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Comment by jamesdhutton | Hacker News Reader

I am curious to know how people here use their RPIs today, and how the RPI5 might help. I have had a model 3 for many years, which I enjoy tinkering with from time to time. I still haven't gotten over the novelty of having such small, cheap computer that runs Linux and does a pretty good job of it. That said, all I do is tinker with it. I turn it on, write a bit of code, marvel that the code runs, and turn it off. I've bought a couple of hats which are fun too, but again it's just tinkering. I'm curious to know who here has found "serious" applications for their RPis.

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Until my home automation got complex enough to justify a faster, more capable machine, I ran all my home automation stuff on an RPi.

I use RPIs as "data collection" units. I have one RPi outside with a cheap SDR to pick up all the neighbor's weather stations, which I dump to a MQTT queue and use to populate weather data in my home. I use another to collect GOES satellite images.

I have 3-4 RPis that act as "Digital Ham Radio Hotspots", basically bridging my local ham radio via the internet to other stations. I use an RPi 4 as my "to-go" computer when I do ham radio in the woods. I use an iPad as a screen, and it works just as good as a laptop.

I have an RPi sitting in my garage as a second nameserver. The primary nameserver is in the house "data center".

I have an RPi plugged into my stereo receiver as a streaming device that lets me stream audio from my phone to the stereo.

I have 4 RPis connected togehter in a k3s cluster, for fun. IT doesn't work great. :)

I have two PiKVMs. They are truly awesome.

... I think that's it.

Why is ns2 in the garage? Everything you said makes sense except for that.

Geographical distribution. If the left half of my house is destroyed by natural disaster, I’ll still have a working name resolver on the other side!

Seriously, it’s just because I may do something else on that Pi that I want it on that side of the house. It’s my only garage Pi. My main internet handoff is in the garage, but my main “datacenter” is in a basement room on the other side of the house.

It’s all for fun. :)

One is monitoring my trash bins in the backyard and generating visual output of emptying times, current location of the bins, alerts if they are still in the backyard but are scheduled to be emptied tomorrow (in which case I need to move them to the street in the front). This has been running on a Pi with Bluetooth (monitoring uses BLE beacons) for over five years now, with very little maintenance necessary.

Another one runs the home automation hub (Homematic plus some addon stuff). Also very little maintenance, basically just doing backups and an update a year or so. Has been in place for several years as well. I often forget that this thing exists at all, as it just chugs along quietly, never needing reboots or anything. Even the updates are unnecessary unless I want to use some new sensor or actor that the old hub software doesn't yet know about.

And then there are two Pis connected to TVs in the living room and kitchen which run OpenELEC/Kodi for media center tasks. Started doing this when the first RPi came out and frequently used back then, these Pis are rarely used these days, as most streaming now involves commercial streaming services and is done via FireTV sticks. But I still have a private library for the occasional exception of stuff that's not offered on any commercial service, and that library is accessed via the Pis. Fortunately, aside from a reboot every few months and very rare updates, these Pis are also very low maintenance.

Trash reminders - awesome!

Nice one. Trash Train is also interesting.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VhYEOG9LOIk

Discovering DietPi was kind of a game changer for me. I had the original Pi 1b that basically sat in a drawer after the first month I got it.

I went over to a friends house last year that had a more modern Pi and they had a PiHole on their home network. It was pretty amazing being able to block ads on my phone near totally and not just in Firefox. New Pi's were completely impossible to find but my friend said give DietPi a shot. The benchmarks on my Pi after installing were complete crap, processes took minutes that took a few seconds on the more modern Pis, but AdGuard Home worked flawlessly.

It sent me down the rabbit hole of Tailscale everywhere, self hosting what I can, getting a NAS, and just opened up to me how simple it is to set up these kind of services now that are accessible everywhere.

I recently was able to get a Pi 4 (one week before the Pi 5 announcement of course) and am looking forward to a setup where I can run services that need hard drive access on my NAS and hosting the quality of life apps on the Pi.

I've been using one for https://pikvm.org/ and it's been a rare case of "the Raspberry Pi is neither ridiculously overpowered, ridiculously underpowered, or even beat out by any off the shelf solution at all let alone at the same price or point". It's literally the best IP KVM I've ever used or owned. The use case is almost a perfect match for the exact hardware capabilities of the Pi: hardware encoding, video input, gigabit network (with Wi-Fi alternative, which has saved me a few times), GPIO, USB OTG, the hat system, open source web KVM software which doesn't suck ass and sit untouched for 13 years with endless security vulnerabilities piling up.

