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I’ve tried so many times but I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi. It seems well suited for making a NAS or plex server, but other th
by vsnf 2y ago
I’ve tried so many times but I just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi. It seems well suited for making a NAS or plex server, but other than that, idk. Everything else I want to experiment with is better served by an arduino.
- k8sToGo 2y agoNot well suited for NAS at all. Too limited in IO and PCI lanes.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoAlso not really suited for Plex, since the transcode performance would be awful.
- ta988 2y agoDepends so much what's on the NAS.
- StillBored 2y agoRight, the IO perf has been bad. But IMHO, no one should be running a NAS without ECC at this point. It's on the "my RAID doesn't scrub the disks" level; it's just begging for silent disk corruption that propagates its way through backups and is impossible to fix with software solutions.
- LtWorf 2y agoI have home automation done with rpi. They have a touch screen, speakers, and control the lights via gpio. I use the same thing to set timers, play the internet radio in the morning to wake me up, and put the lights off.
- dotnet00 2y agoSimilar issue, I have an old desktop as a server already to do all the heavy processing stuff. Only finally found use for RPi to be the brains of my 3d printers.
- borbtactics 2y agoI use my 3B solely for adblocking via Pi-hole and it works fine most of the time
- chrisjj 2y agoR Pi in a nutshell. Three sigma and proud of it! :)
- markus_zhang 2y agoI think they are mostly for hobbyists and students so maybe being pragmatic is not the top concern.
- nsbk 2y agoPi-hole: https://pi-hole.net https://pi-hole.net
- amatecha 2y agoHilariously I've spent hours troubleshooting why my Pi running Pi-hole is intermittently inaccessible from my iPhone, despite being able to connect to the Pi from other machines. I still have no clue why. Last night I finally captured a tcpdump so maybe I can see what is happening (the Pi is indeed receiving packets from the iPhone), but it's totally inexplicable. The other Pi I have always hooked up (music player for my speakers) has a bash script that runs every 5 min with cron, to ping the LAN router and restart networking if it can't ping it. Why? Because after a while the Pi would randomly drop off the network and become inaccessible. Countless stuff online gives various troubleshooting which never made any difference, until I employed my hackish "check the network every 5min" which has completely "solved" the problem. Unfortunately this didn't "solve" the problem for the Pi running Pi-hole, sadly.
- pzo 2y agoI wish they could make a more user friendly rpi that is all in one: router, smart tv, adblock, vpn, private cloud, private media server, wireless charging pad, universal miracast/airplay/chromecast.
- walteweiss 2y agoWon’t a tiny/small PC would solve that use-case? E.g. a nettop.
- lode 2y agoI am running a hypervisor (https://blogs.vmware.com/arm/2023/12/15/esxi-arm-fling-1-15-refresh/ https://blogs.vmware.com/arm/2023/12/15/esxi-arm-fling-1-15-...) on my Raspberry Pi 4. Rock solid. Currently running virtual machines: * Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io/ https://home-assistant.io/) - with USB passthrough of USB stick to read out my digital electricity/gas meters, Zigbee and Z-Wave * Homebridge (to allow my Eufy video doorbell to work with Homekit) * Pihole All are running from iSCSI storage served by my Synology NAS. I am running an older Pi (3) on demand in my garden as a client for my media server to play music on garden speakers.
- zamadatix 2y agoDoesn't Synology support running VMs directly on the NAS itself?
- tetris11 2y agoRun an email server, send triggers on subject keywords, automate stuff.
- ssl-3 2y agoA Raspberry Pi a fairly tiny computer that can run a "real" OS, and that has a fair amount of GPIO that can be bought new somewhat-inexpensively. It has storage that is easily-removed and swapped (whether for good, or for bad). If all a person needs or wants is a fairly tiny computer and it doesn't need to be new/shiny, then there's off-lease corpo boxes that are faster/better/cheaper. If all a person needs or wants is some GPIO to hack on hardware with, and doesn't want a real OS on the back end of things, then maybe an Arduino or ESP32 or RP2040 or something might be better and cheaper. But if a person needs or wants all of that in one box, then: A Raspberry Pi may well be the right approach. (Some folks like hacking with a real OS; this is fine. We used to use things like parallel ports for this in the PC space but those are long gone.) Or: If a person needs or wants a well-tuned system that they can just download and use specialized images for and write to a MicroSD card, then: A Raspberry Pi can become desirable. --- For instance: I use a Pi 4 to play movies with over SMB. I could do that a thousand or more different ways, but using LibreElec on a Pi 4 is the easiest way for me to get there -- just download it, stuff it into an SD card, and boot it up. It becomes an appliance, and this appliance is similar or identical to many other appliances; this makes supporting it easy. (And if I want to do something different with that hardware today, it takes only a few seconds to swap its storage for something completely different -- and swap it back later.) Or: 3D printing. I can do what many others have done before me and sneaker-net gcode from the PC to the printer, or I can use a Raspberry Pi and a standardized Octoprint image to put that printer on the network instead. Now my printer is a network appliance.
