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

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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 in our home office

Next project: 1x Raspberry Pi Zero W to run Unifi Controller

I have a couple of original Model B+ sitting around unused right now – just not powerful enough for any of the above projects.

(Update: Formatting)


I’m not really using one regularly right now, but here are the few things I’ve done with my Pis:

– Hosted a blog using Rails and a Cron that updated the A record on my Route53 domain to point to my local IP address. I’m not sure anyone ever read it, but I had it up for about a year.

– Attempted to reverse engineer a treadmill controller with the UART pins. I successfully figured out the baud rate and captured bytes, but never figured out how to control the treadmill motor board. I have a feeling the motor board had a problem.

– Connected a piezo element to GPIO and made a controllable alarm device.

Nothing that cool, really.


There was a time I was super into a project where I had a streaming server that used my Spotify account and would allow anyone with access to the server to change the song. I was basically trying to replicate what Sonos does with a Pi. It worked, but I abandoned it after a few months of not using it.


– LED Light alarm

– Living room music player & “radio” streamer — I need to set this up as an A2DP audio receiver too

– octoprint server

– Stratum 1 NTP server (GPS referenced)

If I didn’t also have a “big” linux system running 24/7, it would be doing things like DHCP, DNS, MQTT server, etc.


1. A raspberry pi 3 on which I use git-annex to archive data on a bunch of large USB disks.

2. A raspberry pi 2 at a different location which provides off-site backups for the data archived by the first pi

3. A raspberry pi zero to run magic mirror on a leftover screen (I cannot be bothered to turn it into an actual smart mirror though)

4. And I recently added another raspberry pi 3 to play with RetroPie


I have 3 running right now

1x Raspberry Pi model B (from 2012!) – runs a reverse proxy to things in my local network, and runs a dynamic DNS service. It’s showing its age as its ARMv6 and I guess at some point updates won’t be as frequent so will eventually have to retire it, but it works fine for now.

1x Pi model 3 – runs various services, inc. GOGS a private git server, ZNC, a service to control my TV, a service to control my ‘smart plug’ lamp through a private API, a private docker registry, a voicemail system connected to Twilio

1x Pi model 3 – running Pi-Hole and wireguard

I love all of them very dearly and looking forward to reading this thread!


Do you have any more information or a write up on what you’re doing with Twilio and voicemail? That sounds sort of interesting.


I have 5 or more in my house, some bought, some inherited. One of them runs pi-hole. I’m in the middle of setting up octopi for a new 3d printer on another one. Two of the others are pi zeros (no wireless), no plan for those any time soon. I also have one of the older models, RCA video output instead of HDMI. I’m not sure I’ll ever find a use for that one.


I use them as controllers/monitors for remotely managing a 3d printer farm. At about $40 total extra per printer for the pi and associated hardware, and an open source utility called “octoprint”, i’m able to remotely upload, monitor, cancel/pause, and have a camera feed to each printer. They also give some additional nice-to-haves by allowing me to upgrade the printer firmware remotely, and get very accurate print completion estimation times.


1. Retropie
2. Pi-hole
3. Bluetooth presence detection
4. Previously ran a Hassio instance on one
5. Wireguard server
6. (HiFiBerry + Volumio) x 3

great for multi room sonos-like system


A bunch:
– Ubiquiti network controller, Pi Hole
– Temperature controller to knit an ancient hydronic in floor heater and a new-ish mini split together to act in unison. Pings local national weather stations to get more accurate data than I care to replicate at my home.
– Octoprint for my 3d printer
– 4x for a hobby project stitching together video from multiple cameras


I’ve got 5. I only actively use 3 of them.

1. Media player connected to projector running RasPlex – this software is outdated enough and buffers on some high bitrate content that I should buy a replacement device, but it still works well enough. I tried upgrading to a newer raspi and wasted an hour trying to get it to run, then gave up. So, I still use my old one. It still gets used daily and works well enough (only issue is the buffering on occasion).

2. RetroPie – I rarely game, but it’s cool to be able to turn this on and have a library of all the games I played (and those I never had) from childhood.

