Ask HN: For what purposes do you use a Raspberry Pi? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: For what purposes do you use a Raspberry Pi?

5 pointsaquafox4 comments

Hi HN,

motivated by the recent top post on longevity tips for a Pi[1], I'd like to know what you are using it for.

I myself use one as a NAS to store personal documents. It runs Openmediavault[2] to provide a SAMBA share. Once per day, it runs a backup[3] to a 1 TB cloud storage[4], which itself comes with automated backup snapshots.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39407631

[2] https://www.openmediavault.org/

[3] https://www.borgbackup.org/

[4] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/bx11/

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I finally retired basically all of my Raspberry Pis. I had been using them for several low-power systems, basically anywhere I wanted a smart display that could load a URL in a browser, or to connect an RTL-SDR for signal processing.

In the end, though, they were a pain to manage. I run Archlinux on all my Linux systems, and while ArchlinuxARM exists, it feels like the project is running on fumes. Packages were falling out of date, and I kept running into issues where a given feature would only work with the forked linux-rpi kernel, or the linux-aarch64 kernel, or one of them wouldn't boot, etc.

I ended up buying a pile of refurb Lenovo mini PCs from Amazon. I now have a stupid number of boring USB keyboards that I'll never use, but the mini PCs work great, and they're Intel chips so I can just install regular Archlinux.

I have one remaining Raspberry Pi: I needed something that supported USB-OTG to fake keypresses for my KVM. The KVM supports receiving keyboard shortcuts (It's something nuts like alt-printscr-$digit) to toggle between inputs, but using the special "keyboard" port for my USB hub w/ keyboard/webcam/etc caused issues.

So I have the Raspberry Pi plugged in there. It pretends to be a keyboard, and runs a simple web server that receives API requests and triggers the right hotkey.

One day I'll find a better way to deal with this, because right now that system is very very bespoke and unloved.

Pi-hole to block ads and tracking for my less technically savvy relatives

https://pi-hole.net/

Dust collectors. I have 3 and none were powered on last year. I heep seeing interesting projects that I never do.

So is OpenMediaVault basically a software layer that emulates other protocols and APIs? I see SSH, Photoprism, S3, OneDrive listed on the plugins page. Or it emulates some, and syncs with the others listed?

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