What people use their Raspberry Pi's for | Hacker News Reader

What people use their Raspberry Pi's for

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70 pointsjeffreyfox76 comments

I see some complaints about the excessive creation of media projects on the pi.

Taking a step back, from the hardware point of view, the pi showcases VideoCore and not the ARM. This is the reason why the CPU is severly underpowered with respect to the GPU. The GPU is actually a total SoC - it doesn't need the CPU at all. The only reason the ARM CPU exists is to run traditional programs. VideoCore does kick ass media decoding and can output to HDMI. In case, you didn't know, the pi actually boots from the GPU and not the CPU. That's right, the VideoCore comes up first and then gets the CPU going unlike traditional systems. From Broadcom's point of view, the pis sole reason of existence is to showcase their GPU. To this end, it has served it's purpose really well. Unfortunately, they have been terrible in releasing proper image and video decoding drivers.

The Raspberry Pi is not a Broadcom project.

I didn't intend my post to mean that. The design of the pi was inspired by the bcm2835 (which is the same thing as the roku 1). What I meant was that the way broadcom designed BCM 2835 with showcasing the VideoCore in mind.

Thanks for all your work on the pi btw :) I have been using your debian images last year.

Ok, I get what you're saying. You're right that the VC4 is the main selling point of the chip. Regarding image and video decoding...well, we do have OpenMAX which is a Khronos standard. It's just pretty horrific for normal people to use. GStreamer 1.0 supports the Raspberry Pi, and v4l support is in development for the camera.

But it certainly had Broadcom help. You can't buy the BCM2835 on the open market, and the project was spearheaded by a Broadcom engineer.

It's as much a Broadcom project as Panda/Beagle is a TI project. These are just simpler EVKs rebranded as hobbyist/educational products but they also showcase the chip design as general_failure suggests.

VideoCore would be even more awesome if it had a usable OpenCL implementation.

I've got a TON of music on my external harddrive, and I haven't felt like putting all of that music on my new computer or phone. It just takes up too much space. So I decided I'd set up a cloud radio player for it with an iPhone app to listen. So, I turned one of my Pi's into a lamp server with mysql and php and made it public facing. I then wrote a small PHP script that filled the database with 3 columns: the name of the song, the artist, and the path on the harddrive to the audio file. From there I just made a simple iOS app that queries my db and fills in a list of the songs, then streams from my Pi. It's pretty sweet right now, it shuffles the playback and retains the filtering options through the shuffling (so if I wanna' play Jimi Hendrix music, it'll shuffle Jimi). It plays in the background. The next step will be querying some online db of album artwork to put up/show in the background. Here's a screenshot of my app: http://imgur.com/dQzHYSe

I'm thinking of open sourcing the app and writing a really detailed tutorial of how I did it all on Github. Anybody want something like this?

I use gnump3d ( http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/ ) for this exact same purpose. It's quite an awesome piece of software and worth checking out.

Looks cool, I'll have to check that out in more detail. I pretty much just curated all of the bits and pieces of mine (php script to get metadata info on mp3s and then add to db, etc). Haha, so mine ends up as a mishmash of different things, a beautiful hack basically.

Take a look at Ampache. There are a couple existing iOS clients for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampache

http://iampache.com/

http://ampachex.com/

Sounds really interesting; I'd be very curious if you opened it up!

I'll try getting the tutorial up soon - I was going to make it into a github.io page, so I have some more stuff to figure out.

Ugh, I use mine as a paper-weight with a 64gb mem card that makes me feel guilty every time I see it because I'm not using it

Sadly in the same boat. I'm going to look at the reddit thread for inspiration. I was mostly de-motivated with the influx of media server projects, because I didn't need that. Time for inspiration!

Stick XBMC on it, link it to your speakers, and use it as a remote controlled air-play enabled media player

This is what I do with RaspBMC. It's fairly nice, except for times that XBMC locks up (like when indexing all of my music on my fileserver over UPnP). It appears that more than a few places in XBMC they aren't checking return values (eg, calls to malloc() and such). It's something I've been meaning to look into, but time is not always available.

Thia sounds like a swell idea.

Same here. I donated my pis to 9th grade students (I had 5 of them).

Well, I didn't post there, but I will post here what I use mine for.

