinct periods), via a network interface such as Plex. But it was too complicated. I've also used an RPi3 as a node in https://github.com/lennartkoopmann/nzyme https://github.com/lennartkoopmann/nzyme.

YaBa 7y ago

1x Pi-Hole 1x Pilight (working together with HomeAssistant in a different machine) 1x sandbox (testing software, web stuff, etc) 1x Asterisk/RasPBX 1x backup manager 1x honeypot 1x bastion host 1x media player (also integrated with HA)

thachnb 7y ago

I have 1 Pi and 2 Odroid XU4. - Pi for Pi-hole - Odroid for VPN and home assistant server and also a CCTV. - Another Odroid XU4 for RetroPie games.

PenguinCoder 7y ago

I have a pi3 setup as a garage door opener. It's wired to two, 4 channel relays (only use two relays), one for each garage door. A simple php page that can be accessed and a big icon 'lressed', triggers the gpio to switch the relay. This opens or closes the door. I set this up because I got tired of replacing batteries in a garage door opener. This way,I just open the web page on my phone and open the door. I also setup a few android Tasker jobs to register when my phone connects to home wifi, and is also connected to my vehicle Bluetooth. When that registers, it automatically opens the garage door.

Falcorian 7y ago

Really simple stuff, compared to the self watering plants, etc.: - AdGuard Home DNS (Pi Hole was just not stable for me) - Unifi Controller - Torrent box (come get your Linux distros!) - Always on platform to host various scripts on; one backs up my blog to Internet Archive when it changes, for example. - Twitter bots that report the RPi status (just went down for reboot, etc.) - Bot that watches Caltrain for delays and Tweets them to me. - Platform to play around with orchestration, DevOps, etc. I learned Ansible using them. Still want to move it all to Docker, but that'll have to wait.

floren 7y ago

I've got a first-gen Pi that's filled a variety of roles through the years. Currently it's hooked up to an old black-and-white TV where I play old TV shows and the occasional youtube video (omxplayer `youtube-dl -g <url>`).

CapricornNoble 7y ago

1. RPi Model 2B: running Kodi, and connected to my TV. Utilized for watching movies from my NFS-shared movie storage drive. 2. RPi Zero: used to prototype a device for my company. The RPi is connected to a LimeSDR Mini and an UPS. Meant to work out some of the software and form factor for a deployable electronic warfare device. I'm starting to replace RPis with ODroids for the most part. I'm actually waiting for 2x ODroid-HC2 to arrive any day now. One will be hosting a Syncloud instance, as I want to experiment with Diaspora social network. Not exactly sure what I'll use the other for yet.

chrsstrm 7y ago

Outside of off the cuff experiments, most of my Pis are provisioned as MotionEyeOS[0] security cams. Each client can be linked into a central "server" so you can view them all at once, and lots of nice config options for storing or sending image and video either continuously or based on motion. I have the streaming set up so I can peek in from anywhere using VLC on my phone. [0] https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos/wiki https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos/wiki

megy 7y ago
Do you need one pi board per camera?
- chrsstrm 7y ago
  There’s only one camera ribbon connector on a Pi board, not sure if you could also plug in a USB cam or not.

elkos 7y ago

I've set up a SatNOGS (https://SatNOGS.org https://SatNOGS.org) ground-station using a turnstile antenna. I'm able to retrieve signals from satellites and assist the rest of the community to retrieve signals from my location as well.

loginatnine 7y ago

On my original pi, I use it to sense whether my washing and drying machine is working and sends me a notification when the load is done. It uses 2 adxl345 accelerometer with 1 pi. Instructions are on github https://github.com/jebeaudet/time-to-fold-alerter https://github.com/jebeaudet/time-to-fold-alerter On my rpi3, I use it for download automation with couch potato, sonarr and radarr.

dekhn 7y ago

One runs my 3d printer. I've also tried using them for robots and I've built a couple microscopes/telescopes where the pi ran the video subsystem. But for that case I always end up switching back to an Intel NUC or a laptop.

Centrino 7y ago

I'm a ham radio operator and I run a WSPR beacon using a RPi, a TAPR-QRPi shield, the WsprryPi software and a random wire antenna. The RPi generates an HF signal on GPIO_4 at around 14 MHz (20 meter short wave band), the TAPR-QRPi shield filters out the harmonics and amplifies the carrier to around 200 milliwatts. Using a 12 feet wire on my balcony I get automated reception reports from 300 to 2800 miles away.

jaimex2 7y ago

Kodi media centre.

vetrom 7y ago

With an amazing team, I'm helping run a fleet of a few hundredish pi3/3b+ and hundreds of pizero-W cameras in an evolving automotive IoT solution. It's definitely been a challenge using them in volume, but they've been surprisingly reliable once you control for things like heat dissipation and get a decent networking solution. (At our scale we're approaching having to decide if we want to be a MVNO.)

mirceal 7y ago
take a look at my project at cattlepi.com

alexandander 7y ago

piHole, UniFi Cloud Key, Wikipedia Bots (not for spam of course, these were officially sanctioned :))

Mazzen 7y ago

openHAB home automation. The Raspberry Pi is a recommended base for openHAB and a prepared image is provided for easy use. I use more for other purposes but openHAB is the important one. The Rpi is also nice for it as many hardware receivers/transmitters are compatible

epynonymous 7y ago

i created a digital scoreboard that can be hooked up to a large led for sporting events, can be used.from rpi 2, 3 to a, b, and zero

pier25 7y ago

I used RBPs when working on museums. For example as mini video players, to connect sensors and trigger a video or turn on some light, etc. Also to serve as RS232 to wifi adapters. You'd be surprised how much stuff still uses serial to interface with the outside world (tvs, projectors, audio switchers, etc).

bbulkow 7y ago

I have two that control fridges for cheese making and aging. I used to have one running a custom news aggregator my gf made for me. I use them as controllers for large scale art at burning man.

anotherevan 7y ago

Fairly pedestrian uses. One running OSMC (Kodi) media server. One that manages nightly backups for all the machines on my network. Does wake-on-LAN as needed, uses rsnapshot to encrypted external drive. I also run Pi-Hole on this. Have one in the office that serves as a terminal server via X2Go. Let's me remote desktop to office machines as needed. I'm quite a fan of DietPi as my distro to use on these. I also use Ansible as much as possible to configure and manage them.

thallada 7y ago

I currently have three around the apartment attached to the network: One running Seafile (https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ https://www.seafile.com/en/home/) with an old laptop hard-drive connected via USB enclosure. It acts as my own Dropbox. I mainly store notes and photos on it and sync them to a few other devices for redundancy. It also has a Samba share with all of my music and has an open vpn server so I can connect to it from anywhere. One with a HiFiBerrry Digi+ hat (https://www.hifiberry.com/products/digiplus/ https://www.hifiberry.com/products/digiplus/) connected to my sound system via toslink running an MPD (https://www.musicpd.org/ https://www.musicpd.org/) server. I can control it with M.A.L.P. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.gateshipone.malp&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.gateshipon...) on my phone. This one also has a 7" touch screen (https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-7-Touchscreen-Display/dp/B0153R2A9I https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-7-Touchscreen-Display/dp...) which I use to sometimes display ncmpcpp (https://github.com/arybczak/ncmpcpp https://github.com/arybczak/ncmpcpp) inside edex-ui (https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui). This one also acts as the living room clock with an USB LED message board (https://www.amazon.com/818-Dream-Cheeky-Message-Board/dp/B001KU43WK/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/818-Dream-Cheeky-Message-Board/dp/B00...) controlled by dcled (https://github.com/Conservatory/dcled https://github.com/Conservatory/dcled). Another with a GPIO breakout and breadboard with an individually addressable LED light strip attached. I got the idea from this Adafruit tutorial (https://learn.adafruit.com/light-painting-with-raspberry-pi/overview https://learn.adafruit.com/light-painting-with-raspberry-pi/...). I wrote a program in Python to make it softly glow between random colors and sync to any beats-per-minute.

vmlinuz 7y ago

Short answer: I've got one sitting behind the TV in my parents' kitchen, running ssh and openvpn for proxy/vpn purposes, but mostly working as an automated BBC TV downloader, scripted to download a list of shows every night, at different qualities (e.g. don't need high frame rate for quiz shows), rsync them to my server at home outside the UK, and send me a PushBullet message to tell me what will be available to watch over breakfast. Works beautifully! I'm very tempted to get a 4 and pair it with a lower-specced NAS for home server purposes - I don't think even the Pi 4 has quite the I/O to be a great storage server by itself, but that combo is probably more fun and flexible than just a NAS alone...

connorcodes 7y ago

I turned mine into a simple Apache server. It's really nice to save a file and instantly see it live. If I like a program, I just save it and play around with on my server.

matthewowen 7y ago

It's a great paperweight! I'm sure it does other things too but I haven't got round to it yet :).

werber 7y ago

I use it to play old movies and video games with a projector in my bedroom. Super fun

