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Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#521

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

I have an old Raspberry Pi 1 that runs headless raspbian with a set of cheap speakers plugged into it and an old usb wifi adaptor. It has only one purpose: to play a wav file of a telephone ringing for one minute. My spouse does not ever have the ringer on her cell phone. So when I am out and I need her to look at her phone, I VPN in to my home network, ssh into the pi using Terminus on my iphone, and 'aplay' the wav file.

The real reason we ever wanted to get a landline was because of this issue, so instead of wasting money I just used spare parts to make an alert system I can activate remotely. I can also use the 'say' command for text-to-speech, but that's not really effective. The old school phone ringer wav is perfect.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#524

Post by Piskvorrr »

yumraj wrote: post #221
_ea1k wrote: post #208

I use one running OpenWRT as a router. Its an old 3B, so it barely keeps up now that our internet has been updated to 100Mbps. It will soon be replaced, possibly with a pi 4. Of course, it also runs some other things. I have OpenVPN running on it as well as a little nginx instance that I can use for reverse proxying if need be. And the wifi turned out to be surprisingly solid as a (slow) access point, so I have somet…

Don't you need two Ethernet ports to use it as a router? Are you using USB as the other Ethernet port?

Any two interfaces. Ethernet+wifi is enough. (Technically, RPi's integrated ethernet port is also connected over USB) I have once seen a single interface both for external and internal network, but that was an abomination.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#525

Post by VectorLock »

Zaskoda wrote: post #497

I 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Set6z566-s

Are the light levels important for your Bitcoin mine?

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#526

Post by dpcan »

Ours ran various things in our escape rooms:

1) I ran a browser in kiosk mode with a mouse that was used with some custom software on a computer in the room.

2) We had it connected to a remote keypad that opened a magnetic lock, popping a drawer open, when the sequence was correctly entered.

3) We had one connected to a magnetic sensor that would open another cabinet when items were placed correctly.

4) I ran the clocks and hint systems in the rooms from RPi's as well, which allowed me to run mini web servers on them that I would access from the control room to mess with the time if the game called for it, or to send hints in to the rooms, or to trigger sounds or videos.

5) Finally, we ran our lobby slideshow system with one, and also played our orientation videos on them.

Yes, we could have used Arduino for some of these, but I always liked RPi's because I could SSH into them to do the resets or to trigger the doors remotely if needed from my computer at the control center.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#527

Post by sparker72678 »

I have 13 in service right now:

- Outdoor irrigation control via OpenSprinkler Pi: https://opensprinkler.com/product/opensprinkler-pi/

- Z-Wave home automation via ZWay: https://z-wave.me/products/razberry/

- 2 Custom HAVC thermostats using: https://github.com/jeffmcfadden/PiThermostat

- An NTP server with GPS attached for a time source.

- 2 for weather monitoring (one directly attached to sensors, one that aggregates the data from a few sources and provides reporting)

- A sort of centralized "workhorse" Pi that runs a lot of random cron jobs, etc.

- An Alexa gateway for home automation

- An NES emulator

- An infrared-remote source for turning on/off surround receiver, TV, etc.

- Monitoring of HVAC temperatures/performance

- An intranet server

Assuming I didn't forget anything.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#528

Post by sdfin »

vitomd wrote: post #303

A security camera outdoors (connected to another webcam outdoor), when there is motion it will send a request to another indoor raspberry (node server) connected to a speaker and will play the sound of an angry dog. The system is working fine for more than a year without breaks. Raspberry is robust.

Interesting. Would you recommend some brand of security cameras that work well for this kind of projects. Where I live the more popular brands are Dahua and Hikvision. Maybe I have to look for a certain communication protocol, rather than for a special brand.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#530

Post by farmerbb »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #520
albemuth wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that I can remote into from anywhere I've been looking to set up something like this, do you have a static IP or use an external server you could recommend?

All you need is a DNS provider with an API, and a check for external-IP change.

That's correct. The one I use is duckdns.org - it comes with a script that you can add as a cron job that updates the DNS record every few minutes with whatever your current IP address is.
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