3. I use the third one as a networked LED marquee controller (HUB75 panels) with this software: https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix

The other 2 I just have sitting on my desk and occasionally use for small dev projects or to test out some new project I read about on here, hackaday, etc.

An ongoing project that I haven’t made much progress with is an automated turret that squirts squirrels with water. I made something similar in college (a “paintball gun” turret with openCV blob detection/tracking) that had decent performance. Now that openCV on rpi can outperform my old college laptop, I want to setup the pi to detect squirrels, track them, and keep them away from a bird feeder/plants in my backyard.


I’m using a Raspberry Pi (Gen 1, Model B I think) to run a smart mirror. It pulls up my daily commute, news headlines, weather, and calendar. I take no credit for the software (https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror)

I also had one connected to my Motorola LapDock back in 2012 to run a portable raspbian laptop. It worked surprisingly well.


The coffee machine in our office is controlled by blockchain NFTs and a Raspberry Pi:

Once authenticated, an owner of the NFT can select their coffee type on their phone which then signals the Raspberry Pi to make whatever coffee type was selected by jumping the contacts that used to be pressed by the machine’s buttons (which have been removed).

It’s a cool gimmick, fun to show off to visitors, gives us a nice record of who is making coffee (since each NFT’s owner is unique and trackable), limits users to those with the NFT without us having to build usernames/passwords, and is also how I make my coffee each afternoon.


I use it for a personal project implying scraping some websites. One of these websites was behind Cloudflare (I think), and thus was blocking request from my OVH server. Therefore I used my Raspberry to do the job, on my own connection.
I also put recently a Pi-hole on it.


I’ve made some interesting projects over the years – only a writeup on a few of these, and some are in pieces and in various states of disrepair after moving so much.

Some write ups on larger projects:

1. I used a raspberry pi to coordinate the firing of multiple cameras, and then had the pi upload to a cloud service that would stitch them together to an “infinite zoom” super selfie. https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/gigasnap-
a-prototyping-story-efed72099d32

2. I created a library that made it dead simple for a raspberry pi to communicate to arduinos, and used that to control a lot of hardware projects, like little robots. https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/serial-synapse-94a114aa2…

3. Raspberry Pi’s controlled the heartbeat detection (controlled lights and music of your booth) and conductive paint controller (I built it and still don’t understand the meaning) for this art piece. https://vimeo.com/207047769

4. I had a video / text message doorbell a couple of apartments ago. https://github.com/hlfshell/doorbell

5. Used one as an MQTT hub for numerous IoT projects. I created https://github.com/hlfshell/mqtt-scheduler to schedule MQTT jobs for things like the arduino powered garden controller (lights + water pumps) I built for my wife. https://github.com/hlfshell/garden-relay

6. This never got off the ground, but when Pokemon Go had first launched and was super popular, I wrote a slackbot that would alert everyone in the office when pokemon (outside of the super common Rattatas and Pidgeots) was nearby. I was repurposing that code to make a portable Pokemon radar that would jump a false account around the area around you, thus hunting down pokemon for you. https://github.com/hlfshell/pokemon-tracker It never got far as the game got super stale quick.


Have any of you done something with machine learning on rpi? Like face recognition or some fun robot. I’m looking at rpi4+google coral and it seems impressive enough to run interesting projects.


A lot of folks have said “pihole”. I have a linux server at home that does my DNS and a bunch of other stuff. I also have a pi3 still in the box.

Would there be an advantage to me running pihole on the pi3 instead of on my linux server?


I used it to monitor ADSL device status[0], also created a DIY timecapsule for MacOS[1] — these were all in the past, though.

Currently the Pi is on my roof, connected to an SDR. I sometimes run rtl_server on it, and listen around. Although it’s been a hassle, since I have to run upstairs and disconnect it everytime there’s a storm. Also, listening to the device over WiFi means I get really laggy control over my SDR. I’m planning on replacing the Pi with something better powered.

[0]: https://github.com/amingilani/scruffy

[1]: https://github.com/amingilani/chronopill


You could probably automate cutting the power with a relay switch also connected to the pi. Just scrape weather data, and if you expect the storm, trigger the switch.