Things I've used mine (plural) for at various points in time, in no particular order: Wireguard & ssh entrypoint into my home network. Pi hole. Kodi. Calibre ebook server. Orchestrating turning on/off IP-based lightbulbs or plugs (since I'm too cheap to get a gateway for ZigBee/Threads/$IOT_protocol) - automatically turning on my Christmas lights at sundown daily after querying an API for my local Civil twilight time was good fun. "NAS server" connected to a cheap 5-disk USB JBOD device. Hosting a low-intensity crawler that ran into blanket IP-range black-listing issues when hosted on cloud-providers. Hosting a Gitea/Forgejo server: I no longer star projects on Github - I mirror them locally and keep them synced, storage is really cheap now. Periodical syncing my backups from NAS to cloud. As a digital "tape recorder" for broadcast radio using FM receiver, aux cable, and USB sound card. Twitter Spaces recording for time-shifting conversations I wanted to listen to later; I beat Twitter's "record" feature to the punch! Twitter crawler/archive bot for a niche community.

Wishlist projects: getting alerted when my home loses electric service or internet connectivity, using UPS and LTE modem. "Calendar dashboard" site that displays the household's schedule for the day on a tablet/jailbroken kindle. A lazy-loading reverse-proxy Caddy API server that will keep the connection open while it turns on my workstation in the background if it's off. Archiving tweets using mitmproxy to passively scrape Twitter's API responses while I use the official mobile client.

Basically anything that I wanted to automate and was not demanding on compute would get assigned to a Pi.

I think the Pi 5 would be well positioned to be a free, OSS media box. Android TV and Google TV are very popular today, along with Roku, Apple TV, etc.

I installed PiHole and noticed that every single click of my Roku remote gets sent to Roku’s servers. PiHole blocks this of course, but there was nothing I could do to disable this telemetry on the Roku device itself.

Google TV is slightly better - there’s options to adjust targeted ads, and an “app only” mode, but there’s still usage and other data sent to Google. Also you can’t use it at all if you don’t sign in with a Google account.

I haven’t used other platforms.

But I would like to see an easy to use, easy to configure, OSS streaming box. Now that this can do 4k60 and HDR, it might just work for things like Netflix, Plex, and other services.

Right now the best products on the market for high-bitrate streaming are Apple TV and Nvidia Shield Pro. I wonder if the RPi 5 can compete with that?

There's no shortage of projects for this, particularly enby, jellyfin, and kodi spring to mind. The only real challenges are GPU transcoding support, app selection for integration of services like Spotify, amazon prime streaming, and netflix, and app availability on client devices like TVs.

In terms of specs a Pi4 was already beefy enough for this use case, fwiw. But the software stack is hard just because no one seems to target the "set top box“ space quite the same way. There are client/server media platforms to compete with plex, there are single.box media platforms, there are set top boxes to compete with roku, and every possible mix in between.

I have 4 pi4's running HiFiBerryOS. They connect to my Roon VM. I can group them together & they will play the same song in sync.

I have a pi4 running OSMC with the Plex addon attached to my television.

I've got about a half dozen Pi 0 W's with addon sensors that inform my Home Assistant of the temp, humidity, PM2.5 level, and CO2 levels in each room.

I just ordered a CM4 to run the PiKVM board for my homelab server.

I also plan to monitor and water my plants using Pi 0 W's.

I just ordered a Pi4 for running BirdNet, to identify birds in my area.

I would also like to work with ChatGPT to identify people and/or birds around my house.

You could switch out the Pi 0 W's with ESP32's or Raspberry Pico W's (if you'd like to stay in the Raspberry ecosystem). They're a lot cheaper, require less power, have a smaller footprint, aren't too hard to set up and there's usually a library ready for every sensor.

When the Pi 2 was new, it was one of the few single board computers that properly supported fractional frame rates, which are often needed for smooth video playback. (Many films are encoded at 24000/1001 fps rather than exactly 24 fps, for example.) I assume the newer models still support this, since they're still built around VideoCore chips.

A faster model would allow decoding at higher resolutions and frame rates, even when the codec in use doesn't have direct hardware support.

With the PCIe support in this new model, it could also make a decent home file server.

But oddly enough, they don't support some screen resolutions: https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1202#issuecom...

I run my Christmas light show software (https://github.com/FalconChristmas/fpp) with a Pi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlxaA-ca6S0 :)

I have a Pi3 running pihole/dhcp for my home network, and 4 Pis as part of my home k3s cluster (along with 3 cheapo nucs). Yes it's overkill but I'm in infra and I learn a lot from it.

