Pihole, Owncloud, Ambient particulate matter sensor.
Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#262I have it set up to run a project where a subreddit has control over the watering of a live plant in my apartment. The pi runs a reddit bot that reads the votes, and can switch on a pump to water. It also collects data about sunlight, moisture, temp and humidity to help inform the decision about watering. Despite many people's preconceptions about the goodness of the internet, I must admit that they do a wonderful jo…
This is one of the coolest uses of reddit/community sites that I have ever seen. Out of curiosity, how did you come up with this idea?
Trying to impress a girl with my plant-keeping abilities ;) --We had a collaborative message thread reminding everyone to water our plants based upon a set schedule which I was going hook up to a pump to automate, and at the time Twitch Plays Pokemon was a big thing, so I just kind of combined the two ideas.
If you have interest in doing something similar, come check out the subreddit and feel free to DM me on reddit or twitter. Always happy to talk about plants and automation
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#263I was bullish when I got my first Pi to run Home Assistant (before hass.io), but got discouraged when the sd card failures were gas-lighting me by silently reverting my code changes. That and the lack of hardware clock hampering some of the diagnostic tools I usually use, kept me sticking with VMs on a NUC and a fanless Celeron for Kodi for my main compute uses. In time I have gotten more Pis, but mainly for hardware…
oh jeez the SD card story just gave me flashbacks.
I changed networks (uni to home) and the RPi running pihole would constantly keep my uni DNS settings after a restart.
Took me a good few hours to figure it out given that I thought the DNS settings were getting copied in from elsewhere on startup. I think i finally figured it out after i re-installed rapsbian from scratch and to my horror was booted in to the old system.
PSA: Bad SD card can make you feel crazy.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#264I'm partial to PiZero/Ws.
I have one connected to a big screen TV with a USB stick loaded with home videos playable using omxplayer. I use Raspicast to control the playback using my phone.
Also, like using them for projects using Rust.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#265Networked sound card that can also play by itself via ssh/screen/mpv when the main workstation is down. That was the easiest way to avoid ground loops in my home audio setup.
What software are you using for the virtual sound device, and does said software work with Windows?
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#266Using several Raspberry Pis to monitor CO2 levels in my house. Each Raspberry Pi has a CO2 sensor - wrote a little Python script to retrieve data from sensor and upload it to a server Which is also a Raspberry Pi.
I'm also interested, although my curiosity is more about what you are doing with the data. Just storage? Some sort of charting? Graphite? Maybe some other data monitoring tool? Maybe something custom?
I had a suspicion that winter-time headaches we were having might be triggered by high CO2 levels so I simply wanted to record the CO2 levels in different rooms. Thanks to the sensors, I did, in fact, find that CO2 levels were very high in our bedroom. Once I improved ventilation, things seem to have gotten better.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#267Media player connected to tv. (Kodi or Elec, I can't recall which) What I found really neat about this is that if you use the HDMI connection, there is some automated setup/control that allows my tv remote to control the PI. (through the HDMI connection) But also, the smart phone app for Kodi remote control added a new layer of interaction with the media player that is just sort of unique and unexpected. (everything…
The remote control tech is CEC. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control
Thanks, forgot what it was, and didn't have time to dig around in the docs where I first ran into it.
The fact that this is not widely advertised as a feature is surprising. It made remote control automatic instead of having to hack something together.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#268The coffee machine in our office is controlled by blockchain NFTs and a Raspberry Pi: Once authenticated, an owner of the NFT can select their coffee type on their phone which then signals the Raspberry Pi to make whatever coffee type was selected by jumping the contacts that used to be pressed by the machine's buttons (which have been removed). It's a cool gimmick, fun to show off to visitors, gives us a nice record…
> gives us a nice record of who is making coffee
Is that allowed by GDPR?
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#269https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-... - A little project I created to 'paint' my Christmas tree lights.
https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/diy-inline-refractome... - I'm currently working on an inline refractometer using a pi zero to capture the output and attempt to convert to a digital reading.
https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/wildlife-camera/ - I've also got a pi zero setup in an IP68 case, with waterproof USB cable, to capture wildlife in the garden.
This uses a simple script using picamera, to detect motion and record video, which I then just rsync to my laptop. I tried to use a PIR sensor, but alas the casing seemed to block IR. I'm planning on using a doppler radar sensor instead at some point.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#270With the Raspberry Pi:
I've made a four wheel drive robot called Rover that uses brushless motors and 3d printed planetary gears. It's all CC0 open source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwCkX6bLY3E&t=4s
https://github.com/tlalexander/rover_control
https://reboot.love/t/rover-and-skittles-cad-design-files-he...
I've made a smaller classroom style robot named Skittles that also uses brushless + planetary and is open source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2-zIUY_kww
I taught a robotics class using the robot Skittles, and the students did a great job picking up Raspberry Pi. There's a lot of tutorials on the web they found to do their work!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pql6ZbPVog
I've made a "fake Philips Hue" light out of a SK6812 RGBW LED strip to go with my existing Philips Hue system. That uses this github project:
https://github.com/diyhue/diyHue
I made a humidity controlled chamber for mushroom cultivation:
https://github.com/tlalexander/humidity_controller
I've made an RTK GPS system using two raspberry pis and two $75 GPS receivers to make a GPS system that so far looks to be accurate to within a few centimeters (when you have clear sky).
http://rtkexplorer.com/how-to/posts-getting-started/
I replaced our dodgy bluetooth audio sink on our stereo with an Airplay node using this software:
https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync
I've added a wireless front end to some of my 3D printers using Octoprint:
What else? Well I just keep going. Professionally I'm a robotics prototyping engineer and I cannot tell you how much joy I get from the Pi and the things I can make with it. :)