I just set up pi-hole on one this weekend. It was my first time trying a Raspberry Pi, and I loved it. With the news about the latest version and the improved specs, I’m considering setting up a couple to replace my kids’ computers, which are all old and under-powered.


I have several, I use them for multiroom audio with snapcast (mostly with USB DACs although one has a DAC hat.
Some have temp and humidity sensors, one has the rpi cam.
One has a always on vpn connection and transmission running.
For a while I used one with a Parsec client and cloud gaming.
However, I use a Odroid XU4 for all the big stuff (home assistant, NAS, nodered, mopidy, etc.)


If yours has wi-fi (Pi 3 and above or Pi Zero W) you can always just leave it plugged in somewhere innocuous as a pi-hole. It’s super useful and takes almost no time to set up, provided you can change the settings on your router to use it as DNS.


Yep. As much as I’d like to play around with it, I have no projects in mind that aren’t pure-software and easier on my laptop, or just end up filled with pre-made solutions to save on support time. Shame, but there you go.


Most of the services (FlightAware, Flight Radar 24, ADSB Exchange) get much of their data from volunteer-operated receivers. If you stream to these, you get several benefits including multilateration capability (computed location for planes that don’t send their own GPS location data) and free business accounts on FlightAware and Flight Radar 24.


1) PiHole

2) Wired one into a rotary phone to make a weird steampunky smarthouse controller (Dial ‘0’ to turn off all downstairs lights and music, etc)

3) Various LED controls for fun, and Christmas

4) Always experimenting with MycroftAI to stay away from Alexa


We use it as a front end to our Church’s AV system. It runs a GUI written in Python with PySide that controls our cameras, hyperdeck recorder and vision mixer.

It also controls the power switches for the system, and the blinds.


1 – Kids’ desktop (Raspi3)
2 – Kodi (Raspi2)
3 – LAN print/automated backup server (Raspi1)

I’ve order a 4GB Raspi4 to upgrade the kids’ desktop and 1 GB Raspi4 to upgrade the automated backup server (Gb ethernet + USB3!). Kodi will get the old kids’ desktop.


1. simple server for backup and git repos

2. xbmc for videos on main tv

3. retropie (I had fun with this for about a week but haven’t used it lately)

4. pihole for blocking ads and time-wasting sites

5. various small projects: security camera, motorized window shade, etc.

I run Home Assistant on my desktop to communicate with a few of the other devices in the house but I might move that over to a Pi so I don’t have to worry about restarts and performance. I’m thinking about consolidating this setup somewhat but I’m waiting for my next move.


I’m building a CarPi. I’m using a bluetooth OBD-II adapter and Python-OBD to monitor my car’s diagnostics and record them. I’m planning on adding a GPS adapter and probably a gyroscope/accelerometer so I can track location and motion at the same time.

It’s mostly just for fun.

Maybe one day I’ll add some kind of analysis to it. It might be interesting to track location, motion, and car status in order to predict mileage or if the engine light will turn on.


My Raspberry Pi 3 works as a CUPS print server connected to a laser printer, as a pi-hole DNS server to filter ads, and as a ssh entry point (with dynamic DNS). I would use a Pi zero, but Ghostscript is not too happy when printing large documents on a single-core processor with 512 MB of ram. I still have to find the time to set-up a backup server on it (and decide which software to use).


I’m working on turning it into a IR emitter to control some stuff that I have that lack remotes. I have another I’ve loaded snips onto an will be experimenting with soon – I’m currently using a PlayStation eye for the experimentation, but will have to get a better microphone/speaker. I wish I could hack a dot/echo/etc. and use their microphone/speaker, but meh, I’ll take what I can get.

Also, the IR pi will probably drive some ambient light as well.


> I’m working on turning it into a IR emitter to control some stuff that I have that lack remotes

That’s really neat. Please share some details – I was planning on buying a Broadlink IR/RF device for that purpose.