The cluster runs nextcloud, collabora, plex, longhorn storage, deluge, nzbget, some custom projects I built to sync my bank accounts with my finance software and to sync photos from Signal chats to my nixplay frames, backups for my NAS, Grafana/Prometheus/Loki, netdata, etc.

I also run an entertainment company and we use a Pi Zero to control our onstage LED lights via presentation remote or wifi as a fallback.

I keep thinking of other things to do with them, but this is already enough to maintain in my "spare time".

Damn that is pretty impressive. I just drive my 3d printer and run the unifi controller interface with mine. Thanks for the inspiration.

I have a Pi 4 running Pi-hole and connected to a 4TB USB hard drive running a Samba server with a bunch of media. It’s on my Tailscale network so I can access the files away from home, and use it as an exit node if I’m abroad and need to access stuff as if I’m in the UK.

I don’t need to transcode anything so it’s been more than sufficient for me, and if I start to run out of storage I can just hook up more drives.

It also has about a terabyte of PS2 games because a softmodded PS2 can play games off a Samba server rather than the DVD drive. Niche, but very cool imo

I don’t know how serious this is, but I have one in a waterproof box in the backyard and one in the garage to run the irrigation for my garden, etc. They work well enough that I often forget they’re there. There’s another in the office closet running a dynamic dns script and that’s there to use as an ssh tunnel and such.

I use it professionally all the time. I work with arm a lot, and during the testing of customer software that is compiled for arm, I need an arm based Linux os to run and test on. rpi is the obvious choice. I'm very happy with the 4s performance, so I don't require the 5, but I'll still get one.

I also use another one for retro pi, which I imagine will benefit from the increased performance..

lastly, I have a small handheld Bluetooth keyboard with a track pad I use with a pi4 with a 3.5in screen hat and battery pack. the overall size and weight is much less than any laptop I have ever come across, and I use this when I go to cons. (although I'm looking at plantecom to replace this)

What is the advantage of that RPi setup over some cheap Android phone?

Three years ago, my new home came with smart features such as a connected front door lock and thermostat and a wall panel with a sim connected to alarm.com. The intro period ran out, and I didn't want to pay anything ongoing, so I bought a z-wave usb controller and set up HomeAssistant on my old Pi2. With some effort to get everything working in docker with a cloudflare tunnel, I am back to being able to monitor and control my smart home from anywhere.

I'm not feeling compelled to get a more powerful pi. In fact, I'd be more inclined to buy the pi zero or several of them, but they were always impossible to find in stock when I was interested.

I’ve got one of mine showing album art for music I’m playing[1], one with an e-ink display that shows which subways are leaving soon near me, one running Homebridge for a variety of sensors[2], one for WireGuard and Pi-Hole, and one to run Klipper/Mainsail for my 3D printer. I guess these are all tinkering as well but they’ve basically been running 24/7 for a few years now!

[1] https://github.com/aaronhktan/rpi-albumart [2] https://github.com/aaronhktan/vesta

A RPi 4 sits near a Teensy 4.1 in a difficult to reach LED installation: its only purpose is to wirelessly re-flash the Teensy firmware in case of updates and for eventual future features. The Teensy is driving ~15k RGBW LEDs.

I’ve owned many Pis through the years. Always for personal/hobby stuff, but they have been workhorses all the same.

I ran a Pihole server on an ancient 1A for several years. It was considered underpowered but worked great. I’ve run Homebridge services which was a great way to integrate various IoT stuff into HomeKit that lacked native support. I’ve since moved these things onto other hardware to consolidate things (not because of anything inherently wrong with the Pi).

For about a year now I’ve been using a Pi as a BLE data collector to slurp data from a weather station I have on my deck. That being said, the onboard Bluetooth on the 3 and 4 is pretty awful in my experience. I needed to use an external dongle to make it reliable.

For over a year I used a Pi 4 to run multiple SDRs to record and rebroadcast trunked police/fire scanner traffic. I eventually had to retire it for that purpose when the trunked system changed to digital and the Pi just couldn’t keep up with the workload anymore.

Those were all applications that I ran for months/years at a time using Pi hardware. I’d consider them “serious” even though they weren’t anything impressive or enterprise-worthy.

Other things I’ve done with them are use them as emulation stations. Even older Pis are more than capable of emulating 8 and 16 bit consoles without a hitch. Their compact size makes them portable and easy to plug into a TV and work with a Bluetooth controller.

I use my RPi4 as a small server having multiple docker containers behind a Traefik proxy. The largest applications are probably my Nextcloud and my Photoprism instance.

The Photoprism instance holds about 114.000 pictures which I took over the past 10+ years and includes features like face recognition and browsing by location. I quite like it and find it super impressive that such a small device can run such a powerful application with that amount of data.