- bityard 2y agoSounds like a lack of imagination to me! The official Raspberry Pi New page has a least a few featured projects every week: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/ The MagPi has articles and a whole monthly magazine on various projects and use cases: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com https://magpi.raspberrypi.com
- graphe 2y agoAbsolutely correct. The form factor of a Pi zero (2) may be good in a handheld but you can easily get one from China or a PSP and get a great experience. Arduino? You mean the ide or the actual hardware? It's been superceded by esp32.
- jcronenberg 2y agoOne thing arduinos don't do is things which require a GPU. So if you have a project which you want to output to a display but you also want it very low powered, because it e.g. runs 24/7, a PI is IMO the best device. Something like a Home Assistant dashboard display or a DIY smart mirror for example.
- chrisjj 2y agoBut neither requires a GPU.
- sneak 2y agohome assistant and small/quiet/cheap remote syncthing nodes.
- gmiller123456 2y agoI just can’t come up with any compelling use for a raspberry pi. The practical purposes for an RPi have diminished. They're still good for when you need something small, light or low power. But the market for refurb mini-PCs really replaces most of the instances where you're just looking for a cheap, but semi-powerful, computer. And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor.
- meatmanek 2y ago> And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor. Especially with ESPHome making it so easy to integrate with common sensors without writing code. That said, the Pi Zero W is pretty cheap and small (similar in size to many ESP32 development boards) so it provides a nice upgrade path if you want to do more processing on device, exceed a few megabytes of ram, etc
- moffkalast 2y agoAnd the Pi Foundation's refusal to do literally any power management while increasing TDP into the sky with marginal efficiency improvements has diminished its use for robotics and other battery powered applications too. This has just been one of my largest pet peeves with the entire Pi lineup. The Pi 5 is the worst offender that idles at like 3 watts doing jack shit. That's an entire 3000mAh battery gone in under four hours that would've easily lasted several days on an average smartphone SOC with twice the memory and speed.
- ssl-3 2y agoThat's valid. My first reaction was "Well, the OS is open -- isn't it? Just set up good power management yourself and publish it for all to use, and it'll probably get accepted upstream eventually." But then I remembered: The OS is open, but the hardware is not (because -- in one word -- Broadcom). But maybe with an IPO, they can generate enough cash to get their own CPU started up. Maybe something based around [checks flip-chart] RISC-V or something, with enough documentation to allow people to fix the [checks excuse card] power management problem. They've certainly shown some willingness to work in that direction with the RP2040.
- rocky1138 2y agoI use an old 1st gen Pi Model B+ as a ppp server for my Tandy 1000 SX to connect to the Internet. I can telnet in and adjust stuff if needed. Very handy and fun to play Zork on sdf.org through it.
- zamadatix 2y agoThere are a lot of suggestions here for things that can be done on any PC rather than a particular piece of hardware (DNS server, VM host, email server) so to throw out the one genuine "something the Raspberry Pi is compelling for, not just able to do too": IP KVM as with the Pi KVM. It utilizes the CSI interface for the capture without needing to do it through USB or expensive PCIe addon cards like a normal PC, the USB OTG is used to act as keyboard/mouse/disc drive/usb ethernet, the GPIO is used to control the motherboard power/reset pins, the serial pins are used to provide a console interface in case you need to reconfigure the static IP, some other pins are used to drive a small LCD display telling you the IP and status of the device, the Ethernet and Wi-Fi give connectivity options to access the local webpage where the hardware accelerated encode helps stream the data to you. The local uSD storage is plenty for storing the local ISO images and it's a full Arch Linux system in case you ever need to do anything else (like wget an image directly to the device remotely). Not only is the hardware extremely well suited (capture, the IO pins, the decoder, the network interfaces, the minimal storage) to the exact use case but it's used in a way that doesn't really make sense to use an Arduino and would cost a lot more (in dollars, power, and space) to get a standard mini PC to do these things. Of course I've owned 6 Raspberry Pi boards over the last 12 years and this is the only one I ever found to be worthwhile. The others were just for the novelty.
- kstrauser 2y agoI run a Mastodon server in a VPC. It's a Rails all and sucks up all the CPU and RAM you can throw at it. A while back when I was almost at my VPC's limits and didn't want to throw a bunch of money at it, I spun up Sidekiq worker VMs on my RPi. That freed up a lot of resources I could repurpose for frontend caching.
- snvzz 2y ago>It seems well suited for making a NAS No ECC memory, thus no.