Media player connected to tv. (Kodi or Elec, I can’t recall which)

What I found really neat about this is that if you use the HDMI connection, there is some automated setup/control that allows my tv remote to control the PI. (through the HDMI connection)

But also, the smart phone app for Kodi remote control added a new layer of interaction with the media player that is just sort of unique and unexpected. (everything worked so easily)


I have a few.

1) PiHole. I’m upgrading this to a RasPi4 and seeing if I can also merge 2) 5) and 6) into it.

2) NAS/VPN/Media Server/Hass.io

3) RTL-SDR for ADS-B Receiver feeding to numerous data warehouses (Flightaware, ADS-B Exchange, PlaneFinder, etc)

4) Connected to RTL-SDR and running rtltcp for generic HF/VHF/UHF radio receiving which was previously part of a SATNOGS automatic cubesat/Amsat/ISS receiver build I’ve not completed yet.

5) Debian desktop on my workbench

6) A Pi Zero W running a ZNC IRC bouncer

7) Experimenting with remote ham radio control but linux-based ham radio software is still a bit too frustrating, so this isn’t an active project.

8) Two extra RasPis and three PiZeroW’s just lying around because Microcenter always has them for ridiculously low prices.


I’m totally naive with Raspberry Pi..can someone comment on the following project: Is it possible to put a glass eye behind a portrait of a one-eyed pirate and make it’s eye move around/follow whoever enters the room? A friend has a glass eye but nothing to do with it.


Lemme think. A camera that observes the room from the portrait, anyone that walks in is a dot on a plane, and it points the eye at the point on the plane. Should be doable. Yes, the Pi should handle that fairly easily.

The part that you’ll have to figure out is making the eye ball rotate. There are GPIO pins on the Pi, so you can get the commands out, but you’ll need to build the eyeball component yourself.


Media center & TV PC. I have a 4 TB external hard drive connected to it (and swap on it). Using a custom compiled kernel with zswap support, browsing the web isn’t that bad with the 1GB of RAM on the 3B.

I’ve also hooked up an RTL-SDR to it and ran rtl-tcp instead of needing to run a long USB cord.


Low-cost Aarch64 development machine! I run Aarch64 Fedora on a Pi 3B+ for porting personal projects to Aarch64 and for testing. When mainstream desktop ARM arrives (ARM Macs perhaps?), I’d like to be ready in case I have to make a switch from x86-64.


I have three always on

One Pi3B+ connected to anemometer and single solar cell, uploads up to 60 secs of analog data reading every minute by CRON, then has other CROn stuff for emailing

One Pi Zero for home security camera attached to motion sensor/rapid shutter mode, uploads to S3 bucket

One Pi zero for reading HN news out loud in the morning by Amazon Polly, tracking solar cells on window, and then more scheduling stuff

I have another one powered by USB, I intend to use it as “swappable dev stacks by sd card” through USB SSH


I used mine as a NAS for a while with an external USB HDD and a samba share. It was also set up to be a VPN and pi-hole. I have a pi zero that I use to flash coreboot on laptops.

My PS3 isn’t doing so hot as a media server client for my NAS’s movie library – the network connection is poor, the interface is fiddly, and it can’t load subtitles embedded in files. I was going to buy a pi3 to replace it as a media server client and hook up an external DVD player, but now I’ll be getting a pi 4!


Pi-Hole, RetroPie, and for my 1st-grade son I installed Kano OS for his first computer. I see a couple of Pi 4s as upgrades in my future.

Also looking to get my SDR rig up and running on one of the other Pis i have waiting to be used.


PiHole service is the only project I run on my raspberry pi. Setup is not as user friendly as we are accustomed to these days, however, with a few hours you will have a robust ad/analytics block system in place.


Homeassistant (Hass with mqtt and grafana), Octoprint, MotionEyeOS, pihole, pivpn, Donkey car, Robot operating system (ROS), and a wireless controller for my crazyflie quadcopter


Does work-in-progress count? I have two with cameras I am attempting to rig up as a frontend/backup camera in my Humvee (very necessary!), hopefully w/ UI on iPhone


I have a small Internet kiosk for one-off browsing and guests.

