Ask HN: What are you doing with your Raspberry? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you doing with your Raspberry?

25 pointszakokor35 comments

I've had a Raspberry Pi gathering dust for a long time, and I would like to do something with it, preferably involving an e-paper display, but I can't find an interesting project. They always seem to be the same. I would love some creative ideas.

Also, welcome are educational ideas for girls (I have two).

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I run combine1090 (and was able to send Pi's to friends all over the US to send me their ADS-B data too!). Check out https://radar.airport-frequencies.com Also have it running op25 (trunked radio systems) for a real-time police/fire scanner that refreshes every time a new transmission is recorded and displays on another subdomain. Check out https://ducomm.scanner-frequencies.com

As far as "girl" projects...I think maybe it's more of an age thing rather than a gender thing (both boys and girls would dig working with a Pi) - I think the age matters more because there could be a learning curve involved

cool.

do you know why does the fire scanner uses a computer voice? they use text message that are read or something like that?

Not sure how they do it but any time there's a fire/EMS emergency that's what plays in the station...then the human dispatcher responds to whatever units say they're going to the emergency

- pihole

- piVPN

The piVPN story is interesting. I am currently stationed outside my home country. Using the financial apps (bank apps, wallet apps) outside the country are restricted hence I needed a ip within the country. No major VPN provider provide IPs for my country. piVPN has been great in that sense to access the contents from my country.

I gave one away and another is gathering dust. For projects what about a small eink picture frame, updating chore list, or a message. The idea is that they can change from another computers browser to leave messages for each other or their parents. Building off another idea you could make something that shows where the plane flying overhead is from and to, although depending on the age and interest of the girls that might not be particularly too interesting.

Thanks!

I have a pi4 that is a small server for random things. Primarily it runs pihole and HomeAssistant, but also runs several other small servers. Vaultwarden for passwords. Atuin for shell history sync. Resilio sync for photo backup. Few other small things but that’s most of it. All of the services are accessible anywhere through tailscale, even if I’m not home. That’s most useful for HomeAssistant and Vaultwarden. All of the web sites hosted on it happen over HTTPS too.

Everything on it except for atuin is running as docker containers. I think either the drive or the usb connector I’m using is kinda flakey. So I try to keep everything as portable as possible. I can backup and move all of the containers elsewhere pretty easily if i have to.

Running a personal cloud like this is great. Tailscale makes the networking part a piece of cake. And a few containers through docker-compose isn’t super hard either.

I think I got lucky getting a pi 4 on release pretty cheap. But the arm64 support is great, and I think some of the containers I’m using only worked because of that. Not sure if the other pis support that or not

What OS are you using? I'm looking at doing similar with my pi4.

Sorry for the delayed reply. I’m just using Raspbian Bullseye. The 64 bit version.

All the apps im running are in containers, so my setup runs on anything I can get docker running on.

Living up to the username ;) Thanks for replying!

Not very creative but definitely useful, I turned an old USB inkjet printer/scanner into a networked device. I can now print from my phone or scan documents from any computer.

I did not want to have it powered on all the time, so I wrote a simple udev rule that shutdowns the Pi when the printer is turned off.

Wireguard that 1) connects multiple houses across the world into one transparent network with each node serving a local DNS with Adguard for 64-bit or Pinhole on 32-bit-only ones; 2) provides private passthrough VPN that turns on automatically whenever I'm not on a home network.

Running a backup instance of pihole. I have my primary instance on my "server" and run a secondary instance on the pi so I can point my DNS at two separate devices so downtime on one doesn't drop my internet.

I had a lot of fun getting all the bit twiddling right for using a Max 7291 as a display board: https://github.com/dylanowen/display-board-pi https://github.com/dylanowen/bart-pi

Before I moved to home assistant I also automated my lights using my Pi: https://github.com/dylanowen/nanoleaf

I have this hi fi hat on it so I can use it as a synth or effects pedal.

  - Media center
  - Transmission seedbox
  - Zoneminder (security camera monitoring)

Ones I no longer use:

  - Pihole
  - Grafana dashboard of temperatures of other Pis

I also built an exhaust fan into a drawer so I could keep them all crammed in without overheating. Hence the Grafana dashboard above.

A few years ago I built a project that used wifi to count the number of devices in a given area.

You could set up a basic Linux distro on it, put video game emulators on it so they can experience all the old LucasArts classics.

Would you mind sharing with use why you no longer use it as a PiHole? Is there some major disadvantage or problem with it? I ask this because I've been considering getting a Pi for a Pihole.

Sure! Sorry for my delayed response.

To block ads when web browsing, I find adblockers more than adequate. Eg Brave Browser on Android, or the Ublock Origin addon on desktop.

The main reason I wanted Pihole was to block ads in other situations - eg Android apps. In particular, I wanted to watch a documentary on a free video app, but the number of video ads made it intolerable.

I found Pihole did not effectively block ads in Android apps, or ads in videos. I think they must serve the ads from the same server as their content, therefore rendering DNS blocking useless.

(I will go to extreme lengths to avoid watching video ads. In this case, I actually screen recorded the entire documentary on my phone, with the ads. I could then watch it later on, but skipping all the ads)

It's a RPi 3 A+ and it is sitting in my drawer. I plan to install a game emulator later. Unfortunately it only has one USB port so I also need to buy a USB hub.

I bought it from friend. I am using it as a sync backup server running syncthing and I am running pi gallery 2 to serve images as a website for family viewing so that we my images don't remain stocked inside the hard disc and can be viewed by anyone in the family anytime

Pigallery2 Syncthing for 3 phones 2 laptops

For many years I used raspberry PIs running Kodi (previously named XBMC) as myth-tv frontends to play recorded TV shows to the old but still-functional CRT TVs I had to give them many extra years of longevity.

But eventually we gave into the subscription TV services and so took the CRTs to the recycling center (even though they still worked) and then the raspberry's went back into the drawer.

Trying to build a sand sorting machine - skittle/M&M sorting machines seem to be popular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL0VvoQ6kww

NAS. External disk + AFP/Netatalk + Tailscale when I'm not at home. Works like a charm.

MQTT hub for my house to glue various IoT devices together and tailscale endpoint.

One of mine is part of a robot kit. The other is in a semi-watertight enclosure on the back porch taking readings from a BME280 temp/baro pressure/humidity sensor.

mine's deployed as a RIPE Atlas probe! https://atlas.ripe.net/

it earns credits by being online, and allows me to in turn measure other probes around the world to check for traceroutes and other networking stats.

Zoneminder clients and pihole.

They should be moved from archlinuxarm to Raspbian/whatever with v6 support ending last year.

Maybe an oversized digital picture frame?

I remember seeing some folks use them to create smart mirrors too

I run all my primary servers on one, and gather and manage lots of stats from my house.

like many people. the majority of my collection is sitting in a drawer somewhere. pihole is a honourable mention and use case if you are looking to put them to use.

K3s cluster

I run Home Assistant on it.

Same, Home Assistant + Adguard plugin. It's actually been super reliable I don't think I've had to reboot it since set up.

OctoPrint

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