Hacker News Reader

Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

What do people plan to use their Raspberry PI for?

Given the nature of HN I'm intrigued to see what unique and innovate ideas people here may have...

I was thinking wireless doorbell. I can hook up the GPIO pins for power and the doorbell signal and plug in a USB wifi stick. It can then buzz my phone (maybe via Jabber) to wake me up in the mornings when there's an early delivery.

Even though the RasPi is hugely overqualified, it looks like it will be easier and cheaper than using a Arduino with a wireless shield. I'm also tickled by the idea of using a such a powerful computer for such a trivial task :)

Port scratch jr & DrRacket.

It is capable of doing 1080p decoding. I no longer need a Blu-ray player, Boxee box, Roku box, anything. I have an HDTV, I plug this into it with XBMC installed. Boom. I can stream anything from anywhere. It's also AirPlay enabled. Any TV just became a very smart TV for $35.

If you're not familiar with XBMC, prepare to have your mind blown.

Not having Wifi kills this option for me personally.

Buy a WRT54gl, put dd-wrt on it, set it up as a client-bridge, now you can network your xbox, HTPC, PS3, etc. easily.

This is what I did to move the big blue ugly cable running across the entrance hallway. Wife loves the change :)

Granted, I'm playing content off the same box.

Coudn't you get wifi via usb?

Wifi sucks in my apartment, http://www.netcomm.com.au/netcomm-products/powerline/np504 solved the problem for me.

stick a dongle on it.

Really? I'm fortunate that my parents recently built a house and wired ethernet everywhere (I'm tired of helping my dad try to configure transcoding servers to stream to broken DLNA implementations that vary between the 3 different Samsung LCDs he bought within 3 months) and I'll be doing the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com