- Cheap servers. Use them for a little business I own. Rather than rent a box on some datacenter, I ship out the Rpis ready to be used with my software.

- Hydroponics controller. I have a small hydroponics cilantro crop. The board controls/monitors it.

- Learning tool for my nieces. They are learning to program whilst using minecraft for the pi. Plus they are also learning a bit of Python along the way. This summer we have a 2 weeks programming "camp." The Rpi will be the center piece.

Do you use the SD card as storage for the software, or doesn't it need any? I considered using one for the same purpose, but the SD was both too slow and unreliable to use even to store just a few hundred MBs.

I don't store much data in them, but have an API that they talk to and pass data around as JSON. Like so:

request --[JSON]-- > | RPi magic | response --[JSON]--> DB

What sort of relays/pumps are needed for the hydroponics control? I just planted a garden and have been thinking about how I'm going to water it.

I've used inexpensive bilge pumps from Walmart or Sears and a 12V relay.

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Shoreline-Bilge-Pump/16609596 These start at $13 for 600 GPH.

Then use a 5V relay to switch the 12V relay.

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=206248...

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=124667...

YMMV.

Do you have any instructional sources for growing cilantro?

I have only been able to keep mine alive for about 2 months before they die.

Shoot me an email. I'll gladly help you.

A jukebox that scrapes songs from the internet and from my own collection and pipes it to a small FM transmitter (from a Jameco kit). This is for my technophobic inlaws, who are used to radios.

Testing stuff. I'm writing a stream processing server for monitoring distributed applications and I use a few pi's to send me streams of random/semi-random/garbage event messages and stuff.

I use it to watch the air condition of Beijing urban area http://madk.org/beijing-sky-photo.html

This is a cool project idea. You should run some sort of automated "clarity" detection to get numbers/statistics on air quality in Beijing.

Thanks. I am thinking about the same thing on the "clarity" detection and numbers can be used to do some visualisation. Yes, I am going to try it out.

Built a fully automated media center for my mum using OpenElec (SickBeard + Couchpotato + SABnzbd + Usenet + XBMC). Had the setup running for a few years on my Mac Mini at my house, but was awesome to see it achieved for a fraction of the price.

Oh and at work we are using it to control a robot but can't say much more for another couple of weeks :D @sidgtl

I used mine for a similar purpose: allowing my grandmother to watch certain Spanish TV shows over the Internet. The shows are actually freely accessible online, but she doesn't know nor wants to learn how to use computers (which I completely respect!), so I made a simple UI controlled by the TV remote that downloads & displays them.

Incidentally, I used an Arduino as an USB-to-Serial converter for a TV remote receptor I had built when I was 15. It's a waste for such a simple purpose, but it wasn't being used for anything at the moment.

I'm blown away that you can load up and run with this. Isn't SABnzbd pretty RAM intensive? Are you doing this with local storage or networked storage? Does this handle 1080p, or are you running mostly 480 media?

I'm full of questions on this subject mainly because I've been holding out on purchasing a Pi for this exact application until they come with a bit more power.

Yep runs 1080p absolutely fine! You need a very lightweight theme without many animations though.

I used one of my many old internal PC hard drives and bought a £10 case to convert it to USB.

Is there a good forum/site with information with notes on what does and doesn't work for different setups, settings, themes, etc.?

edit: Nevermind, I saw your post below and realized that OpenELEC is a full on media center distro. Thanks!!

I ran all those services at once to try out the performance, and I have to say turning on SABnzbd took the biggest hit. SSH'in for example was just dam slow. I am not sure how you manage to run all those with XBMC on as well. I was using raspmc distro, not sure that makes a huge difference.

Use OpenElec it's a dedicated distro for this. If you try setup those things individually as you would on a desktop you are going to have a bad time. And yes SABnzb is slow as hell extracting but all her TV shows download and extract in the middle of the night.

Are you using just the one Pi for all of that? Not done any serious benchmarking but my tinkering left me with the impression it would be fairly unusable with all that running on the one machine.

See my comments above, works fine with OpenElec

My brother and I are building an X/Y plotter with one, which is either going to turn into an etch-a-sketch printer, or a CNC/3D printer hybrid.

