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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?

#331

Post by KingMachiavelli »

geddy wrote: post #244

I just use one as a Plex server. Can't beat the cost of running it, which is roughly $6/year worth of electricity if I remember correctly. Previously I was running my Plex server on my gaming rig which cost a relative fortune to have running 24/7.

Do you otherwise not leave your gaming rig on? Me and all of my roommates leave our desktops on... they draw about 50-60W so abbout 1.5kWh a day which is less than 15c a day each. Perhaps your conflating the extra cost of the GPU activity incured what actively transcoding files? Which the Pi really can't do so Plex ends up just being a dumb DLNA server.

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

#332

Post by ordinaryperson »

aoeuidiue wrote: post #321
ordinaryperson wrote: post #316

Four things: 1. Pihole to ad block ads (useful for phone browsing) https://pi-hole.net/ 2. Custom Weather conditions dashboard, using Dark Sky's API I'd love to replace the weather dashboard with one of my integrated work / personal calendars so I could see what meetings I have each day but work won't expose that data, claims it's a security risk. 3. Custom NYC subway dashboard, showing me estimated train arrivals fo…

Have you experienced any issues using PiHole? I would imagine some apps etc would go to lengths to prevent their use. But if it works I'll set one up for my partner who plays way too many spammy games.

Two areas where I've seen problems.

One, sometimes I want to browse/buy things via Google Shopping (or some other shopping interface) but the Pi-Hole blocks it.

Two, sometimes for work I will run a docker-compose script that say, downloads a copy of Puppeteer. For whatever reason the domain seems to be on Pi-Hole's blacklist.

Granted I could probably whitelist the domains but that seems like a hassle. It has the ability to disable blocking for periods (like 5 minutes or an hour) but that doesn't seem to solve the above problems.

Other than that, it works great. It probably won't affect a regular internet user. But occasionally you can run into problems.

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

#333

Post by unforswearing »

thedjinn wrote: post #114

I built a guitar stomp box using a Raspberry Pi Zero to trigger samples with a foot switch. Runs on 9 volts and has a very bright OLED display so I can still see what it's doing when I'm playing in a dark venue.

I have been thinking about doing something similar -- would love to hear more about this if possible!

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

#335

Post by wil421 »

exhilaration wrote: post #138
thecodemonkey wrote: post #95

1x Raspberry Pi 3 installed in my car within the internal network as a bastion box and to run software that let's my interact with the entertainment system 1x Raspberry Pi 3 running Home Assistant with a Z-Wave USB Dongle (Home Automation) 1x Raspberry Pi 3 running OctoPrint (Host/remote-control for 3D Printer) 1x Raspberry Pi 3 running FullPageOS (Full-screen Chromium in kiosk mode) displaying a server statusboard i…

FYI - I had to buy a Pi 3B+ to run Unifi Controller, the forum posts said the Zero W didn't have enough juice.

When I used my Pi 3b+ it was flakey for UniFi. I bought a bunch of their cameras and got a cloud key gen 2 plus. Haven’t looked back and now I have a Pi for a few other things in my new house.

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

#337

Post by wil421 »

avh02 wrote: post #263
zantana wrote: post #212

I 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 sy…

The SD card was failing to write? It would have blown my mind if I reinstalled raspbian and the old config popped up.

I’ll have to keep this in mind.

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

#339

Post by MrsPeaches »

MarcScott wrote: post #314

I work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, in the Education team. We're always on the look out for new ideas and projects to turn into learning resources. If anyone would like to share their code, wiring diagrams and setup processes, then please feel free to email me. marc@raspberrypi.org

Thanks for sharing your details!

We are working on an educational charge controller for students in sub-Saharan Africa.

We are currently using an Arduino but I think the Raspberry Pi would be a goot fit as well.

You can read more details on our website: https://localelectricity.org/

I'll drop you an email with more details.

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

#340

Post by semi-extrinsic »

weaksauce wrote: post #302
cr0sh wrote: post #256

I'm kinda concerned by the number of mentions here of using the Pi to run OctoPrint (I think that's right?) to remotely admin and monitor a 3D printer... I've always been of the mind that a 3D printer should never be left physically unattended - even with monitoring (via camera and such), as they can potentially start a fire if something goes wrong (failed print spewing random filament?). Is this a wrong viewpoint? A…

You can also get a small automatic fire extinguisher like they have for grow rooms and over stoves to help mitigate. Having that in an enclosure with some leds and a webcam would be a decent mitigation. Checking in on the print every now and again is a good call too.

I've heard that purging the 3D printer with e.g. CO2 gas is something that you can do to improve layer adhesion. It should be sufficient to prevent fires also? Seems most plastics have a limiting oxygen concentration of around 16%. Purging from 21% down to, say, 15% requires that one adds 40 L of CO2 (at STP) to dilute a 100L chamber. Your typical 2.6 kg small CO2 bottle that people use for home-brew beer kegs would last for at least 35 fillings.
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