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Michael Lee 🍕
Michael Lee 🍕

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I just got a Raspberry Pi 3. What can I do with it?

Just got a Raspberry Pi 3 setup and it's my first one. If you own a Raspberry Pi, what do you use it for? Don't think I'll dive into hardware stuff right now but definitely software related things.

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Jake Varness

I would deploy my hubot to my Raspberry Pi. It was perfect to host a small application like a chat bot. I haven't used many of the hardware capabilities of my Raspberry Pi yet.

When my son gets older I want to teach him how to use computers with one of my Raspberry Pis.

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Huy Tr.

If you don't want to dive into hardware right now, so here are some software ideas for you to build:

  • Your own Linux server to run your own blog
  • A small screen dashboard (you gonna need a TFT screen) that display your notifications, bitcoin price, todo list, pomodoro timer,...
  • A smart mirror, well, this actually need some hardware works
  • A game console (to play NES, Gameboy,... on your TV)
  • TIC-80 computer
  • Or write some emulator on your own that run on a Pi connected with a TFT screen
  • Buy another Pi to setup a cluster to do some heavy stuff (coin miners :v)
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KhoPhi

Coin miners with Pi? I see what you did there. ;)

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Dian Fay

I have two. One's a TV box with LibreElec and the other runs pi-hole, an adblocking DNS service.

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Pavol Rajzak

Whoa! Thanks for the pi-hole, I have one raspberry pi sitting unused :)

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Florescu George Cătălin • Edited

I use it as DNS add-block (pi-hole) and a Plex server. My pi-hole is stopping working from time to time..

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skyxie

I had a similar problem and discovered that the network card on the pi was going to sleep to save power. Since I ssh into my pi, that was hard to figure out, but adding a cron task to ping the router fixed it.

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Steve Steiner

How often did you have to ping and/or where did you find the sleep timeout value?

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Steve Steiner • Edited

That's next when its project box accumulates all the parts. I think I'm almost there!

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Rémi Lavedrine

Does the plex server works properly?
I installed it on the RaspberryPi but unfortunately, I never managed to watch a full movie in good conditions.
The Pi wasn't powerful enough to display the media (video file).

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skyxie_60 profile image
skyxie

Up-vote for pi-hole, best raspberry pi use case ever.

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Nihar Raote

Thanks for the suggestion! pi-hole seems interesting 😮

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Alessandro Ronchi

I just set up NextCloud on a Pi3 connected to a nas via nfs and now have my personal private "Dropbox".

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Der Sascha

Hi,

I build a small train information panel. This grabs the real train Infos from a particular trainstation and displays that onto a LCD display. This was build for my sons Modell train. There is a little bit hardware knowledge and programing skills needed.

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digitallyamar

I own a Raspberry Pi 2 and have been using it as an XBMC/Kodi media server.

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Lars Wächter

I use my Pi as an interface to different public APIs, that I access from my phone via Pushbullet.

For example: I send "train details" via Pushbullet and the Pi answers with live information, like arrival time, about my train connections.

The app is based on Node.js. For the communication I use the public pushbullet api.

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Rishabh Gupta

That's a great use case. Would love to know more about which libraries you use for communication with public api

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Lars Wächter

Thanks! I use the 'request-promise' module for sending the http requests and the 'websocket' module for the pushbullet stream.

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Patrick Tingen

I have a pi2 that I used to use these to log my solar panels to PVOutput. Last week I set up pi-hole to finally get rid of all ads on my wifi. And boy, I surely should have done that earlier

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K

I bought an Asus Tinker Board, because it has good video capabilities. Used it for a smart tv. Don't know if the RP3 is good for such things.

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Leandro García

If you got a 3D printer you can use it as a server to control the printer remotely

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Alex Reilly

I've got a few myself! One I've been using for years as a torrent server. I've got it hooked up to a router and NAS drive at home, then I've got a folder action on my laptop that automatically sends any .torrent files to the pi which automatically downloads them to the NAS drive for later use. It's useful in case I'm somewhere that's blocking P2P traffic.

The other one I set up at work with a couple sensors to monitor our bathroom and post whether it's occupied or not to a slack channel. I'm working on a backend for it right now for slash commands so people can make reservations 😂

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Theofanis Despoudis

Awesome

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lefebvre profile image
Paul Lefebvre
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Mohamed Diouane

You can use it as home assistant (homeassistant.io) hub .

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Julio Carlos Barrera Juez

I use it as emulator station with RetroPie, connected to my TV and using PS3 and XBox One controllers with USB cable or Bluetooth.

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Amelia Gapin

I installed RetroPie on my for a retro gaming system.

I also have a Raspberry Pi 2 that I use for random little things I want running on my network. Like homebridge for making non-HomeKit things work with HomeKit and Siri.