CypherSnyper 7y ago

Hook it up to NASA's network with a default password and watch hackers take over the entire network through it

chadlavi 7y ago

I have a pi0 running pi-hole on my home network, and another one running a network drive. Just got the 4B to use as a Plex server

watsocd 7y ago

I run my own energy monitoring business. We use many RPi's for remote customer site energy meter data collection and forwarding to our cloud based REST servers. Once we got over the SD card issues, I have had zero problems and no hardware failures (including SD card issues) in four years now. Because of the low cost, I always install two units on every site; one is powered and idle but ready to take over if the other fails. Not hot-standby but close enough for my purposes.

jbuzbee 7y ago

I have a bunch of headless Zero Ws spread around the house, each monitoring temperature and reporting themselves over multicast DNS http://jpbuzbee.asuscomm.com/ http://jpbuzbee.asuscomm.com/

chadd 7y ago

With my 16 year old son, I built a weather balloon with one, including an Arduino, a few temperature sensors, a GPS, LoRA radio, and we're going to launch it next month. Having a hard time finding Helium.

sokoloff 7y ago
Don't most party stores have helium tanks?
- chadd 7y ago
  I need 200 cubic liters and they won't sell that much
cmmeur01 7y ago
Welding supply store may be worth checking.
- chadd 7y ago
  Yes they won't sell except to existing customers. New customer == no helium.
orpheline 7y ago
As a further science project, why not liberate hydrogen through electrolysis? Much less expensive than helium, and greater lifting capacity...
- chadd 7y ago
  good idea! I think we're just going to get a hydrogen tank, some protective gear, and go that route.

gregsadetsky 7y ago

There's a bus station across from my studio / coworking space. I can see people waiting for the bus and doing either: 1) staring into the void 2) looking at their watches 3) desperately glancing in the direction where the bus is coming from. I figured that it'd be nice to let people know when the bus is supposed to be there. So, I installed a 28" display on a monitor stand, installed the stand on my window frame, turned the monitor to face the bus station, and show the up-to-date arrival time in a very big font (the buses have GPS; the Pi gets the real time info from the local transit authority). This is in Montreal. Some info here [0]. And a little video [1]. [0] https://greg.technology/#bus https://greg.technology/#bus [1] https://youtu.be/pc16oPb5zW0 https://youtu.be/pc16oPb5zW0

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dotmanish 7y ago
This is awesome work and thank you for doing this for public without asking. P.S. does the transit authority offer an API or is this prone to breaking when they change their page layout? [edit: I just read about the rumor on your webpage. Clarifies.]
- gregsadetsky 7y ago
  Thank you! As many other transit authorities, the STM [0] offers "GTFS" data (a standard feed format for transit info) [1]. Mucking around STM's public site, you'll also see the schedule information go by if you inspect the network requests. From what I've seen, their API endpoints are stable, reliable and fast. I've had to do ~2 updates in >1 year of service. [0] http://stm.info/en http://stm.info/en [1] http://www.stm.info/en/about/developers http://www.stm.info/en/about/developers [ edit: that rumor is just a rumor :-) ]
- punnerud 7y ago
  If you use MITMProxy or Charles you can easily intercept the traffic on 99% of all iPhone/Android apps (bit harder if pinned-sertificate). These API’s are often stable because a lot of users don’t update their apps that often.

rapfaria 7y ago

I use one to receive GPS signals. Whenever I'm <500 meters from home, it turns on my air conditioner and starts making coffee. Not fully automated since I still have to put the capsule in the morning, but works great.

wybiral 7y ago

I have multiple but the one I use the most has Kodi installed. It's connected to a projector and I basically use it as a media center streaming files from one of my desktops over the local network. Another one is used more like a custom IoT hub/gateway for various BLE (and even some LoRa devices).

gwynn 7y ago

College student here with a part-time data entry job. I have automated nearly all of it using Python, Selenium, and a few nasty bash scripts called by periodic cronjobs. Recently purchased a 3b+ for the task so that I can travel without worrying about AirBnB wifi speeds. If I need anything I can just SSH or VNC into it from a coffee shop. It just sits next to my router and blinks all day doing my job for me! Best $35 I have ever spent.

rohan_shah 7y ago
Can you explain more about what kind of data entry is that exactly? Also how exactly did you automate it? Have you written about it anywhere?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dougmwne 7y ago
That's great! The business world is chock full of these situations where non-technical people create a process that could be automated but isn't, eventually leading to an entry level person (or several) who's entire job is to do things like copy-paste, clicky-click or OCR. I think the key step to automating these tasks is to have the ability to both recognize the opportunity for automation and code a solution. There could be a fantastic amount of money in building things like this on the regular.
- xtomus 7y ago
  There's a whole industry dedicated to this task with some major players involved: RPA.

jonobird1 7y ago

Has anyone used it for any car-related mods? I share my passion between coding and cars so I'd love to push some boundaries there if anyone has tried before? Gauage display from sensor units, just a cool OS display for music, or maybe something cooler?

sparker72678 7y ago
http://www.carberry.it/ http://www.carberry.it/

steve_b 7y ago

I use it do Anki on my bike ride to/from work. Wrote some scripts in Python. They take my deck, convert it to speech using IBM Watson’s TTS. Then i made a small PCB with 4 buttons that is fixed to the handle bar. That way I can interact with the program.

bengrunfeld 7y ago

I have a cat hooked up to a car battery in an unused garage somewhere in the Bronx. The Raspberry Pi interfaces between the battery and a 20+ person WhatsApp chatroom via API and anytime someone mentions the word "shock" (or any other word with a negative association), the cat gets it. FYI - this is a joke, but effectively conveys the point: the only limits are in your imagination... and tech skills.

anonu 7y ago

Some projects: Easy Setup (Download and Run): - ADS-B decoder and transmitter to FlightAware - PiHole Required More Coding: - PhotoBooth: Python script that monitored a special Gmail account and sent attached images to a photo printer (Canon Selphy) - Upload to Dropbox: ScanSnap sheet-fed scanner, listened to scanner button response, created PDFs, copied to DropBox - Data Collection Engine: 1. Collected data from local sensors (temperature and humidity) in nursery. 2. Collected periodic data from public APIs (NYC CitiBike) 3. Captured time lapse images from nursery every 2 minutes.

vivekkalyansk 7y ago

Anyone has any experience using it as a NAS? Is the I/O too slow for it to be smooth?

chrisparton1991 7y ago

I previously used mine to drive my synchronised Christmas light display. It worked great one year, then for some reason the next year, retrieving the playback position of an audio file in Java was taking nearly a second (previously it was practically instant). I never figured that out, so I bought a second-hand Mac Mini to power the display instead.

ccapo 7y ago

* I made a Raspberry Pi Zero W version of this baby monitor (https://kamranicus.com/guides/raspberry-pi-3-baby-monitor https://kamranicus.com/guides/raspberry-pi-3-baby-monitor) * I am using a Raspberry Pi Zero W + Arduino Pro Mini, with a GPS, Sensors, Camera and Radio for a High Altitude Balloon (HAB) project (https://bitbucket.org/ccapo/habpi/src/master https://bitbucket.org/ccapo/habpi/src/master), launch pending. A friend is also launching a similar project (https://bitbucket.org/peterkingsbury/neopi/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/peterkingsbury/neopi/src/master/) * I am using a Raspberry Pi 3 for RetroPie * I have a Raspberry Pi 3+ for development purposes, mainly the HAB project since developing on a Raspberry Pi Zero is quite slow

celnardur 7y ago

I'm in a college club that uses Pis to run football playing robots. The Pi basically translates instructions from a Bluetooth PS4 controller into commands for a motor driver. We currently 4 college clubs in the league and we play a couple of scrimmages and a championship every year. The robots take big hits in the games(these bots can go faster than we can run) and we've found the Arduino to be the most durable and reliable platform as well as being the most customizable. Here is our club Website: https://www3.nd.edu/~rfc/ https://www3.nd.edu/~rfc/ Here is a little video about the club: https://www.greatbigstory.com/stories/nbc-sports-intramural-football https://www.greatbigstory.com/stories/nbc-sports-intramural-...

zmix 7y ago

I didn't fiddle with it for quite a while, since I was bored of updating and using old code, so I removed it from the chain, but a few years ago I ran it as an ad-filtering, transparent proxy in my LAN. Very nice (for a tiny network) !

fizzledbits 7y ago

I used an ESP8266 and not the Pi for this, but a really really great m/c project is a wireless fan controller for a smoker or kamado (big green egg-style) grill. I made mine from scratch as an learning exercise, but here’s a similar project using the Pi: https://github.com/michmike/Raspberry-PI-Q https://github.com/michmike/Raspberry-PI-Q It’s We use it to make, for example, this recipe (with some modifications of our own) on a regular basis with a minimum of effort, and it is one of the most breathtakingly delicious things I’ve ever tasted, let alone cooked myself. We follow his instructions but hold to 180-190 deg until the meat reaches about 138, basting a few times with a honey+whiskey+thyme glaze; also be sure to use a fatty salmon, like (in my experience) farmed atlantic, not sockeye. https://youtu.be/1zT8QBMEML8 https://youtu.be/1zT8QBMEML8

tghw 7y ago

I have a bunch doing different things: One is running our sprinklers with OpenSprinklerPi https://opensprinkler.com/product/opensprinkler-pi/ https://opensprinkler.com/product/opensprinkler-pi/ One is running VolumeIO to splay music on the speakers in our house as a Spotify Connect device https://volumio.org/ https://volumio.org/ One controls our whole house humidifier via a relay and a combination of weather and thermostat information. One has been turned into a precision/TSD/regularity rally computer for my vintage car. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularity_rally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularity_rally One runs my 3D printer using OctoPrint https://octoprint.org/download/ https://octoprint.org/download/ And I use one as a race car telemetry system using a 9-dof sensor and a GPS module (with brake, throttle, and steering inputs to come). For most of these projects, they're complete overkill in terms of hardware, but with integrated wifi and bluetooth, and a host of GPIO pins, they make developing projects like this dead simple. And at $35, the amount of time they save is well worth it over bare metal hardware.

