To run Kodi as a frontend to my Mythtv backend. The 4 out I am wondering how I could replace the backend desktop with a Pi. I would need to find a way to connect a TV tuner to it. That seems the biggest hurdle. My current card connects through PCI slot as I recall...
Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
911–920 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#912Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are a kindred spirit. I have: 2 pi NTP servers - one running a GPS hat + PPS wired up, one using a USB gps receiver. a "workhorse" pi - 2 wired ds18b20 temperature sensors, cron jobs, email generators, weather page generator, connectivity monitor. One pi running piubos + nextcloud. One pi running as a clock. One pi running as a wireless temperature receiver. a few floating pis running media center or retropie or…
Good souls. I took the time to setup a highly accurate stratum-1 not server only to find my ISP permanently blocks udp 123.
Can a VPN pass that, further loading up the Pi?
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#913call me a little paranoid but - a RPI security camera. I have it running locally on my network, capturing still pictures of cars/people/things walking by (I live near a train). Its really just a passive monitor, but I'd like to add more difficult things to it like tell me if someone comes within x feet of my house - phone me, or something, it works for now though.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#914I live in an apartment with quite strict fire-protection standards. Due to the fact that I have a cat that absolutly loves to go outside, I needed to find a solution for him to get outside without a catdoor trough my door. So I installed a fire-protecion-approved door drive that is hooked to a raspberry pi. Another raspberry pi then analyzes a video stream and detects my cat. If my cat is in the frame for n amount of…
Does this open a door or a cat door? I’m just imagining breaking into places by wondering around holding a picture of a cat.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#915I started a company that constructed booths which used 70 accurately sync'd Pis with custom PiCams (fitted with lenses) to take pictures of human subjects, for turning them into avatars like this: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pete-swagger-walk-a55d807de1... At the beginning of the project, I'd barely powered up the Pis I had collecting dust in my drawer. By the end, I was a legitimate domain expert in several nich…
What you call UBEC is just a switch mode DC-DC buck converter. They are used everywhere in electronics, and you could probably save money buying general puprose 5V buck converter modules instead of modules made specifically for RC. Anyway, that's very interesting info about supply voltage affecting Raspberry Pi speed and timekeeping, thanks!
As @Kadin suggested, the UBEC we purchased in bulk was, at the end of the day, a packaged product that had two things going for it. First, it had undergone some degree of QA and we found the results to be consistent, which was a huge deal for us. Second, it came with a 3-pin connector that could not have been more perfect for plugging directly onto the GPIO pins.
For anyone attempting something similar, here's my boy scout good deed for the day: http://www.banggood.com/External-Brushless-BEC-UBEC-3A-5V2-5...
It's entirely possible that you could get a cheaper buck converter, possibly for pennies. However, this was not where the money was being spent in our project... and if we had to do literally anything to it to prepare it for use (such as soldering on a pin socket) it would have destroyed any cost advantage.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#916Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you listen to all these radio transmissions?
For the airplane data, I always liked browsing sites like flightradar24, planefinder etc, and wondered how they aggregated the data, and it sort of just went from there. I also now send the ADS-B data to open projects rather than commercial only entities. In terms of the random radio transmissions, it was simply because I was already installing the two ADS-B antennas in my attic, and thought I might as well just put…
I'm only familiar with the commerical ones (flightaware etc.). What are some of the open ones?
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#917Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you call UBEC is just a switch mode DC-DC buck converter. They are used everywhere in electronics, and you could probably save money buying general puprose 5V buck converter modules instead of modules made specifically for RC. Anyway, that's very interesting info about supply voltage affecting Raspberry Pi speed and timekeeping, thanks!
This is true, although UBECs are also packaged with some filtering caps, and are in a nice heatshrinked package usually -- so I look at it the other way around; packaged UBECs are so cheap, if you can make do with them, it's too easy to just grab them off the shelf and move on with life rather than DIYing it from components. All depends how many of whatever you're building, I suppose.
I did a quick search and wasn't able to find anything even close to the price of the UBEC we used: http://www.banggood.com/External-Brushless-BEC-UBEC-3A-5V2-5...
However, I cannot state enough that the price of this small component was simply not where the costs accumulated on this project. We geeks have a nasty tendency to over-optimize things that just don't matter in the big picture. You totally nailed it when you mentioned that this device is a packaged (and QA'd) product. The fact that it just slips right onto a Pi's GPIO pins without requiring any further modification is what makes this such a win. If you have to do anything to [70 units of] a component to make it work, you're blowing up any miniscule price arbitrage anyhow.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#918A client that I'm consulting was being ripped off by a local IT provider with pricing for on-premises servers & MS software. I proceeded to rent cheaper equivalent machines off-site. The IT provider claimed the hardware firewall (Fortigate) was not configurable for site-to-site to the new machines directly (could be, not an expert on those). Therefore, I ended up purchasing several Raspberries and configuring them as…
You can absolutely configure IPSec tunnels on Fortinet. Can I ask, do you perform updates and maintenance on these boxes? How do they perform in terms of throughput with openvpn?
I'd be more interested if wireguard is an option, and how it performs. Since they're already on linux/oss.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#919Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I VPN in to my home network, ssh into the pi using Terminus on my iphone, and 'aplay' the wav file Once, when I was working away from home, someone unplugged the phone at home so I couldn't phone in. After becoming very frustrated, I SSH'd into my home server, and from there into the Mac Mini we used as a media station. Then: - checked they were watching something using `ps`. - killed that process so I had their at…
Haha this reminded me of the time I lost my phone. I suspected it was left at work so I ssh'd into my Mac at work, started recording audio, dialed up my phone and voilá. It was there and I had peace of mind until tomorrow.
Turning on FaceTime remotely to see what’s in front of the computer has saved me a few times, and made me wish that my screen was angled differently many more.
Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
#920I‘m running Bind9 and ISC-DHCPD on my Pi. Having set a bunch of DNS blacklist zones to completly eliminate necessary of ad blockers on all my devices. Following, I have set up dhcpd, thus I‘m not bothering about setting static IPs.
How do you maintain the blacklist? Is there a good community project around dns blacklists?