Currently, mine is running on an ODROID-C2 but the Pi 4 should have more than enough performance for one.

My setup is a stripped down install with a minimal window manager. There’s only one icon for launching Firefox which is configured in an amnesic mode. The DNS is set to my Pi-hole.


In production since 2016 with 3 x Raspberry Pi 3s. Very reliable – they only need a reboot once a year. These guys are hardcore – processing bursts of thousands of records from a serial interface 24 hours a day 7 days a week and shuffling it off to the cloud.


Doorlocks of our hackerspace has been RPi controlled almost since the original RPi came out, maybe 2013. Nowadays we got 4 doors on 3 RPIs (internal and external), with over 200 members that has access. Using MQTT to communicate with our membersystem since 2016 or so.


I got a RPi 3B+ to build and test some open-source amateur astronomy tools I contribute to – everything has been working quite nicely so far (I use Fedora on my computers and it also works fine on the Pi). I’m eyeing the RPi 4 with interest.


I used it as a ad hoc game camera last summer (we had something coming through our back yard, so wanted to see what it was, and I won’t say no to buying more electronics I’ll use once), but that’s about it. Been powered off ever since.


I use it to build a cloud backup system. My files in the computer will automatically sync to Raspberry Pi.


I spent a while figuring out the cheapest possible way of doing front end dev for a series of blog posts (that I never wrote) . The result was using a Pi3B+ and a lot of open source tools, Github and Netlify. It works so well I’m still using it for a ton of dev.


I used mine as a dlna server and file server, but I was constantly having to restart it or delete the database to get it to pick up new files I had recently dragged on to it. Has anyone been able to use one successfully for serving media?


I run minidlna on it to host music. No issues scanning for new files, but IIRC detecting new files was an issue when I ran Plex under docker on it.


Right now: I use it as a Flashrom rig, for flashing BIOS chips.

The new Raspberry Pi looks powerful enough to use as a media center PC, I ordered one and want to see if it can do that well enough (read as: I’m curious to see emulation performance.)


I am using The Pi for

1) video security system using zoneminder

2) text and email me alerts

3) Automate lights/devices using 433MHz RF sockets, crontab and RF433Utils

4) A cloud storage for my files using owncloud


I have several Raspberry Pi’s in use:
– One Zero with AudioQuest Dragonfly for PiMusicBox
– RPI v1 with a camera for motion detection
– RPI v3 for HomeAssistant Hub


1. I used a Raspberry Pi Zero W to flash Coreboot onto my Lenovo X200.

2. I have a 3 B+ running RetroPie.

3. I use a model 1 with USB Wi-Fi adapter as a wireless print server for an old LaserJet printer.


Primarily, an always-on node to run wake-on-lan (via etherwake) on other home network nodes, and to act as an SSH bastion when other entrypoints are failing.


I use my Pi2 as a media player (LibreElec), and just ordered a Pi4 4gb which I’m planning to replace my ageing server and NAS with.


Using it to run an order scheduling system in store of an automated coffee chain startup we’re developing.


main pi: pihole and google cloud print
spare pi: retropie loaded with all the good goodies.


Using one for a DMR (ham radio) hotspot.

Plan on using one for a GPSDO data monitoring.

The problem with the RPi is the SD card file system. It’s just not reliable enough. I have had better luck with the Beaglebone Black, which as on-board eMMC.


I don’t use it, I never got around to it because I’m not actually all that interested in computers, at least not in the sense that I thought I was.


Mine is running in my attic, hooked up to three antennas on my roof:

1. A GPS antenna which provides an accurate “stratum 0” time source. The pi runs ntpd and provides time for all devices on my network.

2. A home built ADS-B antenna for receiving position reports from local aircraft and airliners. Interfaces to the pi with a USB SDR. Pi runs dump1090 to provide a web visualization of local air traffic. I also feed FlightAware with this info.

3. A home built VHF antenna for listening to airband transmissions. Second SDR. Pi runs scanner software and an IceCast server for clients on my network to connect and listen.

The pi also has a temperature sensor that logs once a minute so I can plot my attic’s temperature and I can have it alert me if it gets too hot.

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