squarefoot 7y ago

Video playing through Kodi and nothing else. Nearly all other "competing" boards are either cheaper or more powerful or both, and more open, but the PI has the best CEC imlementation along with good video acceleration which makes it ideal for the task. The freshly announced PI4 seems a step in the right direction price and performance wise, although I don't expect the Pi Foundation (aka Broadcom) to solve the openness problem anytime soon, so although it could soon become my main video player I won't consider it for anything else, especially if security related.

mwill 7y ago

Mines not as cool as all the others here, but I use pi's to run all my homemade machines: A few 3D printers, pen plotter, CNC etc.

olixr 7y ago

At the moment I am using a few pi to control my garden systems. I just built an open source system (https://mudpi.app https://mudpi.app) to help manage the sensors and relays. Actually gearing up for a launch soon. Being able to regulate my watering and control it from my phone as been awesome. The whole thing emits events with sensors on redis so its open for systems to hook on top of it. Pi was the ideal choice to keep inital costs low. The amount of power you get for the price is pretty sweet. The other pi is running the same code moderating lights on a basement shelf of plants too. The last pi I am using retro pi to play some old school roms.

NamTaf 7y ago

I've got a 3b+ and a 1b, and whilst only the 3b is in use currently, I have plans for the other. The 3b runs libreelec for a tv in my bedroom. I found my 1b to be too slow for this, but the 3b+ does admirably. The 1b, I hope to repurpose into a couple of services: 1) a pihole for my home network 2) a Wireguard VPN for connecting my phone back to my home network. This is all sort of waiting on me getting usable internet, because my 700kbps upload currently sort of makes it pointless. However, I'd like to do this once I have better internet so I can use my phone as if I'm on my home network. This will provide me with several benefits: 1) I will be able to stream media when travelling for work 2) My phone will benefit from the pihole even when out and about 3) I will be able to control my home network as if at home 4) It will provide another endpoint for hurdling the GFW when I work in China I hope to start all of this next year, once I move house or when I finally receive a proper internet connection rolled out to my place. If the 1b is too weak for those services, then I will probably repurpose it into some sort of automation system for watering plants, since once again due to work travel I routinely have to lug them over to relatives' houses whenever I'm away for a week or more.

pierregillesl 7y ago

Run my home automation system with Gladys Assistant! :) https://gladysassistant.com/ https://gladysassistant.com/

VilleO 7y ago

1. Rpi 3 keeping my IRC session up and working as small server for small tasks. 2. Rpi 2 has zigbee-module (raspbee) which controls lights. 3. Zero W with camera is currently doing nothing.

gangadhargs 7y ago

I sent one to space on a helium balloon. Some details here http://sulkunte.net/tale-of-an-ambitious-space-odyssey/ http://sulkunte.net/tale-of-an-ambitious-space-odyssey/

m-p-3 7y ago

A Pi Zero W at work, controlling an LED from BlinkStick which change color depending on my presence and status, monitoring my position and calendar through IFTTT. I I can also change it manually through HTTP GET commands on the BlinkStick server with my API key.

sairahul82 7y ago

I use it to remotely start my computer. My raspberry pi is always on and i use "wake on lan"[1] to start my desktop whenever needed. My desktop is powerful and consumes decent amount of power. Using Rpi to start is lot more power efficient. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

jupp0r 7y ago

A project I want to do: use an rtl-sdr to catch temperature readings from a BBQ thermometer off the air. Then push that data to prometheus/grafana and get alerting when the brisket is done.

lolcmdb9000 7y ago

Hack NASA. It's great.

sandreas 7y ago

I use a Raspberry PI Zero / 3 together with a phat dac for a bluetooth audio receiver / Airplay in my car: Auto-Installer: https://github.com/BaReinhard/Super-Simple-Raspberry-Pi-Audio-Receiver-Install https://github.com/BaReinhard/Super-Simple-Raspberry-Pi-Audi... PhatDac (hardware): https://www.amazon.com/Pimoroni-24-bit-192KHz-Sound-Raspberry/dp/B019U9VC9E/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=phat+dac&qid=1561436473&s=gateway&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Pimoroni-24-bit-192KHz-Sound-Raspberr... Alternative (hardware): https://www.amazon.com/Audio-AUDIO-Raspberry-Better-quality/dp/B00MDW602K/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=phat+dac&qid=1561436555&s=gateway&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Audio-AUDIO-Raspberry-Better-quality/... It can be controlled via buttons over bluez / dbus via infrared remote and buttons: Button Shim (hardware): https://www.amazon.com/Pimoroni-PIM301-Button-Shim/dp/B07HCPC8MP/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=pimoroni+button+slim&qid=1561436627&s=gateway&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Pimoroni-PIM301-Button-Shim/dp/B07HCP... Bluez API: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/bluetooth/bluez.git/tree/doc/media-api.txt https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/bluetooth/bluez.git/tree/doc/... DBUS control script: https://github.com/sandreas/raspberry-bluetooth-receiver/blob/master/scripts/btapi.sh https://github.com/sandreas/raspberry-bluetooth-receiver/blo... Unfortunately it is not possible to set playback position via dbus (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50190477/bluez-and-dbus-set-track-playback-position-jump-to-position https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50190477/bluez-and-dbus-...), so rewind 30 seconds is not possible atm.

Karrot_Kream 7y ago
I don't know anything about Bluetooth. Does bluez always mount devices on /org/bluez/hci0/dev_${DEVICE_NAME} ?
- sandreas 7y ago
  Depending on your device... But for me it works with every audio capable device i tried (iPod nano, iPhone SE, Android Moto G7)

peckrob 7y ago

Pet Feeders! http://www.robpeck.com/2017/11/robs-raspberry-pi-powered-cat-feeders/ http://www.robpeck.com/2017/11/robs-raspberry-pi-powered-cat...

ivolimmen 7y ago

When reading specs of the new raspberry pi I decided I will buy two in the near future to serve as a desktop for my girls. I still have a raspberry pi 1b with 512mb. I was too soon and missed the free upgrade. Tried it once as media server. Was not impressed. After that I bought a pine64 with 2Gb ram that runs my bookmarks web application I personally use every day. Also bought the hardkernel mc1 cluster to play with. Still the support for raspberry pi is unbeatable.

noamelf 7y ago

I connected it to "dumb" computer speakers at my office and made it into a Bluetooth sink so that everyone can use it to play music

captainmurvel 7y ago
Any good guide on how to do this? I tried this a couple of years ago but got stuck in that I always had to pair my handset every time I wanted to use it.

egberts 7y ago

My son use one to monitor the completion of a washing or dryer machine.

codebudo 7y ago

I'm using an RPi as the main compute module for an Autonomous Radio Controlled Car. It's similar to a Donkey Car, but not using ROS (at the moment). Project is documented here: https://medium.com/@mikkelwilson/autonomous-rc-car-part-0-6e341de2a52d https://medium.com/@mikkelwilson/autonomous-rc-car-part-0-6e... (This is not a commercial project; just for fun) I'm very interested to see how OpenCV 4 and YOLOv3 object detection will run on the new RPi. At the current trajectory I will have to upgrade to a Jetson Nano to get hardware acceleration (CUDA), but resorting to specialty hardware seems like cheating. They also make a great prototyping platform for IoT projects. I've built 802.11.4 (Zigbee) mesh radio networks for passing small messages across neighborhood distances. Previously I used an RPi to run an Airplay Bridge to my Sonos speakers. This has since been supplanted by AirPlay 2, which Sonos supports.

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago

Persistent IRC bouncer with Weechat.

rishabhd 7y ago

Pentesting. PiHole. OOBM device for my Infra.

