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I've got a Raspberry Pi 4 B, what can I do with it?

Thomas Bnt ☕ on June 04, 2022

I know some projects like Pi-hole and Kodi, but what super cool on Raspberry Pi 4 to install? Relevant post 'What can I do with a Raspberry Pi ...
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highasthedn profile image
highasthedn

Mine is directly connected to my router, measures my Internet connection every five minutes and sends the report to one of my servers. Every time I'm facing connection problems and the focking support of German Telekom doesn't believe me I make a beautiful Excel report from my collected data.
Pretty german right 😄

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thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt ☕

Excellent 🤣🤣

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primo profile image
Primo

That's great.
Can you share the tool you are using to measure the internet connection?

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highasthedn profile image
highasthedn

npmjs.com/package/speedtest-net

That's the package I'm using to measure the connection. I built a HapiJS server which is running a cronjob. After the test the result is sent to a MongoDB on my web server

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primo profile image
Primo

great, thank you ^__^

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fredlag profile image
fredlag

Since many years my raspberry run yunohost yunohost.org/ and i can do self hosting for emails documents and many other things

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bacloud22 profile image
aben • Edited

that's amazing !! I saw you have a discussion forum as well, ghost I believe?. do you even run that on it ?

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Thomas Bnt ☕

Yeah you can see nice apps here (Ghost is present)

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aben • Edited

Gigantic!! Could it holds the whole Mongodb database?!?!

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Thomas Bnt ☕

Ow I don't know for that sorry :/

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bacloud22 profile image
aben

Are you hosting such a solution and don't know where is your data residing?!

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Thomas Bnt ☕

No I know where I put my data, I just don't know if there is a MongoDB app on Yunohost.

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Thomas Bnt ☕

I really like Yunohost, I hesitated to use again this good project. Maybe on my other Raspberry Pi 😁

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Filippo Ferrando Damillano

Well, you can install over it portainer and docker and start your homlab!
Or use OpenMediaVault and create a NAS for your home.
Look at this website if you want, it has a lot of interesting projects!

pimylifeup.com/

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thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt ☕

thanks!

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rdfilippo profile image
Filippo Ferrando Damillano

No problem man

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Daniel Schulz

The best thing I ever did with a raspberry was set up a pi hole for a network wide ad block, and Nextcloud to switch my cloud storage, pictures, contacts and calendar from google to my own domain.

I can also see a email server, small-scale webserver or a NAS come in handy.

If you've got something to monitor (Website Analytics, Page Speed, Server logs, 3D Printer, Plant water status) and visualize, Pis are the perfect tool for that.

Or take a look at all the weird black magic Jeff Geerling does.

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

The PiHole is an instant quality-of-life boost and couldn't be easier to get running.

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jzombie

I'm making a system called "Host Bridge" which is intended to bind a system of headless servers to a UI I'm building.

The UI is a React project and is open-source. Here's a demo: speaker.app/

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Thomas Bnt ☕

Cool system!

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jzombie

Thanks!

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cjsmocjsmo profile image
Charlie J Smotherman

1 is running a music server (I wrote)
1 is running a movie server (I wrote)
An old phone is my remote control.
2 security cameras (pycamera and opencv)
1 security camera hub (use ML to tell if the garage door is open)
1 I use as a desktop for app development

And there is sooooo much more you can do with them

Happy Coding

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Chris Greening • Edited

Haven't played with mine in a while but I was usually using it for automated webscraping and simple bots

Three projects that stick out in my mind:

  • Twitter bot that would watch Elon Musk's Twitter and send me a text whenever one of his tweets mentioned a particular keyword
  • Bot that would enter every giveaway on a book website (usually a couple hundred a day) Had to turn that bot off because I was winning literally dozens of books and it was taking over my bookshelf 😅
  • Girlfriend was looking for a pair of rollerskates during the shortage in 2020 so I wrote a bot that would watch the product listing she wanted and text us as soon as they were back in stock - it worked!
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thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt ☕

Soo good projects!

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drsensor profile image
૮༼⚆︿⚆༽つ

As portable mini PC for a dev work where it can be hooked to a car dashboard/monitor or some random monitor when traveling. Also, scavenging a monitor from unused/broken laptop works too. Just need LVDS-to-HDMI which bridge between the monitor and RPi mini HDMI slot. As for keyboard, using smartphone or $5 mini wireless keyboard+touchpad (usually for tv box) works but it need some time to get used to this setup.

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Victor Perez

Mine holds:
Airsonic
Transmission daemon
Amule daemon
Nextcloud
Tor
PiHole
FressRss
Wireguard
3 calibre instances (one per library)

All dockerize except for transmission (due to file administration needs).
It suffers when rebooting and when doing heavy work with nextcloud or airsonic, but for the rest, all good.

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Ayan Pahwa

Hi Thomas, you can drop by to balenaHub (hub.balena.io) an app-store for IoT projects which you can deploy on your raspberry pi 4 computer with ease. The applications on balena devices works as individual docker containers so you can host like say :

  • Pi hole ad blocker
  • A private VPN
  • Home automation server
  • NAS
  • media player etc on same device.

There are a lot of projects submitted by community like converting your raspberry pi to multi-room audio streamers, or apple airplay server.

Check it out and let me know if that helps, cheers :)

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Thomas Bnt ☕

Ooooh I already tested Balena with Pi-hole, very simple to start the software. I recommend to using that ✨👍

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madza profile image
Madza

Good topic, did a discussion on this a while ago too 👍✨

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thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt ☕

Oooh yeah I already read your post. Thanks for bumped here !

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Eljay-Adobe

I've got mine hooked up to my 4k TV. I use it to program on. And I enjoy the irony of having an inexpensive Raspberry Pi connected to an expensive TV.

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Adam Crockett 🌀

Build an RC car and program a controller?
Home automation with he assistant

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bacloud22 profile image
aben

Make a web server for LAN or even for the internet.

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Parker Waiters

Something that hooks up to a real-world API and then does something physical. Like a sign that flashes every time such and such happens. It's a kernel of an idea, but I find all of those really fun.

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Thomas Bnt ☕

yeah pretty cool idea!

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Sacha Gennari

I have the 8GB version and i run pimox, best decision ever.

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Ho3ein

Automate your home

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Andrew Baisden

Some great ideas here.

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Thomas Bnt ☕

Oww goood usage ! 👍🚀

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Ionut aka BlitzCloud

I configured mine, for web hosting with cloudflare tunnels and ngnix. The web servers are running in docker containers. I have the 8 gb model but i will run out of storage.

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Ole Petersen

Bitcoin mining. Not.

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Ayan Pahwa

Monero Mining : Yes -> github.com/iayanpahwa/monero-miner

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Daniel Fitzpatrick

adguard home is a nice alternative to pi-hole. github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

also look into slack nebula as an alternative to tailscale. github.com/slackhq/nebula