Fun Things to do with a Raspberry Pi (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Fun Things to do with a Raspberry Pi (2012)

reviews.cnet.co.uk

122 pointsrfreytag58 comments

I'm currently mounting two rPi boards to two external hard drives. I'll leave one at home and one at work and run BitTorrent Sync on them to create my own little distributed / decentralized Dropbox. Would a blog post when I'm done be interesting?

Absolutely!

How well does BTSync work?

I've been really happy sofar. I haven't finished this project build quite yet but I've been using BTSync installed on my nexus 4 auto-syncing my camera folder to my laptop so every time I take a picture I get a notification saying that a new JPG has been added to the folder (and auto downloads obviously).

In this blog post it sounds like I'll be writing, I'll report on sync speeds using 3 nodes and things like that.

Haven't had an issue with it thus far. It's very good on iOS, and running on a few different devices I've got lying around.

Why not just set up ownCloud?

I'll be considering other software like that once it's set up. Using BTSync works with my current workflow so that's what I'm shooting for in v1

I've been meaning to setup BTSync on all my devices, including the raspberry pi I haven't hacked with in awhile.

Shameless plug: I just did exactly this over the weekend and wrote about how well it works here: http://blog.travisthieman.com/ec2-for-23-cents-and-your-own-...

Short version: BTSync is awesome, ownCloud makes the Pi struggle pretty hard

Great! Would doing something like using BTSync across multiple nodes as usual be fine, then only run opencloud on a single machine (just for the web interface)?

Yeah, that would work just fine. The only issue is that you want the ownCloud machine to have local copies of the data, so either you'd want it in the cloud (super expensive) or you'd want your own beefier-than-a-Pi machine to serve as an ownCloud-running node.

By the way, if you're looking at ownCloud check out Seafile as well. After hearing about ownCloud's performance issues I decided to try Seafile instead and I've had a very positive experience. I'm running it on a VPS in the cloud but they have a release compiled for the Rasberry Pi as well. http://seafile.com/en/download/

Thanks! I saw some references to it scattered about but was sort of turned off by the team-centric presentation. Are you just using it for your own personal stuff?

Yeah, I'm mainly just using it for a personal backup/synchronization and it works great for that. The team stuff is nice to have available too though. It was trivial to set up a shared folder between myself and my girlfriend.

I can't imagine why syncing files would consume 800 ARM-Mhz. Maybe their is contention between the host OS and the Secure OS.

For reference, I was seeing about 80% CPU load from btsync and 20% from the driver talking to my hard drives.

I wish 1password worked with btsync

I would love a combination Raspberry Pi/hard drive enclosure. This way you could tote the two around in one handy container. I'm thinking 3D printing companies could handle this "easily" -- at least for prototype??

I would really like to have my Pi powered by the same power supply as the hard drive. I could probably hack it together myself, but out of the box would be nice.

I really need to get myself a Raspberry Pi. It seems like me and my kids could have a lot of fun with it.

I'm actually almost considering getting one, a cheap monitor/keyboard/mouse and setting it up for the kids to use as their own computer...seems like it could be a cheap investment to get them to learn how to use Linux.

How would one go about creating a quick/cheap custom enclosure for their Pi and a touchscreen? I have both, but I'm completely lost looking into 3d printing for it, and most things I've found have been pretty expensive. Are there any quick prototyping tools or materials I could use out there, or even services/startups to get something made?

Another thing to do with a Raspberry Pi is to colocate it: http://raspberrycolocation.com/, https://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi....

Caveat: the delivery time, at least with PC Extreme, is long (ETA = 90 days); I've been waiting for my RasPi to come online since July. Also note that when I signed up for colocation it was offered for free [1].

The CPU performance on the Pi will not compare favorably to even the humblest x86-based VPS but I rather like the idea of getting to play with a dedicated ARM server at a remote location.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5946940

I use a Pi as an air-gapped system for stuff that I really want to be secure. Master keypair was generated on the Pi (which has a hardware RNG in the SoC), and the only way I get data on/off it is to sneakernet it. The small size of the device makes physical security much easier as well.

If you are interested in the Pi also check out the BeagleBone. I love how easy everything with the Pi was. I'm hoping to do more home automation with either another Pi or a BeagleBone. As for now my Pi is controlling our detached garage, and has done a nice job surviving a Louisiana summer.

Shameless plug: http://itsbrent.net/2013/03/hacking-my-garage-with-a-raspber...

If you are interested in the BeagleBone also check out the Cubieboard. It's a more powerful Pi, essentially. Dual core, 1GB of RAM, SATA.

http://cubieboard.org/

Another nice option is the Hackberry.

https://www.miniand.com/products/Hackberry%20A10%20Developer...

The Cubie eeks out the Hackberry in the latest revision, if you're interested in CPU power. Allwinner A20 rather than A10.

All of the Allwinner boards have mostly-closed Mali GPUs and closed but partially reverse-engineered CedarX VPUs.