Arn_Thor 7y ago

Nothing too exciting. I've got an air purifier set up with homebridge and run a PiHole from it. I've also used it to practice setting up websites from scratch.

la_barba 7y ago

I'm using mine as a kitchen computer to lookup stuff online. Not exactly a Pi, but I used a adafruit feather to detect vibrations. I used it for landscape photography with a super telephoto lens where I wanted to be able to detect vibrations before firing off a bracketed shot.

dws 7y ago

A Pi 2 at work runs a Grafana playlist on a spare display. A Pi 3 at home runs a Flask server that collects data from sensors around the house (ESP8266 + SHT20 for temp/humidity), and provides a web page that overlays sensor data on a diagram of the house. I've been curious about CO2 levels in the bedroom overnight, and have parts for that experiment on order.

ecesena 7y ago

Streaming via airplay (we have iphones at home). Currently connected to a jukebox: https://twitter.com/0x0ece/status/1137487161974972416?s=21 https://twitter.com/0x0ece/status/1137487161974972416?s=21

jaythvv 7y ago

- Huelights control - PiHole - NFC card hacking - ARM assembly programming - Kubernetes + OpenFaas cluster - Postgres DB (with SSD harddrive)

ardeliens 7y ago

I did a whistle box. A NAS for whistle blowers and journalists. https://github.com/Guiraud/WB https://github.com/Guiraud/WB The Idea is for anyone to make a low cost NAS that allows a TOR service to upload/dowload files , pgp encrypted them with the key of the journalist, while having the simpliest interface as possible. I did'nt update for a long time tho. There's a Slide in french language here : https://fr.slideshare.net/Fred2baro/la-whistlebox https://fr.slideshare.net/Fred2baro/la-whistlebox

chidea 7y ago

Many hospitals in S.Korea adopted my rpi based system. It is a network organized, synchronized, distributed video signage with weather/news web feeds and touch screen based vision acuity tester integrations. The major key factor in it is a framebuffer driver by pure python which is open sourced by myself through Github. https://github.com/chidea/FBpyGIF https://github.com/chidea/FBpyGIF Recent haul-over includes ESP8266 based remote power management.

djmips 7y ago

Just another Talking Fish controller project... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7busGsuIOU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7busGsuIOU4 https://github.com/djmips/trout https://github.com/djmips/trout

peteforde 7y ago

I started a company that constructed booths which used 70 accurately sync'd Pis with custom PiCams (fitted with lenses) to take pictures of human subjects, for turning them into avatars like this: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pete-swagger-walk-a55d807de14a4ba7bdb9977600e7c412 https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pete-swagger-walk-a55d807de1... At the beginning of the project, I'd barely powered up the Pis I had collecting dust in my drawer. By the end, I was a legitimate domain expert in several niches within niches of Pi dark arts. For example, since Pis do not have hardware clocks, you have to rely on NTP. However, you need to take pains to make sure that each Pi is getting the same amount of voltage or else they will run at different speeds. If you want to power 70 Pis in a constrained space, you need to devise a customized power distribution system with adequate heat venting. Due to the thin effect, voltage drops over distance, so the distance a Pi was from the power would impact the voltage and therefore the speed. The major breakthrough came when I realized that I could start with a high end power supply outputting 14 volts and terminate each parallel line with a device known as a UBEC. They are used primarily by drone enthusiasts to make efficient use of battery packs. A UBEC is designed to drop down a supply voltage to 5v without bleeding off the excess voltage as heat. Since this could also describe a fuse, we felt comfortable bypassing the Pi's MicroUSB power supply and attaching the UBEC's pins directly to the top pins on the Pi's GPIO breakout. That's just a tiny example of the hijinx. The Pi is an incredible tool if you're patient and clever. What a rollercoaster.

Fredej 7y ago
Could something like this be used for synchronization in such a scenario? https://ncase.me/fireflies/ https://ncase.me/fireflies/
- peteforde 7y ago
  Thank you for sharing this! I love it. It's beautiful. Unfortunately, I also have literally no idea what you're proposing. I would like to, though.
  - terramex 7y ago

FullMetalBitch 7y ago

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 where I host my personal website including a nextcloud instance, with it I learned more about Linux. With the release of Raspbian Buster I am currently rebuilding it because it was the first one I bought so there was plenty of residual stuff from when I had no idea what I was doing. I have a Pi 3b+ I use as a Pi-Hole, samba share and whatever I want to try at the moment. I have to rebuild it after I "finished" with my site. And I want a Pi 4, or two.

hansdieter1337 7y ago

Pihole

yCloser 7y ago

pihole with my rpi1 retropie with my rpi3

LawnDart1 7y ago

Octoprint - 3d printer monitor & controller

dexcs 7y ago

I just ordered a complete Raspberry Pi Set to grab CAN BUS informations of my old landrover defender to send engine metrics to a remote sink on my synology nas at home. Maybe incl. gps tracking. Thats my plan :)

bArray 7y ago

Our Raspberry Pi 3 B is the core processing unit for our humanoid robotics platform [1]. This is in the context of the RoboCup competition [2]. With it we run: * Vision - A custom CNN using YOLO [3], where we are able to process a 256x256 (input is scaled) at 10fps to detect bounding boxes for balls and goal posts * Localization - Kalman filter (mainly currently used for tracking rotation) * Networking - Game controller (referee) [4], team communication [5] and a debug interface [6] * Behaviour - A hybrid state machine * Walking - Inverse kinematic walk with a balance system [7] Feel free to ask questions. We plan to open source everything (everything) in a month to two months. [1] https://humanoid.science/ https://humanoid.science/ [2] https://www.robocup.org/ https://www.robocup.org/ [3] https://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/ https://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/ [4] https://github.com/RoboCup-Humanoid-TC/GameController https://github.com/RoboCup-Humanoid-TC/GameController [5] https://github.com/RoboCup-Humanoid-TC/mitecom https://github.com/RoboCup-Humanoid-TC/mitecom [6] https://github.com/hellerf/EmbeddableWebServer https://github.com/hellerf/EmbeddableWebServer [7] https://github.com/Rhoban/IKWalk https://github.com/Rhoban/IKWalk EDIT: Bullet points on different lines

gchokov 7y ago
A+ for effort

Udo 7y ago

Home automation: it's an offline system I wrote myself to tie together all the different systems where I would normally need separate (always online) controller for each. That includes several soldered-to-GPIO-pins remote controls, and a HomeMatic and a ZWave radio module, although the latter is still controlled by the Z-Way software and I'm just using their API for those devices. It's a Raspberry Pi of the first generation, I'll probably replace the hardware soon. Audio: I'm also using one RPi2 with an attached hard disk as a music player for pen&paper roleplaying sessions, and I have 3 Pis distributed around the house acting as Wifi-enabled Airplay receivers attached to off-the-shelf powered speakers. Retro gaming: I built one RPi2 into an empty Amiga 500 case, it runs an Amiga emulator with many emulated game floppy disks onboard. Fun fact, the Amiga 500 keyboard sends its key strokes over a serial interface, so it's relatively easy to attach it to modern devices. 3D printing / IP cameras: I have drifted towards the Orange Pi hardware recently, mainly because they have a dirt-cheap headless module that costs about 10€. These are extremely useful for all kinds of automation tasks. For example, I'm using them with the Octoprint open source project to control 3D printers. Those headless Orange Pi Zeros are also fantastic as IP cameras, which has become necessary recently because consumer IP cameras that do not send all your data to China have become rare and expensive. Attendance and access control: I'm currently considering throwing out our shitty proprietary attendance and access management system at work, in favor of some simple custom-built Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi-powered panels. I have a prototype ready but haven't had time yet to make more. Lab control: I have an RPi3 attached via serial interface to a chemical analytics device at work, which required reverse engineering the proprietary protocol between the device and its shitty Win32 software. This allowed us to throw out a legacy Windows PC that needed to phone home all the time.

axegon 7y ago

Truth be told I have 5 or 6 raspberries. In all seriousness I think I'm actively using 3: * A rpi zero running several scripts(hooked to slack, telegram and a private mattermost server) to monitor the health of some production services at work from home(in case the network at work goes down and all the services there fail to notify the right people). Has never happened but having it makes sleep at night a tad better. * Rpi 3 b for some throwaway code/testing/place to store stuff at home and using it as an access server to access my home network. * Rpi 2 b pretty much glued to my parents' router so I can access the network at their place every time there's one of those "My computer is telling me something, what do I do?". I'm sure most of you are aware that those messages are surely gonna cause the end of the universe and need to be resolved as soon as possible and could not possibly wait 2 hours.

missjellyfish 7y ago

At one point I stuffed 40 of them into a rack mount and built a cluster to use for teaching at my university. Never gotten any publication out because it‘s fairly uninteresting from an academic point of view, but as a teaching tool to learn ARM assembler or parallel programming / how to execute stuff on supercomputers / OpenMPI it’s an invaluable tool. Recently there have been some odroid c2 added to the cluster, so it‘s not only RPis anymore. More info: https://www.caps.in.tum.de/en/himmuc/ https://www.caps.in.tum.de/en/himmuc/ Some Beautyshots at my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/BcA1QdFgWuk/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BcA1QdFgWuk/

princekolt 7y ago
Really cool! I feel this is the kind of project I have no use for, but would love doing just for the sake of assembling computer parts together haha

agumonkey 7y ago

here's what I used mine for: - znc bouncer - tiny public http server - attempt at osmc/kodi - see how low (Hz) can it go while still be emacs capable (https://monkeyplush.blogspot.com/2012/09/raspberry-pi-underclock.html) plans that never realized: - pi as electromechanic controller - pi as atmel flasher (thinkpad bios fix/coreboot)

codetiger 7y ago

I used my Raspberry Pi 3 B+ to control all Fish tank equipments remotely. We live in a city (Chennai, India) and my family usually goes to our native for 2 months every year during summer vacation. During these times, it find it very difficult to manage the equipments. The Raspberry Pi controls 2 Lights, 2 Filter pumps, Cooler, Fish feeder, and CO2 cylinder. Am planning to attach a camera and some sensors to the system as well. Right now, all these components are controlled by simple scheduling, but am planning to extend the control through a server in future. The Pi is connected to a 8-Relay board and is attached to a extension power board. So this setup can control just any equipment. Source Code: https://github.com/codetiger/AquariumControl https://github.com/codetiger/AquariumControl

