Ask HN: Share Your Raspberry Pi Project

I have one running a few home automation type tasks (an IP->serial gateway for my whole-house audio, SDR radio to monitor 4 utility meters [only 2 meters are currently reporting data as my 2 water meters are not reporting usage via radio to me or to the utility], and controlling relays for the sprinkler system). Next steps are I plan to create an Alexa skill that will control the whole-house audio and let me "pause" the sprinklers as needed and integrate with weather forecasting to predict near-future rainfall so I can save water/increase plant health if rain is expected.

I'll be honest: it's a lot of fun, but if I lived 100 lifetimes, it would never save me time on balance. ;)

I also use one to run stratux as another poster mentions. That one saved ~$650 vs buying the COTS solution.

I built a spaceship for my kids: http://www.duncanjauncey.com/blog/archives/377 (please excuse the tabloid headline of the article)

I recently used a Pi to replace the game controller on an arcade style basketball game we have in our office (like this: http://imgur.com/a/B7YBq). It's running Android Things and has a couple of fun new game modes, better sound effects, and a whole bunch of LEDs for added awesomeness.

I'm also in the process of building a photobooth. Using the standard Pi Camera module + a Pimoroni Unicorn Hat HD to give people a prompt when the photo is about to be taken. It'll then publish the photos on it's own internal webserver that'll be visible on another Pi for easy emailing / browsing and tweeting! Going to pack it all in an transparent enclosure that looks like the approximate shape of an oversized DSLR.

I've done a little reading into making something along these lines using a Pi, Snowboy hotword detection, and one of the cloud APIs.

Two things I'm curious about...

1) What are you using for hardware with the Pi? It seems a high quality microphone is important to this application and the only array microphone I've been able to find is the MATRIX creator which seems steep in price if I could just buy an Amazon Dot.

2) Your numbers indicate significantly better performance than Google. How are you able to achieve that? Where does your training data come from if nothing is supposedly leaving my device?

I really strongly desire a system that wouldn't require relying on the cloud but I just don't know how you can get enough training data to be anywhere near as accurate as a cloud provider. That led me to thinking the next best thing would be a setup with Snowboy hotword detection where I know nothing is leaving my device until my own programmed hotword is spoken.