Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi? • Hacker News Board

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

#651

Post by wycy » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:37 AM UTC

sparker72678 wrote: post #527

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 aggregate…

What sort of equipment are you using for monitoring your HVAC system performance?

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

#652

Post by tghw » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:38 AM UTC

I have a bunch doing different things:

One is running our sprinklers with OpenSprinklerPi https://opensprinkler.com/product/opensprinkler-pi/

One is running VolumeIO to splay music on the speakers in our house as a Spotify Connect device https://volumio.org/

One controls our whole house humidifier via a relay and a combination of weather and thermostat information.

One has been turned into a precision/TSD/regularity rally computer for my vintage car. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularity_rally

One runs my 3D printer using OctoPrint https://octoprint.org/download/

And I use one as a race car telemetry system using a 9-dof sensor and a GPS module (with brake, throttle, and steering inputs to come).

For most of these projects, they're complete overkill in terms of hardware, but with integrated wifi and bluetooth, and a host of GPIO pins, they make developing projects like this dead simple. And at $35, the amount of time they save is well worth it over bare metal hardware.

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

#653

Post by BMorearty » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:46 AM UTC

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.

I made the exact same thing with a Raspberry Pi in 2013. For the outdoors part I used a motion detector attached to an Electric Imp that uploads the message to the Raspberry Pi indoors, which is connected to speakers.

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

#654

Post by JustSomeNobody » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:47 AM UTC

DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #521

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…

If they have an iPhone, you can go into contacts and turn on emergency bypass just for you and that way their phone will ring when you call but not anyone else.

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

#655

Post by JustSomeNobody » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:48 AM UTC

vnchr wrote: post #591

drcross wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have presumed you can have custom notification levels for specific phones calls baked into modern phones OSs.

iOS has a bypass list for “Do Not Disturb” mode, but sound is disabled via a hardware switch next to the volume buttons. As a workaround, I’ll use the “Find my iPhone” chime which is the one way to bypass the hardware switch if I need to get my wife’s attention while the phone is set to silent.

Emergency bypass in iOS should also bypass the hardware silent switch.

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

#656

Post by jameslk » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:50 AM UTC

tylerjaywood wrote: post #217

I 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…

It would be interesting to create a live feed of plants taken care of by remote botanists at an industrial scale. Maybe to train an ML model. Of course I know next to nothing about botany so this probably wouldn't work for some reason.

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

#657

Post by mwill » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:53 AM UTC

Mines not as cool as all the others here, but I use pi's to run all my homemade machines: A few 3D printers, pen plotter, CNC etc.

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

#658

Post by cmmeur01 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:54 AM UTC

chadd wrote: post #615

With my 16 year old son, I built a weather balloon with one, including an Arduino, a few temperature sensors, a GPS, LoRA radio, and we're going to launch it next month. Having a hard time finding Helium.

Welding supply store may be worth checking.

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

#659

Post by whalesalad » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:54 AM UTC

gregsadetsky wrote: post #617

There's a bus station across from my studio / coworking space. I can see people waiting for the bus and doing either: 1) staring into the void 2) looking at their watches 3) desperately glancing in the direction where the bus is coming from. I figured that it'd be nice to let people know when the bus is supposed to be there. So, I installed a 28" display on a monitor stand, installed the stand on my window frame, tur…

Awesome! This has reminded me of an old Heroku app that has been sitting idle for years: https://wmata-status.herokuapp.com (before the Silver line, which is why the UI is all wonked now)

I wanted to do something similar to try and reinvent the old/ugly/hard-to-parse televisions scattered around the DC metro.

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

#660

Post by toephu2 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:55 AM UTC

klambda wrote: post #553

tylerjaywood wrote: post #217

I 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…

Did something similar. Raspberry pi is automatically uploading video of each watering to YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtl442fLi6KAOowkw_w83rA/vid... ) and informing me with summary (incl. watering duration, soil moisture level, temperature, humidity, light level etc.). Not that I care that much about the plant but automating it has been fun. It's been on auto pilot now for a couple of months now and the…

How did you guys automate watering? Any good DIY tutorials you recommend? What devices/parts do I need?