TimeOutBoss 7y ago
I always wanted an aquarium and this was the sole reason I never got one, thanks I'll look into it. Can you tell what are your equipements and whats the setup like? (sorry, if already mentioned in github I can't open at work)
- codetiger 7y ago
  The config file in GitHub already has the schedule for each component. Equipements: 1. Lights 2 (One for plants and another colour LED light that came by default with the tank) 2. Filters 2 (One Canister filter and another top filter) 3. Cooler 4. CO2 cylinder 5. Fish feeder (Built myself) Currently, some equipment are always ON but planning to allowing to control remotely in future for triggering automated maintenance routine. The Pi is controlling an power extension box using a 8 relay module.

sirLoaf 7y ago

I created a toilet bot for our office. We only have one toilet, which caused a lot of people to walk to the toilet to check if it's free. I connected the Raspi with GPIO door controller and created a python script which makes use of the UCWA library from skype for business and hooked it to a blynclight (status indicator). Now ever coworker can add a specific contact to his Skype for Business favorites and will immediately see if the toilet is free or occupied.

shocks 7y ago

- One running my home automation setup (zigbee2mqtt, home assistant, influxdb, grafana, and nose red) - OctoPi for my 3D printer - RasPlex (Plex client attached to TV) - Lakka, an emulation OS for retro gaming

lamby 7y ago

I tried making a "travel access point" with mine, so I could have all my devices already setup to access a single access point and funnel all the traffic through that. I was previously using a $20 router, but curiously the Pi 3B just didn't want to play ball, dropping packets / connections and generally sucking. :(

Fradow 7y ago

At one point, I figured I wanted some lighting for my bar, which consists of about 70 bottles on shelves (about 1.2m wide and 2m height). But a simple on/off is not good enough. Instead, I went with individually addressable LEDs (NeoPixels strips to be exact), and developped my own back-end to manage those LEDs, with a simple front-end. So far, it supports lighting bottles individually, by category (rum, vodka etc...) and some simple animations across the whole bar. It's a nice ambient lighting, and it serves as a show-off for guests. Plus the whole thing runs on a second-hand computer power-supply. The Pi runs on the power-supply power-on line so that when no LED is on, the main power-supply is shutdown to reduce electricity consumption.

fisle 7y ago
That sounds super cool, I'd love to see some pictures if you have any!

INTPenis 7y ago

Like most people on here I have several raspis that I don't use. Two raspi zeros are wild life cameras for my dog. I like to see what she's doing when I'm not home. One raspi 3 is a camera covering the entrance to my apartment.

iuguy 7y ago

Things I use Raspberry Pis for: * Pi-hole * Home Assistant * Processing assistance and PPP/Serial and tcpser connection for an Amiga 4000 * MyCroft personal assistant * Octoprint for 3D Printing * MotionEye camera management (Moving across to a NUC) * A 4 node pi-zero cluster using a ClusterHat for distributed Pi approximation optimization I normally run once a year on Pi day. Much of this is due to the segregated way my network is set up, and the Pis have largely replaced previous OpenWRT devices, although some of these Pis have now or are in the process of moving to other more reliable systems.

mlang23 7y ago

As a braille user, I was always fond of "laptops" without a built-in display, simply to save ssace, weight and power. I found a braille display which features a small compartment with micro-USB inside. Used a Pi Zero (these days 0w) to transform that braille display into a full-features Linux laptop. I documented the first version here: https://blind.guru/brlpi.html https://blind.guru/brlpi.html

djbelieny 7y ago
This has got to be one of the coolest uses of pi ever. Amazing !
benj111 7y ago
Cool. You make reference to fonts. I assume this isn't font in the traditional sense, ie the look (feel?) of a character.
- mlang23 7y ago
  Nope, I actually do refer to fonts as you know them. Long story short, prior to linux kernel 4.19 and brltty 6.0, only those characters that are mapped to a glyph in the currently loaded console font can be backtranslated to the actual codepoint. So to be able to read unicode braille (0x2800-0x28FF) I needed to load a braille font in addition to the standard latin glyph. This dependency on the loaded font has been removed with linux 4.19 and brltty 6.0. Now, there is a new device (/dev/vcsu) which can be used to read the unicode codepoints of characters on the console, without having to go through the loaded font.
  - benj111 7y ago
    Interesting. I assume its for differing reasons? You would want an X to always be an X and what feels most like an X to you, and not be worried about whether the X is Ariel or Times New Roman. Does it extend further to do italics and such? I had naively thought the screen would do all the heavy lifting in this situation, feed it text, and it converts it to braille.
7y ago

gvalkov 7y ago

A device that waits for the SSID of my Olympus WiFi-enabled camera to show up and then sync all new photos: https://github.com/gvalkov/olympus-photosync-server https://github.com/gvalkov/olympus-photosync-server https://github.com/gvalkov/olympus-photosync https://github.com/gvalkov/olympus-photosync

gchokov 7y ago
That's cool!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

orhmeh09 7y ago

I am going to use one to try to replace my Echo Dot with. I only use Spotify, TP-Link lightbulbs and power plugs, timers, reminders, and weather, so I think replicating this functionality with RPi and Mozilla IoT Gateway should be a fun little project.

ajs1k 7y ago

I rigged up something where by I can see and operate the garage door at home. It even works by talking to Siri to get it to do its thing... https://imgur.com/a/Gd54E https://imgur.com/a/Gd54E

twooclock 7y ago

I monitor several solar plants with old syntronic inverters using node installed on rpi. Works 24/7 without any problems.

Quequau 7y ago

I have a few Raspberry Pi boards and since I've seen folks doing stuff similar to what mostly do I thought I comment on something I hadn't seen yet. I struggle with tinnitus distress and Ménière's. One of my coping strategies is to continuously play some sort of background sound in the areas I occupy. I have a first gen RPi with a set of USB powered speakers in my bedroom that plays long form background soundscapes I get from YouTube on loop. This is the lowest tech I could muster. YouTube-DL is a command line tool that fetches content from places like YouTube and recodes it. I use mpg123 to play the resulting audio file on loop... and because I'm already using ssh for all sorts of other things as go about my day this workflow is basically completely integrated into my normal day-to-day activities. When I first started doing this I changed the audio track on a fairly regular basis. Sometime to suit my mood, other times for the weather. These days it's more of a seasonal thing. It works great. It's proven to be really reliable and it was really, really cheap.

mad_tortoise 7y ago
As someone newly with tinnitus, and with fading hope that it will go away at some point, I've been playing around with ideas of doing something like this. I was thinking of using frequencies to cancel each other out, but I think this might work much better.
- Quequau 7y ago
  I don't think that it's possible to use certain frequencies to 'cancel out' the perception of tinnitus because for the over whelming majority of folks dealing tinnitus the noise isn't a real sound.
  - blunte 7y ago
    Even an imagined sound has a frequency (and probably?) a phase. It might be possible to generate a tone at the same frequency and shift the phase until it's 180 degrees out of phase with the imagined sound. Perhaps the brain would do the math and cancel the imagined sound? This can't really be automated since there's no way to measure the imagined sound, but it might be possible to make a little box with knobs - pitch, phase, and volume - that would all one to tune a cancellation frequency.

RedNifre 7y ago

I used a Raspberry Pi to solve the problem that the trash can in front of the building where I lived was often overflowing when I tried to take out the trash: I connected a 20x4 character LCD to the Pi and put it next to the bathroom mirror. The display displays some useful info: - Estimated garbage can levels (interpolated based on the trash calendar) - weather forecast - cryptocurrency prices So when I notice that the trash can level is low I can take out the trash without troubles. (These days I use my Pis for more simple things like RetroPie+Kodi and PiHole)

johnobrien1010 7y ago

I built a device that pulls the weather from Darksky and displays it on electronic paper every hour.

fps_doug 7y ago

I'm still using an old 1B (512MB version) for Kodi, almost on a daily basis. Playing back stuff from an NFS share. I'm limited to 1080p but that's still fine with me, I'd need a TV upgrade first anyways. It's showing its age though, and I had to hack up some stuff to use it properly: I'm controlling Kodi via Yatse (Android app), and mostly just use the file mode to browse Movies and TV shows. I have them sorted and named properly anyways so that's not that much of an inconvenience to me. Using the fancy views that show artwork and IMDB metadata is still working but a little to slow. But even in plain "file mode" Yatse was a little to slow and sometimes timing out when listing directories with 200+ items. This is where the hacky stuff comes to play: I built a simple proxy that intercepts the requests from Yatse and modifies them, namely, when Yatse is listing a directory it sets some field in the JSON that says "media type video" for example, when browsing for videos (forgot what the key is called exactly; currently at work). So I simply strip that key entirely from the request, and now listings take 1-2 seconds for large directories. While I was at it I also started to intercept links to youtube videos and instead call youtube-dl to download them first and then have Kodi play them back via NFS. This way I get 1080p instead of just 720p and also have a history of everything I watched on YouTube, in case I can't find it anymore, or it gets deleted etc. It's pretty brittle since it doesn't properly track state or prevent you from triggering a second download while the first one is still active, also if you request a 50min video it will take a while until playback actually starts, since it needs to download it fully first. But at least it recognizes if a video has already been downloaded and just starts playback instantly. Turning this into a proper project is on my TODO list, but that list is mighty long.