Outside of Android the Mali GPUs are a bit of a bear to get working at all, much less use for anything useful.

For headless tasks I agree that Cubie/Hackberry are faster dollar-for-dollar than the Pi, but the Pi's VideoCore GPU, while still blob-encumbered, at least provides a documented interface with working drivers for both the "traditional" X11 stack and Android, as well as a real OpenMAX video decoding interface.

I just recently setup a bit torrent sync server on my rPi. So nice to sync with LAN speed as soon as I wake my MacBook as the data is already on the Pi. \o/

the rPI can hardly reach 100Mbits over LAN. Its nice and has its uses but i wouldnt use it for file related stuff inside a network, just too slow.

Wargames-style: reverse engineer oldschool RS422/RS485 multi-drop 2 or 4-wire command & control protocols for physical security / surveillance / access control systems. Plug in a pi via http://www.bb-elec.com/Products/USB-Connectivity/USB-to-Seri... to an arbitrary cable (maybe with servo-automated sensing/tapping of cable cores for speed/precision), and have it detect channels, passively map devices and grant full control of the network. Jumpstart with http://wiki.wireshark.org/FieldbusProtocolFamily dissectors and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socketcan library. Probably loads of firmware bugs on that era of devices...

Might as well be titled "25 things to do with a computer", since very few are anything to do with the Raspberry Pi itself.

how about "25 things to do with a $25 computer"?

Well, the Pi is just a computer.

A computer that costs $35, and has a built in GPIO. But just a computer.

Because the Pi actually isn't a general purpose computer, it contains a TEE (trusted execution enviroment) and you're not trusted.

25 things to do with a low-cost ARM based computer that has seen widespread community adoption doesn't really have the same ring to it.

I got a raspberry pi to see if I could replace a noisy htpc with Raspbmc. It worked a lot better than I anticipated but I found that I was sacrificing speed for the 'cool' factor of running it on a Pi so I ended up going back to a PC.

Still looking for a project to combine my Rift and Pi.

I've been trying to find a good way to power my pi with a solar panel, but haven't found many suitable options. Anyone?

Not sure what you consider a good way, but getting a decent sized panel, and use it to charge a lead acid battery would be the way i'd expect. Then run the pi off of a 12v usb adapter (usually find them for cars). That'll give you a number of advantages, it'd let you have a battery to deal with cloudy periods where you won't have enough juice to run the pi, and let you run for a while after the sun goes down. if you then want to add hardware to let you shut off when the panel voltage drops for too long it'd also be possible with just a diode before the battery (also not that hard to get) or with a sense line on the charging hardware you use.

take a look at stuff like [1], that should work fine for the pi, as long as you aren't trying to power huge amounts more.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Instapark%C2%AE-Black-Mono-crystalline...

"Regardless of the ethics involved, try out this security penetration testing project."

...

Being able to run Windows 3.x sounds like the coolest among the list.

I am in the middle of constructing my own piMAME powered arcade cabinet. I've wanted one for years and building it has been one of the most fun things I've done.

As the maintainer of the PiMAME distro, Thanks! If you have any questions we have an active forum at http://pimame.org

-Shea

I used mine to make an ambient backlight for my TV. The rPi drives individual LEDs in a strip by processing the video signal directly from my cable box.

This sounds like a really interesting project. Have you written it up anywhere?

Some time soonish I plan on picking up a Pi and a GPS module that I can wire in to the GPIO pins, and have a Stratum 1 NTP server on my LAN.

The link for number 9, the robotic arm seems to be down. Does anyone know where I might find that story?

It's called robotic arm edge. I'll let you duckduckgo it.

Thanks but I am more interested in the writeup regarding how to connect it to a raspberry pi, (and possibly how far it can throw a frisbee...)

I've read Instructables and such for modding it with potentiometers to give control feedback on the movement, hooking it up to an Arduino for control, things like that. I haven't personally seen a version of this for the Pi, but the interesting part is getting it talking to a CPU controller at all, and it ought to be a pretty short leap from an Arduino to a Pi.

It's definitely not plug and play if you want to do anything interesting with it, though.

Trying to verb it, huh?

Has anyone tried to setup ownclod on their pi? How is the performance?

Allegedly bad.

folks talking about seafile in other thread...

Also: FM Radio transmitter. (Which will also be my next project) :)

I automatically read your name as 'TobbenFM' ^_^

The best thing I did with a Raspberry PI was to setup openvpn on it to connect to my server where I have minidlna running and a lot of other services, then give them to my friends and hook up to their Smart TVs and routers. Now all my friends can view my music and family pictures on their TVs, with basically no setup, just pushing buttons on the remote - the Raspberry Pis openvpn connects the UPnP/DLNA at the openvpn server to anyone that is connected, and so my friends can share their family pictures with each other in a very secure way - no third party, its all going over the vpn and they can use a web-interface to add pictures to the server directly, or let the rasppi mount their images on their NAS for those who have that. This one was a bit tricky to setup, since minidlna needed to index remote content.

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