The other one is either going to become a quadrocopter, or an arcade table (cheap coffee table, cheap LCD, and some controllers).

I'd like to know more about the plotter. Any plans or links to share?

I've got two that I plan on tinkering with this summer. Not exactly sure what I'm going to do with them, but considering my programming and building experience is pretty novice, if I can get them to do anything remotely useful will be a big win.

I hooked one up to the intercom/door unlock system at the office. Most electronics with physical pushbuttons can be disassembled and wired in with a relay for control by the Pi.

As usual, be very careful if you're disassembling something using AC.

Here's someone doing "bare metal MIDI" on their Pi. (http://www.joebutton.co.uk/blog/baremetal-midi-lv2-raspberry...)

I just put XBMC on it, and use it to watch TV Shows and Movies occasionally using put.io service - Amazes every non technical person I know. No interesting projects yet.

Early on I recall reading a lot of comments saying there were audio playback glitches with the rpi. Are these resolved now? I have built 3 or 4 Halloween-related audio projects on Arduino using Adafruit's wav shield and the somo-14d module but they sure are a pain to work with. I would love to do my next project on the pi but was sitting on the sidelines waiting for the early glitches to work themselves out.

My understanding is that the Pi lacks real audio hardware on the analog output. For audio heavy projects you should consider a USB sound card.

Edit:

This looks promising: http://dbader.org/blog/crackle-free-audio-on-the-raspberry-p...

I use my Pi to control my sprinklers valves https://github.com/pothibo/irrigation

I currently run node.js on the Pi, as part of a mobile device game controller. It works quite well, albeit just being a prototype.

I just got my Pi yesterday.. now it replaced my mediacenter (a Boxee). Love it, it's such a great project! No problem at all playing FullHD DTS movies over WLAN at all, it's smooth! Even overclocked it to 1000 MHz and no problem. The UI could be a little bit smoother, though, but only a very very minor annoyance (it's smooth. just not every time)

We're using Pi to drive the lights in http://www.ma-brains.com/

This sounds like an awesome project! The artist in me loves stuff like this.

I want one of those magazines like the old neckbeards talk about, full of BASIC programs that you had to type in one line at a time and compile to run. I know there's online tutorials and that, but the idea of having a paper magazine and pecking out characters is just so appealing. Can anyone point me the right way?

Unfortunately, I can't help you with finding dead tree magazines. However, you should probably be aware that, unless you're commenting negatively on the social skills of those older programmers, the word you were looking for is not "neckbeards" but "greybeards."

check out http://makezine.com/. it features articles on RPi projects from time to time. It has dead-tree version as well.

Ctrl-P?

I have a static IP at home. I use my Pi to enforce IP-based access restrictions on most sites that allow it. I use ssh's built-on socks proxy (-D on command line or DynamicForward config option) to do this. Firefox and Chrome both support SOCKS proxies.

I also use it to deploy hobby web sites.

I made this:

http://www.whatcaniseefromtheshard.com

In case you haven't seen it, there's a new approach to Wayland/Weston on the Raspberry Pi.

http://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/2013/05/weston-on-raspberry-pi...

Here's a quadcopter with a raspberry pi and webcam for vision sensing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Cc3B4xG1c

My team and I did this for a senior capstone project.

M2M prototyping. Paperweight.

mine is mainly an ornament. I think I got too worried about the shortage. After I got it I realised it could not do anything I wanted it too (e.g. image processing)

I'd like to use it for transcoding - anyone working on that?

an ornament

?reddit?

But still no netflix support. Strange.

Streaming TV and movies has got to be the most boring thing you can do with a Raspberry Pi, at least after letting it sit in the box in a drawer.

I have two Pi's. One runs xbian and plays tv, movies and music. The other I use for random projects. The one running xbian gets used every day. The other one gets used every now and then. I love them both equally :)

Why? A Raspberry pi is nothing special - it's just a cheap computer.

Is that just because Netflix still uses Silverlight?

An enterprising hacker could possibly make it work with Wine at some point but not today.

Be very tricky. RPi isn't x86/x64.

I thought you can already use Netflix using Wine?

You'll have to combine Wine with qemu or something because the Pi doesn't have an x86 CPU.

Ah, that's right. My bad.

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