slumber86 7y ago

Beside the classical setup of homeassistant I have a telegram bot that parse the website of a local used camera gear. Sometimes you can find good deals, but they last a couple of minutes, so having the new deals on time is vital.

cgrf 7y ago

Among other things, I use it for a cycle-exact emulation of the Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive: Firmware: https://cbm-pi1541.firebaseapp.com/ https://cbm-pi1541.firebaseapp.com/ Hardware: https://www.hackup.net/2018/07/pi1541io-revision-4/ https://www.hackup.net/2018/07/pi1541io-revision-4/ https://github.com/hackup/Pi1541io https://github.com/hackup/Pi1541io

Aromasin 7y ago

I have a (basically non-existent) side business selling LED strips and RPi lighting controllers for surfboards! If you've seem some viral videos with guys surfing around at night, they were probably using my gear :-) Briefly put, I use the Glediator and Jinx! control software on an RPi, which communicates with an Arduino, which drives the LEDs. I put them in a permanently sealed box, water proof it as much as I possibly can, then cut some IP68 RGB LED strips to size and strap them to the rails of the board. I can remotely access the RPi via Wi-Fi to change lighting schemes, and there's a wireless charging coil inside the box which I can use to charge the batteries, so I never have to open it up after waterproofing. It's basically bomb-proof, and simple enough that I can teach a surf bum how to use it in about half and hour. Start thinking of the RPi as more of a powerful microcontroller and suddenly a world of opportunities open up. I did my dissertation on it! Titled 'Home Automation and Monitoring using a Raspberry Pi', I basically used an RPi as a master node to control a bunch of Arduino slave nodes, using I2C protocol. With just two wires and an Pi, I run about 20 Arduino's all over my house, doing everything from feeding my fish, to monitoring air quality, to starting my coffee maker. I can access it remotely via Wi-Fi too, so I can do things like water my plants while I'm away. Aiming for a full Wallace and Grommet home in the near future. Raspberry Pi's are awesome.

petercooper 7y ago
Is it this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqgLaMc9IVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqgLaMc9IVA
- Aromasin 7y ago
  No, but very similar! I made mine as a product you could attach to any board, as opposed to the strips being embedded and shaped into the board like the one in this video (which normally cost thousands to buy...) A few of my friends rode them at a contest in France though [1] Alas, at the moment it's just a kick-starter pipe dream I'll never have the time to put into production. [1]https://www.adventuresportsnetwork.com/sport/surf/night-surfing-contest-france-surfers-rode-led-boards/ https://www.adventuresportsnetwork.com/sport/surf/night-surf...

LukaD 7y ago

I'm using a Raspberry Pi 3 as an airplay receiver for music streaming at home. The software is called shairport-sync and is open source. My other Raspberry Pi 3 is a Retropie retro gaming console.

b3lvedere 7y ago

1 x Rapsberry Pi 3 as RetroPie/Kodi/Printserver for an old Dymo Labelprinter 1 x Raspberry Pi Zero W as Dakboard (http://www.dakboard.com http://www.dakboard.com) I think i want to make useful wireless NAS out of a Pi 4 once.

mikosty 7y ago

I use it mainly for music streaming via Spotify (raspotify) and airplay. It's paired with an 10-year old EMU 0202 USB DAC which haven't had working drivers for OS X since Snow leopard or something.

glup 7y ago

Controller and logger (temperature, humidity, time lapse photos) for making tempeh (90F oven). https://github.com/smeylan/tempeh/blob/master/tempehrature.py https://github.com/smeylan/tempeh/blob/master/tempehrature.p...

bjoerns 7y ago

I've built a mobile airpollution sensor together with a few other parents and their kids at my 8-year old son's primary school in London. Air pollution is a big topic as the school is right next to a busy road, a lot of children are suffering from asthma and Islington has been pretty useless in collecting/publishing data. So we've started taking things in our own hands and built a handful of raspberry pi based monitors in class rooms, the playground and children take it with them on their school run. geo-tagged data is automatically uploaded to little influxdb/grafana based web service wheneve the pi has a wifi connection. Makes it an interesting project for kids to look and interpret charts and stuff as well. Currently we're measuring PM2.5/PM10, temp and humidity only, haven't had the time yet to look into NOx sensors yet... https://github.com/bstiel/airpollutionpi https://github.com/bstiel/airpollutionpi

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

xbhatnag 7y ago

I'm trying to write my own micro-kernel from scratch that runs on a Raspberry Pi 3B. It boots up and has support for virtual memory, interrupts, timers and very basic multi-threading. You can take a look at the source code here -> https://xbhatnag.com/xyos https://xbhatnag.com/xyos

ozkatz 7y ago

The Pi Zero W can act as both a USB host and a USB HID device, i.e. can act as a keyboard/mouse. This makes it a very capable bad USB/rubber ducky/automation tool with Wifi enabled. I've created a small repo to demonstrate this. Connect a zeroW to a computer, the Pi will expose a hidden Wifi network that by connecting to it you'll be able to send remote keyboard commands (or execute ducky scripts) on the host computer: https://github.com/ozkatz/pi-remote-ducky https://github.com/ozkatz/pi-remote-ducky

TigerAd 7y ago

I have it set up to run a project where a subreddit has control over the watering of a live plant in my apartment. The pi runs a reddit bot that reads the votes, and can switch on a pump to water. It also collects data about sunlight, moisture, temp and humidity to help inform the decision about watering. Despite many people's preconceptions about the goodness of the internet, I must admit that they do a wonderful job caring for my plant! website: https://www.idealzanussiservice.com https://www.idealzanussiservice.com subreddit w/ voting: https://www.idealzanussiservice.com/blog/%D8%B5%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%8A%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%B2%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%89-%D9%81%D9%89-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%87%D8%B1%D8%A9 https://www.idealzanussiservice.com/blog/%D8%B5%D9%8A%D8%A7%...

stzup7 7y ago

I use one as a hardware ad blocker on my home network (the project is Pi-Hole) I also attached a webcam for home security (motion-project) that sends me a gif over telegram.

nairobi222 7y ago

When I was younger I worked at a retail store and I remember being thrilled to discover I could telnet into a cash register and echo text directly to the attached receipt printer.[0] I became a small time hero at one point when I used this power to alert our sister store that their phones weren't accepting calls during the middle of the holiday season. [0] Also interesting is the time I discovered that sending a special escape code to the printer caused the cash drawer to open, but that's a tale for another thread. https://whitewhalemaintenanceeg.blogspot.com/ https://whitewhalemaintenanceeg.blogspot.com/

GnarfGnarf 7y ago

Watch TV shows.

speleding 7y ago

I hooked up the raspberry pi to an old monitor I hung over the kitchen table. It boots up shortly before dinner time for an hour and then displays "Find my Friends" on Chromium in kiosk mode. (Inspired bij the Weasly family clock from Harry Potter). It's a fixture I couldn't live without anymore. When family members travel you still feel connected. It has a tiny ruby script to rotate through pages, during breakfast it displays the kids' upcoming class schedule.

rjo 7y ago

I use them to convert old industrial equipment into oddball control surfaces. For example http://www.digitalesoterica.net/projects/honeywell.html http://www.digitalesoterica.net/projects/honeywell.html

dirkc 7y ago

Currently: * I use a Raspberry Pi Zero-W and a neopixel strip to tell me the time at night. This post describes part of it: http://www.thebacklog.net/projects/smart-light/ http://www.thebacklog.net/projects/smart-light/ * Run a piHole at home. Things I've done in the past: * Use a Raspberry Pi as an intervalometer to do time lapses with a DSLR camera * Make a photo booth for a 2 day workshop. * As a cheap computer to run coding tutorials * Monitor water levels in a hydroponics system using a ultrasonic sensor * As a WiFi access point to access a wired network from my phone

unhammer 7y ago

one as a baby monitor (shoutcast + microphone) and one for my weechat irc bouncer

cameron_b 7y ago

For those of you commenting about the mechanics and pitfalls, I've found that a Pi3B+ with the 7" screen and a keyboard/trackpad is a wonderful tool for provisioning new cards. I do headless system configuration on that, then swap to the Zero or whatever it'll actually use. Since the BSPs for every board are tiny, there's no reason to limit yourself to something that can't work on all of the boards out there. It makes troubleshooting a lot easier. Also, don't buy crap SD cards, and probably have 2x the number you'd like to have running. This stuff is cheap so that you can have multiples for testing.