Teams in the FIRST robotics competition community use the Raspberry Pi for computer vision. There's an open source program called Photonvision that provides an easy way for talented high school students to set up CV. Some of the better teams use Orange Pis or mini PCs for this purpose (and some of the best teams have fully custom solutions), but a Raspberry Pi is a lot easier to set up and is cheaper (even at $60). Also, my understanding is that the architecture of the RPi4 CPU/GPU allows for GPU acceleration of classical CV algorithms without copying (and that feature is integrated into Photonvision), so this hardware upgrade will probably make the Raspberry PI perform on par or better than more expensive options, while being easier to setup.

And two MIPI camera ports is also really nice for this application, because the new advancement in FRC is to use April Tags included with the field for full field localization. For this purpose, I've heard you get better results with global shutter MIPI cameras than USB webcams, and having multiple cameras is good for always seeing an AprilTag.

I use one for each of the following. None of which I think are terribly novel anymore:

- Octopi - PiHole - Grafana/Prometheus for my local network (I push Speedtest results, ping results, among other things to it) - home-made SNES/NES minis

I’m excited to try using the new Pi for a more comprehensive option for a retro arcade including many games that didn’t run very well for me last time I tried. (I instead used a home-built small PC)

My pi 4 runs a wide variety of small services for me. Most important is my vaultwarden instance, which is securely accessible everywhere that I go via tailscale. The pi also runs HomeAssistant for my smart home stuff, pihole to block ads, and a resilio sync server. I’ve got a bunch of other small stuff as well that I rarely use. Like “your-spotify” which stores and tracks stats for my entire Spotify history.

I want to also possibly make it a media device? I have it physically located behind a tv, just because I already had Ethernet wired there, but it isn’t hooked up to the display yet, and I haven’t figured what to do with it if I did hook it up. Not sure if that would overstress the cpu. Can’t have my dns crashing if I’m watching a video.

I'm using currently 4:

- One pi4 for my homemade 3D printer (a Voron)

- One pi3 for a homemade eInk clock/weather station (here I could've gotten with sth much cheaper like an ESP32, but the Pi is so convenient)

- One pi zerow 2 for a homemade eInk radio

- One pi4 I just bought for home automation (homeAssisstant)

I have a pi running to continuously collect data from my home, temperature, lights, gas usage, electricity usage, weather, etc. It runs Benthos to get all the data (MQTT + http), and stores everything in Postgres.

I used mine along with the 7" touchscreen as a live photo frame connected to a google photos album when my mother was ill from Alzheimers.

but, but, but ... the RPi is meant for tinkering, isn't it?

I got an RPi2 connected to a GPSDO acting as time server. Another RPi2 controls test&measurement gear via GPIB (there are GPIB hats, but I happen to have already an USB adapter from Agilent) and TTL PPS input and trigger output for synchronization. A RPi2 is plenty of computational power for those applications.

Three sitting around. They make very convenient small servers. One (a RPi4) has substantial mass storage and is a backup and media server. Another (an RPi3) is an RSS reader service and web proxy for some internal stuff. And the third (RPi3) servers for occasional experiments and what-ifs.

I'm still using a first gen Raspberry Pi Model B to run an adblocking DNS server (github.com/0xERR0R/blocky), and PiVPN (Wireguard). For the most part, it works great except apt-update occassionally maxing out the CPU/RAM which causes my services and sshd to be killed.

i have a raspberry pi zero wifi thats running syncthing and has a few of my syncthing folders/nodes on it. i already have a NAS that acts as the always-on node for all my syncthing folders, but if that is ever down for maintenance or whatever then the pi zero is sort of a backup that will keep syncthing things

i have another running kodi so i can access jellyfin that's on my NAS

pi-hole for network wide ad blocking

currently setting up one to act as a storage location for the restic backups from my NAS instead of having to store them with some storage provider like backblaze. i will be installing tailscale on it as well so i can leave it in a friends house and hopefully be able to reconnect to it even if they move house in the future

I wrote my own irrigation controller with a web front-end on a pi3 and have used it for ~7 years.

Deployed a Qt app to dozens of pi4-based machines for doing clock-in/out and generating various PDFs in to support the business I was working for.

I’m using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ to run Steam Link to stream games from my desktop computer upstairs to the TV in the living room. I managed to connect some XBox series controllers to it using Bluetooth by installing xpadneo drivers.

I think it would be really good to give to children so that they can have their own computer for £100. It’s like the modern equivalent of a C64 but also completely capable of being a desktop for everyday use.

Use mine as a RoonBridge running RoPieee

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