I’m running a series of spaghetti-code scripts to trigger the lawn sprinkler when a camera detects motion, and notify me with a gif using pushover.
You kids get out of my yard!!
Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
491–500 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This one is a candidate for replacement as the 4K monitor would be nice here. You might be able to run 4k display with an old RPi at about 8-10 Hz.
The Pi is memory bandwidth limited as it is, that would probably kill it completely. Even the RPi2 was really only responsive enough with a 720p display.
Maybe you could even try 4K at 6 Hz. That should take less screen refresh bandwidth than 1280x720 @60Hz.
It might work fine. You can't know unless you try.
Partial screen updates might look weird, though.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#493Coincidentally there’s another story on the front page about using a Raspberry Pi to hack NASA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264774
thats not a coincidence. That's a well coordinated product launch with a good PR agency doing it's job
A PR agency that hacks NASA to boost your product launch, sign me up! ;o)
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#494I use an older Pi with a USB DAC to bring in audio and data from my radio scanners, for a slow-moving side project. Goal is to mux the audio with time sensitive radio metadata, like talk group and location (surprisingly difficult given messy state of formats, containers and playback options) and deliver this to clients on the network for easy listening and other processing (e.g. speech-to-text, mapping, etc.). Learned a bunch of gstreamer in the past half year, hoping to pick this all back up with the Pi4.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#495I've done digital signage, controlled servos, used them as cameras, the works.
Right now I have:
- A 5-node Pi 2 cluster running k3s.io (https://github.com/rcarmo/raspi-cluster), and a separate Pi 2 I use as a Docker build box and local Docker registry.
- A Pi 3B+ as a "lab" desktop computer with an USB oscilloscope and FTDI cables to flash ESP8266 and Arduinos
- A Lakka.tv arcade/MAME box for the kids with a PS3 controller (no room for a proper PiCade, we just use the TV(
- A Pi 3A+ with a mic array for playing around with Google Assistant
- A Pi Zero W taped to the inside of my electricity meter trying to estimate power consumption (we have a spinning disk mechanical meter)
- Another Pi Zero W that I use to demo Azure IoT solutions
- An ODROID U2 (Could be a Pi) running HomeKit and Node-Red for home automation, as well as a bastion container (all dockerized).
Edit: forgot about the 3B hooked up to my 3D printer running OctoPi
And the list goes on. I have many older Series Bs lying around, and once used one to revive a dead synth whose MIDI keyboard still worked (I set up timidity and a sound font on it and it became the kids' piano). I also ran a Plex server on one until it became obvious that I needed to think about transcoding (but it worked fine for music).
You can do a _lot_ with Raspberry Pis, and I fully expect to get a beefy Pi 4 to use as a lab computer.
I just hope they also beef up the Zero at some point (power envelope will be a problem, but a Zero with Pi 2 specs would be great).
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#496I use it to automate my weed garden in my closet. It turns on and off the LED lights everyday and waters my plants with a pump based on the moisture level of the soil. I measure the moisture level through a moisture sensor. Weed is fun.
Have you looked into nutrient sensing at all? I’m curious if/how others are tackling this.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#497I used several Pi Zeros with EnviroPhat sensor hats to monitor temperatures and light levels in my Bitcoin mine. I have a Pi 3 setup as a game emulator in the basement. And I used to chop up rc toys from the thrift store to make RPI robots to chase my cats:
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#498I play around with K8s on ARM: http://pidramble.com It's been a fun hobby project over the past 6 years, and I also do some other things like home environment (temp, PM2.5, etc.) monitoring. I also have a few Pi Zero W's strapped to USB batteries I use for impromptu time-lapses, using a little set of scripts here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-timelapse I love being able to tinker with software/hardware easily...…
Have a look at k3s.io. I love it.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#499There are so many amazing projects here, all of which are more impressive than what I actually get around to doing with mine! I really just use mine a simple way to play around with assembler in a simple environment.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#500A security camera NVR. (Help wanted! I'm developing it here: https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr I'm proud of the design but it's still far from a polished system that does everything a reasonable person would expect. Lots of opportunities to extend it if you're looking for a fun Rust + Javascript project.) A Raspberry Pi 2 will run a working setup; the new Raspberry Pi 4 should be a lot more pleasant in terms…
I need to dig into this later, but one suggestion is to put your video chunker in a separate process, this way you can scale across multiple nodes.
It doesn't do enough work today to require that, given that it's meant for home use and doesn't decode/re-encode the video. One Raspberry Pi 4 with a couple 6 TB drives in an external USB3 SATA enclosure should be sufficient for 16+ cameras in terms of CPU, USB3 bandwidth, Ethernet bandwidth, spindle time, storage capacity, etc. If for some reason you need more security cameras than that in your home, you can probably afford a single machine beefy enough to handle it.
The only thing I anticipate being a significant performance challenge is on-NVR motion detection. Most likely that will end up being separate processes that download the video and annotate it via the HTTP API. Those workers could then run on separate machines if needed. The primary machine would have sufficient bandwidth to support this.