tnasemelward 7y ago

I started a company that constructed booths which used 70 accurately sync'd Pis with custom PiCams (fitted with lenses) to take pictures of human subjects, for turning them into avatars like this: https://maintenancearistonalex.blogspot.com/2019/06/blog-post.html https://maintenancearistonalex.blogspot.com/2019/06/blog-pos... At the beginning of the project, I'd barely powered up the Pis I had collecting dust in my drawer. By the end, I was a legitimate domain expert in several niches within niches of Pi dark arts. For example, since Pis do not have hardware clocks, you have to rely on NTP. However, you need to take pains to make sure that each Pi is getting the same amount of voltage or else they will run at different speeds. If you want to power 70 Pis in a constrained space, you need to devise a customized power distribution system with adequate heat venting. https://indesitmaintenance.blogspot.com/2019/06/blog-post.html https://indesitmaintenance.blogspot.com/2019/06/blog-post.ht... Due to the thin effect, voltage drops over distance, so the distance a Pi was from the power would impact the voltage and therefore the speed. The major breakthrough came when I realized that I could start with a high end power supply outputting 14 volts and terminate each parallel line with a device known as a UBEC. They are used primarily by drone enthusiasts to make efficient use of battery packs. A UBEC is designed to drop down a supply voltage to 5v without bleeding off the excess voltage as heat. Since this could also describe a fuse, we felt comfortable bypassing the Pi's MicroUSB power supply and attaching the UBEC's pins directly to the top pins on the Pi's GPIO breakout. That's just a tiny example of the hijinx. The Pi is an incredible tool if you're patient and clever. What a rollercoaster.

kylegordon 7y ago

Pi Zero running a digital picture frame that I made from a discarded 17" laptop screen Pi 3B running adsb-receiver and feeding flight data into Flightaware, ADSB-Exchange, ADSBHub, FlightRadar24. Pi B Rev 1 running node-red with a Jeenode decoding weather station data from my weather station. Sends data over MQTT to Home-Assistant. I have a BananaPi M2 Zero running Armbian and doing nothing at the moment. It's likely going to be put in a box close to the ADSB antenna and take over ADSB duties in order to free up the 3B for AIY/Snips.ai experimenting.

mr_mitm 7y ago

I use one with an extra wifi card as a wireless router. I'm living in hotels a lot and sometimes I find their wifi too restrictive. The built-in wifi card connects to the hotel wifi and the external wifi card acts as an access point to which all my other devices connect to. This way I only need to pass the captive portal once (and only pay for one device ...) and I can enable a VPN to my home router in case I want to use Netflix or Amazon Prime in a foreign country. Another raspberry pi I turned into a listening device to analyze and modify traffic. I call it Lauschgerät: https://github.com/SySS-Research/Lauschgeraet https://github.com/SySS-Research/Lauschgeraet

alvern 7y ago

I've bought every board that comes out since the 2B. Most of them get gifted to relatives as Kodi boxes. The three I currently use are a 3B that runs the [0] LivPi CO2 and environment monitor, a zero W that has a noIR camera pointing at my plants under lights, and a 2B+ that runs piHole. I recommend the odroid [1] XU4 (desktop) or [2] HC1 (nas) if you have anything that requires constant read writes. Pi SD cards do go bad over time unless you set it to run the OS from memory. Odroid made a smarter choice going with eMMC early on. The con of odroid is you have to hack everything that was already done on a pi to work. [0] http://www.livpi.com/ http://www.livpi.com/ [1] https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4-special-price/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4-special-price/ [2] https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/

skocznymroczny 7y ago

Buy it, think of the cool projects I'll make with it, then hide it in the cupboard. Every few months I'll take it out, set up a webserver on it and after few days hide it again.

moron4hire 7y ago

I have the original Pi. With it, I started a collection of various organic and inorganic particulates. The collection site is a shelf in the corner of my basement.

tomrandle 7y ago

At Geckoboard we have a Pi hooked up to a thermal receipt printer so that remote participants can print off their retrospective cards through Slack: https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/building-a-slack-printer-for-remote-retrospectives-8de0282e5791 https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/building-a-slac... (We've upgraded it a bit since that post! - We also use it to ping a Slack channel for when it's standup). We also use Pis to run some of our dashboards: https://support.geckoboard.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023924372-Set-up-Geckoboard-on-a-Raspberry-Pi https://support.geckoboard.com/hc/en-us/articles/36002392437...

noisy_boy 7y ago

After reading the replies in this thread, I just feel so inferior. I can't solder to save my life and here people have made amazing things. :(

sbouma 7y ago

A few years ago some of my coworkers used a Raspberry Pi to instrument our work foosball table. They had badge readers so all the players could badge in, and IR sensors for autoscoring. They found some open-source foosball leaderboard software that they ran on the Raspberry Pi as well, so we had an auto-scoring, auto-ranking foosball table. Best Raspberry Pi project I've ever seen :)

sbouma 7y ago

Another friend of mine also used a Raspberry Pi with MagicMirror (https://magicmirror.builders/ https://magicmirror.builders/) to build a smart mirror. That was a neat project.

glenscott1 7y ago

I installed the Pi-hole ad blocker (https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/) on a Raspberry Pi Zero, and have it as my DNS server on my home network. It has improved general browsing speed tremendously.

ruuki 7y ago

I pulled a prank at the office with my RPi. I built a very simple circuit to listen to 5V pin of HDMI and I hid RPi and the circuit under the desk of a colleague after work and turned off video output of RPi. Colleague's laptop -HDMI> RPi -HDMI> external display. when the colleague comes to work and turn on the laptop, my RPi turned on its video output and external display showed the website I made for the occasion.

boyband6666 7y ago

I'm giving my son a classical education with it. Using Retropi Every now and then we play "Daddy's games", so he has NES megadrive, and MAME (PacMan mainly). As he starts to master those, I'll add the next generation to it. If we've played some of the same games, hopefully it gives us some form of common framework, and him an interest in how he could code something similar i.e. a gateway in to computers. If he decides he doesn't like it, that's fine too. So far it's goign well - we set off on the adventure 6 months ago when he was 4. I'll also get another microUSB card and try trhe same with my daughter when she's a bit older (currently she's 2).

totalrobe 7y ago

Installed raspbian then stored it in the closet for 4 years unused

pknopf 7y ago

I use it as a test camera source. https://github.com/pauldotknopf/raspberry-pi-camera-source/releases/tag/2.0 https://github.com/pauldotknopf/raspberry-pi-camera-source/r... I can't wait for my Pi 4 to get in so that I can have a test 4k60 source.

datagram 7y ago
I do the same thing with game footage to test my capture cards.

northernman 7y ago

1. Pi3 controlling my swimming pool pump (basically a fancy timer) 2. PiZero controlling a mousetrap (servoe controlled trapdoor with IR sensor)

Eric_WVGG 7y ago

My father built this wild automatic glass cutter with one. https://twitter.com/Eric_WVGG/status/1010952072139890694 https://twitter.com/Eric_WVGG/status/1010952072139890694 [edit: I'm a dummy, this is built on an Arduino] He also built a solar panel that's mounted on an upside-down bicycle frame, slowly turns all day to keep facing the sun. Lot of interesting math to track the sun across the calendar year. I'm boring, just building a NAS with Nextcloud Pi. Although it will likely be built on a different board that's better-suited for NAS…

abdullahkhalids 7y ago

I have been trying to build an Rpi+eink screen laptop, using https://github.com/joukos/PaperTTY https://github.com/joukos/PaperTTY But haven't touched the project in months now.

TomMasz 7y ago

I've got a Zero running my PedalPi guitar pedal from ElectroSmash and a 3 running with a USB dongle as a digital radio hotspot (soon to be upgraded to an MMDVM board with PiStar).

jmhobbs 7y ago

I used mine to build an egg incubator this year, http://www.velvetcache.org/2018/03/04/chicken-cam-incubator-edition http://www.velvetcache.org/2018/03/04/chicken-cam-incubator-...

heisthefox 7y ago

I have a live stream of my bee hives, the pi reads the stream from the camera and frame copies it to the correct format for YouTube live: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2E5s3LTU9ObXjiOL7K8KPg/live https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2E5s3LTU9ObXjiOL7K8KPg/liv...

riledhel 7y ago
ffmpeg right? can you elaborate a little more on your setup please?

ngaut 7y ago

Running a distributed database cluster TiDB as a Demo.

djbelieny 7y ago

I setup a pi 3 running OpenLighting Architecture (OLA) connected to 2 ENTTEC USB->DMX adapters, connected to 2 Wireless DMX transceivers as an ARTNET->DMX gateway to allow our team to remote control all the stage lighting at the church via software without running cables to all the lights. Pretty cool setup.

markfchapman 7y ago

We use them in our stores for digital signage - we use 60" screens in the store front and behind the food counters. We created web app that allows our Marketing team to allocate posters/menus/videos to stores or groups of stores. Changes are pulled by the store from the server every 60 seconds. If the store loses network connection it will just continue to cycle the existing images/videos until the connection is restored. Even with the price of the screens it's very cost effective compared to commercial offerings.

