DEV Community

Cover image for What's your use of Raspberry Pi?
Madza
Madza Subscriber

Posted on

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?

Top comments (55)

Collapse
 
louislow profile image
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.

Collapse
 
kalatalabnik profile image
Michal Klabník

Could you share some details about Power Management? Thx

Collapse
 
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.

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

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

Collapse
 
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.

Collapse
 
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

Collapse
 
siddhantvirus profile image
siddhantvirus

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

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

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

Collapse
 
jreinhold profile image
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.

Collapse
 
sameureka profile image
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...

Collapse
 
jreinhold profile image
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 ;)

Collapse
 
couchcamote profile image
couchcamote

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

Collapse
 
jreinhold profile image
Jeppe Reinhold

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

Collapse
 
downey profile image
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. 😅

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

Nice one 👍😉

Collapse
 
aidanrb profile image
Aidan Bennett • Edited

I wrote a Python script to log some stuff to a Discord channel, added it as a PAM module, and opened SSH on port 22 to the internet. It's quite entertaining.

Collapse
 
unfor19 profile image
Meir Gabay

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (4GB) - Using it as a Plex Media Server on Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian).

Recently, I've tried to install Anbox + Google Play on it, but it didn't work well, crashed too many times so I gave up. I guess it will remain a Plex Media Server for the rest of its life

Collapse
 
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.

Collapse
 
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 😂

Collapse
 
sevmorris profile image
Seven Morris

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

Collapse
 
_garybell profile image
Gary Bell

I have an 8GB 4B which I use for PiHole plus backing my NAS up to the cloud . It also posts drive info about itself and my NAS to my Pi3 where I have a crude and ugly dashboard telling me about space use.

My Pi3 also connects to the NAS, but syncs the data to an external hard drive.

Collapse
 
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.

Collapse
 
madza profile image
Madza

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

Collapse
 
cirrus profile image
OnFileNotWanted

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