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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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rusher81572 profile image
Phillip Tribble • Edited

Check out PiCluster, a simple way to manage Docker containers on multiple hosts with monitoring capabilities. github.com/picluster/picluster

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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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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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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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Steve Steiner • Edited

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

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skyxie

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

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Pavol Rajzak

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

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Nihar Raote

Thanks for the suggestion! pi-hole seems interesting 😮

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4:5GTM

I would definitely say pi-hole. I'm running in docker container, so that I can use remaining resource for my other projects.

Right now I have about 5 device connect and it's blocking 24-29% ads traffic daily.

Mom(at home): ...
Mom(at gradpa's place):Why do I see these ads here but not at our place?.
Me: Mom, say "Thank you pi-hole".
Mom: eh?

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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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Dave Hackett

I use my pi as an emby server emby.media/ for my home media in conjunction with my Roku. I've loved it for the past two years. My wife says I've spoiled her into never touching our Blu Rays/DVDs ever again.

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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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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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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.

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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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Rémi Lavedrine • Edited

If you have a RaspberryPi, the very first thing you should install on it is Syncthing.
It will then allow you to have a personnal Dropbox installed.
I connected a 3To HDD on it and boom I have a 3To of cloud.

When you have this, the possibilities are endless.
Let's consider that you have Syncthing installed and configured on all your devices:

  • You can export your photos in a specific folder on your computer and boom they're saved automatically on your HDD.
  • I have Boosnote installed on my machines. With Synchting and Boostnote, I have a Evernote, Google Keep, etc, that is synchronized but not shared with any company. Everything is my property. :-)
  • I have a Plex server on my Shield that is connected over the air to my RaspberryPi. So it serves the content, videos, photos (synchronized automatically from earlier). So as soon as you finished working on your photos, you export them on a folder on your computer and after a few minutes (Syncthing is soo fast), you can enjoy them on your TV and even your relatives from the other side of the world can enjoy. You have nothing to do.

As you can see, I am very enthusiastic about that piece of software. :-)

But Syncthing is absolutely fantastic, open source, free and I could definitely not get rid of it and my RaspberryPi.
It cost the price of a one year Dropbox subscription for three times the volume and it works from 4 years now, like clockwork. :-)

You should definitely give it a try.