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Madza
Madza

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What's your use of Raspberry Pi?

The Raspberry Pi is a series of very affordable credit card-sized single-board computers developed in the United Kingdom.

As it is described in this awesome GitHub repo, the sky is the limit when it comes to the projects and the use cases of it, it all basically boils down to your creativity and needs.

As of June 2020, the most advanced version is Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, offering up to 8GB of RAM, USB-3 ports, Dual Micro HDMI ports (supporting 2k and 4k displays) and other superior features.

Do you already own some? What is/would be your use of Raspberry Pi?

Oldest comments (55)

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cirrus profile image
OnFileNotWanted • Edited

I use an old model b with 512 mb ram, it runs archlinux-arm, i use it as mpd server, webserver (lighttpd) IRC supybot, bitlbee and the obligatory tmux session, cheap to run so always on 24/7, also uses cron to post random tech stuff to twiter via some scripts i have written using xstartlet. makes a fine home server.

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madza profile image
Madza

Good job on it 😎 I need to get one too, I guess it was fun to build it 🤩

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cirrus profile image
OnFileNotWanted

yes fun is one word, however in the early days of 'alarm' frustrating was the more apt adjective.

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Marco Antonio

I have a Raspberry Pi 2 B + which I use for a small web server with a couple of Laravel applications. At some point I used it with Asterisk with my own VoIP system.
At this moment he is taking dust in a corner hoping that I will find some work for him

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madza profile image
Madza

You never know when the necessity arises 😉 And in urgent situations it could be a life-saver 👍

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shadowtime2000 profile image
shadowtime2000

All I have created is a web server which serves the live feed of the raspberry pi camera.

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madza profile image
Madza • Edited

Tbh, I didn't know they made separate components as well 😉
Came across it while sourcing info for the discussion intro 👍

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stereoplegic profile image
Mike Bybee

While I still only own a 1B? Collecting dust.

When I get my hands on some 4B's and the other materials I need to prototype (and time to actually work on said prototypes)? Products for the two most important things in life: Coffee and orgasms.

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crash7 profile image
Chris

I have two 1B collecting dust. I feel like I need to buy a 4B but I'm afraid it will collect dust like the others 😂

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sevmorris profile image
Seven Morris

Turn that 4B into a dusterbot for the 1Bs.

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aadiandroid profile image
Aditya

I have Raspberry Pi 2 which I use as a ad blocker using Pihole and as a wireless print server for my old USB printer

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madza profile image
Madza

Hahah 😃😃 Yeah, as I said, you can find the use case for it for virtually anything 😃😃

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siddhantvirus profile image
siddhantvirus

That's exactly what I do with my Pi Zero W as well :D

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Jeppe Reinhold

I'm working on a Raspberry Pi Zero with an amp HAT to take a pair of old speakers and converting them to smart speakers. First, just make them available as a Spotify device, and maybe later I'll build a multiroom setup.

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Sam Dennon

Are you going to use the balenaSound setup? I have one on our pool deck and one in the garage. Not as slick as sonos but way cheaper!! 😊

balena.io/blog/turn-your-old-speak...

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Jeppe Reinhold

I'm actually planning on using raspotify which seems like the simplest approach. :) It doesn't allow me to Cast to it with the Chromecast protocol, but that's next step ;)

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couchcamote

Have you heard Raspotify before?
github.com/dtcooper/raspotify

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Jeppe Reinhold

Yes! That is actually what I'm planning on using actually. :)

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madza profile image
Madza

That was an interesting read 😉
Thanks for documenting your journey 👍

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yoursunny profile image
Junxiao Shi

Pi 4B 2GB: main desktop running Ubuntu MATE 20.04, hooked onto a VGA monitor via VGA666 adapter.
Light web browsing in Firefox, light code editing in Pluma (compiling on remote machines), participation in Google Code Jam and similar (compiling locally if I use Python or C, otherwise remote).

Pi 3B: previous desktop, now inactive.

Pi Zero W with camera: home surveillance.
I never got it working fully: no motion detection or recording, but I can connect to it and watch.
I made a slick GPU accelerated contour detection though yoursunny.com/t/2018/contour-PiCam...

Pi Zero W with small touchscreen: inactive.

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madza profile image
Madza

Have you often run into RAM limits (w/ 2GB vers), or is it enough for your use? 👀

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yoursunny profile image
Junxiao Shi

2GB is enough for 3 browser tabs (Slack or Facebook or Gmail can open one at a time; other two are simpler pages like Python docs) and 10 files open in Pluma. VS Code struggles so I stopped using it on this desktop.
I have 2GB swap partition, using a spinning drive taken from a 2005 laptop.

Both 3B and 4B-2GB were hackathon prizes. If I'm to choose, I'll want the 4GB. 8GB would be overkill in comparison to this CPU.

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Louis Low • Edited

I use Raspberry Pi for crafting simple appliances such as:

  • WiFi Router + Switches, I do not use any ready-made opensource router firmware, I simply configure the whole Linux Debian with added packages such as ipfilter, dnsmasq, etc. That's the simple network firmware I did.

  • Torrent TV Box, build with NodeJS, I manage the downloads via a web-based interface from any devices connected to the same network, some times over the Terminal.

  • Power Management, It's for controlling and monitoring my home power consumption, I can set which appliances have exceeded the threshold limit and turn it off remotely, I use external advanced PLC module to managing it more effectively.

  • Rogue-Calibre, this creation is to prevent too much high-frequency WiFi active at midnight while I sleep. It paralyzed the WiFi routers surrounding my house within the radius I set.

Raspberry Pi is for entry-level, I would like to see a post that discussing other advanced FPGA or SoC such as Parallella, Arty, NVIDIA Jetson, etc. I have a different story for them.

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Michal Klabník

Could you share some details about Power Management? Thx

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nieuwepixels profile image
Nieuwe Pixels

A Pi2 and Pi3 running as local webservers. Working quite nicely.

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pazyp profile image
Andrew Pazikas

PiHole for blocking ads & trackers

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tlenexkoyotl profile image
Rashīd Tlenexkoyotl • Edited

As an IoT device at the company I work for. RasPi is used to extract data from modbus meters and then you can put it anywhere you want through the web.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern
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madza profile image
Madza

This is awesome, way to go! 🔥🔥

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Moe Long

I have a lot of Raspberry Pi boards: 2 x Raspberry Pi 4 boards (8GB and 4GB) 1 x Raspberry Pi 3 B+, 1 x Raspberry Pi 2, 1 x Raspberry Pi 0W.

I have two Pis set up as retro gaming consoles: A Pi 4 in the NESPi case, and a Pi Zero W in a Gameboy case for a portable retro gaming console.

Aside from that, I use my other Pi 4 for a basic Linux desktop. And my older Pis are used for stuff like a smart home hub with Hass.io, ad-blocker with Pi Hole, 3D print server using Octoprint, and a VPN server. Have a Pi Plex server I made for my uncle too, ripped his small DVD collection to digitize it, put it on a flash drive, and spun up a Pi NAS.

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Tim Downey

Raspberry Pi Kubernetes Cluster

I have seven Raspberry Pi 3s running as part of a Kubernetes cluster with an eighth one being used as a gateway/router that connects to my network and exposes the connection to the others.

It's kind of difficult to find ARM-based Docker images for a lot of popular software to run on it and the Raspberry Pi 3s only have 1gb of RAM so they don't have much to spare. It was a good learning experience, though!

I have a few 4gb Raspberry Pi 4s with Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) HATs that would allow me to make a really clean looking and more powerful cluster... but I haven't found the time to do so. 😅

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madza profile image
Madza

Nice one 👍😉