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Best Raspberry Pi Projects

tomshardware.com

41–50 of 69 posts

Re: Best Raspberry Pi Projects

#41

One of the recent ones I did was a Pi-KVM. https://imgur.com/a/AVxuR0d Im honestly considering deploying these at work to replace some aging (and expensive) dell, java based ipkvms. I like it enough i made a second one to attach to a small headless desktop. Mainly just as a cheap quasi-OOB management. Mine use h.264/webrtc or html5/mjpeg and on one i even hooked it up to a smaller kvm to give me a 4 port switcher via…

On the subject of IP-KVMs, I miss¹ something that I can plug on the USB of several computers, and access them by the bare serial interface, without messing with video capture and peripheral emulation. It would be something much simpler than the things available today, even requiring less wires.

The main issue I see with it is that it would need to connect to multiple host USBs and only one client.

1 - I actually don't miss it anymore because I'm not in a situation to use it, but I used to miss it.

Re: Best Raspberry Pi Projects

#42

I wish I could find a project that would recognise a cat by its appearance and open / close a cat flap based on that. It could also make a noise or other distraction at cats that are recognised to deter them from tampering with the cat flap. The cat flaps available on the market use a chip to identify a cat, but this is a terrible method - it doesn't work more often than it does. Many times my cat was attacked by oth…

Use a Pi with a camera module and a passive infrared motion sensor. Take a bunch of photos of your cat and other cats, using the module and the PIR to trigger it. Manually label photos as `your cat` and `not your cat` and then use https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/ to retrain a model based on your cat's image. Then rig a big enough servo or stepper motor to open a cat door, and a big buzzer for other cats.

Re: Best Raspberry Pi Projects

#43
post #9

I'll hijack this thread to ask: What are some good Pi alternatives that don't need blobs to boot and run, and that use mainline (or more-or-less mainline) kernels? I don't need any video output, and I'm happy to pay double. What are my options?

The FSF has a page on single-board computers that might be helpful, at least to narrow down your options by discarding the worse options. https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers

>Some have workarounds, but some are fatally flawed and none are fully free.

Re: Best Raspberry Pi Projects

#44

No blog post or pictures but I have taped an ADXL345(accelerometer) on the back of my washing + dryer and I'm using a pi to notify me when a load is done. Didn't have the time to put a fancy algorithm to detect movement so it's rough, but it has been working perfectly for the past 4 years with no false positive/negative. https://github.com/jebeaudet/time-to-fold-alerter

Why not detect current in the power cable? Or tap into an indicator light or relay? Way easier.

Re: Best Raspberry Pi Projects

#45
post #44

No blog post or pictures but I have taped an ADXL345(accelerometer) on the back of my washing + dryer and I'm using a pi to notify me when a load is done. Didn't have the time to put a fancy algorithm to detect movement so it's rough, but it has been working perfectly for the past 4 years with no false positive/negative. https://github.com/jebeaudet/time-to-fold-alerter

Why not detect current in the power cable? Or tap into an indicator light or relay? Way easier.

Absolutely, however I already had the accelerometer in hand for another project.

Re: Best Raspberry Pi Projects

#46

One of the recent ones I did was a Pi-KVM. https://imgur.com/a/AVxuR0d Im honestly considering deploying these at work to replace some aging (and expensive) dell, java based ipkvms. I like it enough i made a second one to attach to a small headless desktop. Mainly just as a cheap quasi-OOB management. Mine use h.264/webrtc or html5/mjpeg and on one i even hooked it up to a smaller kvm to give me a 4 port switcher via…

On the subject of IP-KVMs, I miss¹ something that I can plug on the USB of several computers, and access them by the bare serial interface, without messing with video capture and peripheral emulation. It would be something much simpler than the things available today, even requiring less wires. The main issue I see with it is that it would need to connect to multiple host USBs and only one client. 1 - I actually don'…

Not sure i follow.

In this case. Its basically a single USB cable and a HDMI/Video cable.

All the Mouse/Keyboard etc is emulated through USB. Which is pretty nice. That was the best part for me. And with modern standards the lag was noticeable, but minimal. That said, in my cases, im just using SSH or something anyway. This was more for outage situations, or in a situation where i need to make a BIOS change remotely etc.

Re: Best Raspberry Pi Projects

#47

Many cool ones in this list! Other great ones: - https://birdnetpi.com — Bird call logging - https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/ — ADS-B Tracking - https://pi-hole.net — Network wide ad blocking - https://homebridge.io — HomeKit bridge for many devices/services

https://birdnetpi.com — Bird call logging I love this idea. I've just started getting into birds, and I wish I had steady enough hands to build a solar+battery version of this I could stash in the woods for a week.

You might be interested in picking up an AudioMoth [0]. A bit more work as you’d have to manually push through BirdNET, but easier to deploy.

https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth

Re: Best Raspberry Pi Projects

#48

If you want to monitor things around you, and you have an SDR dongle set up, rtl_433 is handy. I have a Pi 3 running it to graph temperature and humidity readings from a couple of remote-reading sensors, plus barometric pressure from a Sense Hat and voltage, load, and battery readings from my UPS. It will display selected readings on the LED display, but I mostly just let mrtg/rrdtool do its thing. https://github.com…

My first thought was, "Why would I need SDR to read temperature/humidity from sensors", then I realized these are more like wireless weather stations. Out of curiosity: why did you decide to purchase ready solutions instead of rolling your own using ESP32 for a fraction of the price?

It's not likely going to be cheaper to roll your own once you add a case and weather proofing and battery handling. These things can be had for as cheap as $15 on amazon, https://www.amazon.com/Crosse-Technology-308-1409WT-CBP-308-... or even down to $5 on aliexpress, https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003408554165.html

Along with that using 433MHz means that there's a much longer range, and they generally also have much lower power usage compared to doing wifi, which makes the batteries last a lot longer.

Re: Best Raspberry Pi Projects

#49
post #37

What would make the best platform for building some kind of personal dashboard/radiator on an e-ink screen? I guess ideally I'd spend as little time as possible on tinkering with low-level rendering code.

I bought an inky 7 colour e-ink screen for rpi [0]. Pimoroni offers a python library that can write any image (jpg, png) to the screen.

Any rpi just fits with the gpio pins like a typically HAT. I'm using an rpi zero 2 w. Setup was less than 5 minutes.

I'm now hooking up a system that will take screenshots from a home assistant dashboard and push that to the display every 5 minutes.

[0] https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression-5-7?varia...

Re: Best Raspberry Pi Projects

#50

I wish I could find a project that would recognise a cat by its appearance and open / close a cat flap based on that. It could also make a noise or other distraction at cats that are recognised to deter them from tampering with the cat flap. The cat flaps available on the market use a chip to identify a cat, but this is a terrible method - it doesn't work more often than it does. Many times my cat was attacked by oth…

Have a look at Lobe [0]. I haven't found a use case for it personally but it looks promising. The caveat is that this would only handle cat identification, you would need to build & implement the opening mechanism.

[0] https://www.lobe.ai/

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