fsargent 7y ago

My wife and I went to Paris, and in our AirBnB there was a fantastic little radio. We'd turn it on and listen to Radio FIP and just leave it going. I had forgotten the pleasure of listening to what was on, rather than picking, or worse, skipping songs. I hooked up my raspberry Pi to a small LED header with directional buttons on it. Each button was a different french radio station's m3u stream, output to speakers. It perfectly simulated the radio. I want to put in a delay where it would be time synched with California so the theme is more aligned (slow night time music at lunch is noticeable).

coverclock 7y ago

I do embedded, real-time and distributed product development for clients in the commercial, enterprise, aviation, defense, and big science domains. I probably own two dozen Pis of various vintages (and just ordered one of the new Pi 4 models). It's my go-to platform for prototyping, especially for ARM-based systems. I keep one on my LAN just to regression and unit test software that I otherwise developed on an Intel platform. I've also used Pis in devices that are more-or-less permanently deployed, like an NTP server that uses a GPS-disciplined chip-scale cesium atomic clock as its oscillator, and a home-built WWVB clock. I'm currently using three Pis in a Differential GNSS system I'm prototyping.

immnn 7y ago

I‘m running Bind9 and ISC-DHCPD on my Pi. Having set a bunch of DNS blacklist zones to completly eliminate necessary of ad blockers on all my devices. Following, I have set up dhcpd, thus I‘m not bothering about setting static IPs.

e12e 7y ago
How do you maintain the blacklist? Is there a good community project around dns blacklists?

maddentim 7y ago

To run Kodi as a frontend to my Mythtv backend. The 4 out I am wondering how I could replace the backend desktop with a Pi. I would need to find a way to connect a TV tuner to it. That seems the biggest hurdle. My current card connects through PCI slot as I recall...

a_lifters_life 7y ago

call me a little paranoid but - a RPI security camera. I have it running locally on my network, capturing still pictures of cars/people/things walking by (I live near a train). Its really just a passive monitor, but I'd like to add more difficult things to it like tell me if someone comes within x feet of my house - phone me, or something, it works for now though.

tru3_power 7y ago
got any tutorials you can point me to for something like this? I want to make a front door peep hole camera after someone recently stole a package from my apartment entrance.

batoure 7y ago

Besides the standard PiHole VPN so on I have several RPis I use. 1. I run Samba to manage access to provide AD to my home computers and manage the attachment of various network shares. 2. I have a RPi with an attached set of 12v switch controls that I use to manage various things in my Airstream trailer such as internal/external lights a backup shut off valve for my LP tanks as well as a watering system for plants that I keep in the trailer that I don't always get around to watering.

gatesphere 7y ago

I had one of the original 2012 Model B's (with the 256MB RAM) serving as a simple web server for years. I just recently retired it in favor of a VM. Other than that, I have: - A RetroPie attached to my living room TV - A Zynthian (http://zynthian.org/ http://zynthian.org/) - A PiDP-11 (https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11 https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11) In the past, I've played around with them, making: - A touch-screen enabled stand-alone SunVox synth - A home audio server attached to my stereo - An experiment to read MIDI files from floppy disks, also attached to the stereo I have a couple spares laying around waiting for use cases... but I'm not really antsy to get to them. I'd love to build an OTTO (https://github.com/topisani/OTTO https://github.com/topisani/OTTO) when it's ready for prime time. I'm also considering building some sort of portable RetroPie.

jonotime 7y ago

Internal network services. Mostly UniFi controller, Emby, Syncthing.

ramy_d 7y ago

I'm making a toy that prints a nice message through a receipt printer to my coworkers when they scan their key cards on it.

jonotime 7y ago

UniFi controller, Emby, Syncthing

rolandblais 7y ago

I use it to monitor a Tilt submersible hydrometer to keep track of the fermentation status of my beer. It displays the data on a small oled display and pushes it to a couple of Google sheets.

xcubic 7y ago
Source?

chriscareycode 7y ago

It's an addiction, I have 17 and a Pi4 on order 1 - (pi) pi - temperature sensor 2 - (pi) woody - garage door opener - custom web interface 3 - (pi2) white - Unicorn hat blinking lights 4 - (pi2) pi2b - OpenVPN server, pihole DNS 5 - RetroPi - Games (Pi 3) 6 - bigwood - Freeswitch phone system, Nagios4 (Pi 2 Model B v1.1) 7 - (pi) unicorn #2 - unicorn hat blinking lights 8 - pi2 motion - motion sensor, camera, blink(1) light- blink shows red or orange when motion is sensed and takes photos 9 - Slack Bot - (at work) 10 - zero (on desk at home) 11 - green3 - camera - garage wide angle (old cam) 12 - infra - camera front door 13 - infra2 - camera garage wide angle 14 - infra3 - camera front door far view 15 - zerow-cam with infrared usb adapter displaying cameras on tv - change cameras with remote control 16 - zerow-cam1 - camera back yard 17 - zerow-cam2 - camera back yard 18 - Pi4 4GB is backordered but I found a Pi4 2GB which I hope will serve well as a file/backup server. Hoping to utilize the USB3 to get better I/O to a couple external disks. Running Bitwarden on a VM right now but will probably move this to a Pi4 in the near future I have all of these connected to a custom command-and-control web interface (socket.io) where I can send commands, perform updates, monitor load average, version, uptime - and can reboot if needed

senectus1 7y ago

PiHole for one and Media player for the other. Will be buying the new one to up my media player then I'll have a spare :-D

neelkadia 7y ago

Feed my rat online – http://neelkadia.com/feedmyflash http://neelkadia.com/feedmyflash

Magnitopic 7y ago

I have a Raspberry Pi 2,3 and 0W. 2 as a media and games center with RetroPi and Kodi. 3 as a Web server using LAMP and Wordpress. And 0W as a server for my non wifi printer.

Magnitopic 7y ago

I have a Raspberry 2, 3 and 0W. 2 as a media server with RetroPi and Kodi. 3 as a web server using LAMP and Wordpress. and the 0W to work with my non WiFi printer.

FerretFred 7y ago

Good question! I have quite a few Pi sipping small amounts of power here, so... Web server, mail server, gopher server, key server, NTP server, SMS gateway (with SMS hat), NTP client network reference clock (Pi Zero), MQTT server, Flightaware box, PiHole, XMPP server.

antirez 7y ago

Retrogaming

elroyjetson 7y ago

I just recently went on a vacation that included two 14 hour days of travel. I setup a Raspberry Pi as a Wifi hotspot for the car, added a 128GB USB thumb drive, loaded it up with movies, attached it to a 20,000mAh battery pack. My wife and son were able to watch movies on their iPads using the VLC iOS app for the whole trip.

capnnemo 7y ago

I'm using a raspberry pi as a low latency server to organize and provide a bridge between esp8266's that are running LP flame effects for Capn Nemos Flaming Carnival. You know, for the kids! I've open sourced various aspects, and though it's all a bit disorganized as it is primarily me that uses it, you can find codey bits at https://github.com/burntech https://github.com/burntech, and cool pictures and links at http://capnnemosflamingcarnival.org http://capnnemosflamingcarnival.org. Yeah, it's kind of a Burning Man thing. But long term, I hope the tech can serve as a small fast network that controls potentially timing critical things (eg shutting off fire reliably, music-controlled effects, and etc.).

atum47 7y ago

I have used it as a server to control electronics, among other things.

erlemantos 7y ago

A programmable, annoying, rotating alarm. Triggered every time a Jenkins build fails. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgXXkwVXqvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgXXkwVXqvI

erlemantos 7y ago

A programmable, annoying, MQTT-triggered rotating alarm. Used to annoy people when a Jenkins build fails. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgXXkwVXqvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgXXkwVXqvI

Xelbair 7y ago

Absolutely nothing. Because i still need to buy a micro HDMI cable :) The plan is to setup a piHole, make a SMB share on usb HDD, and if it has enough juice left - connect it to TV and setup it with some streaming services. I would love to have a small home server rack but both power costs and space constraints prevent me from setting it up. i might do it on multiple RPI's - and maybe add a NAS for storage later on.

neumann 7y ago

All headless: One for Kodi+VPN. With yatse on Android I have my own Netflix and Spotify for my own owned content on demand whenever. Another for a baby monitor that feeds TinyCamPro with audio and video A third that is a slave Kodi to play music in different part of the house as well, but mainly to operate the electric gate from my phone. About to buy a rp4 to build a synth with a keyboard I just got.

neop1x 7y ago

HTPC for local home IPTV, another one as a wifi camera photo forwarder (security camera), another one as ADS-B receiver for adsbexchange.com and flightradar24.com

efazati 7y ago

Better media center with Raspberry PI and Dropbox ( or whatever you like ) -> https://medium.com/@efazati/better-media-center-with-raspberry-pi-and-dropbox-or-whatever-your-like-bd716d272357 https://medium.com/@efazati/better-media-center-with-raspber...

argimenes 7y ago

I use it run RISC OS on the metal.

greenido 7y ago

I created this project with my kids: https://greenido.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/raspberry-pi-as-security-camera-with-motion-detection/ https://greenido.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/raspberry-pi-as-se... Fun stuff!

gregpaton08 7y ago

I’m using one as a smart lock so I can get in my house using my phone. I have another one running HomeAssistant with a USB z-wave adapter as well as some esp8266/tasmota switches.