Alot of us who have a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 might upgrade to the Raspberry Pi 5.
Doing so would leave us with 2 Pi’s. What are some great use cases for the older Pi, that would no longer be the main machine?
Yes, here the question is if you really need to upgrade to 5, and if you really need, why not buy a dedicated NUC for example that would be a lot more powerful and extensible than the 5, while also consuming not too much more power.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| AP | WiFi Access Point |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| PCIe | Peripheral Component Interconnect Express |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #278 for this sub, first seen 12th Nov 2023, 16:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Here is a controversial thought; do you need to replace the 4?
I can’t speak for the OP, but in my case… It was very much a resounding YES!!! If your using Pis as general home servers, like I was, you can very quickly run into resource constraints. I wound up replacing 5 Pi 4’s with a pair of 4th gen Intel boxes and I’m still hit resource limitations from time to time. Though now it is more io related then ram or cpu.
You didn’t blindly upgrade to the next Pi. Not upgrading or upgrading to something you know meets your demands are the right things to do. I assume upgrading to a Pi 5 is not that for most people
In my case I need the 5 for the extra power. It will exactly meet my demands, and the 4 ‘only’ does 90% of the time.
And if I could find something cool for the 4, I would buy the 5 immediately. But I think I need to know that I can use it for something. Otherwise I will feel bad buying the 5.
- Octoprint if you have a 3D printer
- Volumio (or similar) if want a device you can cast music to
- for astronomy can install astroberry for remote control of your scope and camera
- run home assistant for home automation
- pihole for use as a DNS server that blocks ads
- plug a camera in and use it as a webcam/ security camera
Thanks man!
I will try Volumio for sure! I also want to try home automation some time, but I don’t think I have enough hardware to run with it yet.
I started my home assistant journey with 4 smart globes, a Google home speaker with a pi 4. I learned how to use it and started integrating things I don’t need hardware for, such as shopping/Todo lists, weather, Spotify, last.fm, calendars, basically anything I can learn without hardware. Right now I’m working on getting a shopping list sent to me when I enter the shops zone.
Then I bought a bunch of NFC tags (they’re cheap) for medication reminders, kitty litter reminders/tracking. I have a music poster in my house I’ve stuck an NFC tag to and it opens up the album on Spotify, turns on Bluetooth and connects to my speaker.
I’ve slowly been adding more devices as I go along due to cost constraints. Not that smart home stuff is expensive, I just can’t afford to do it all at once. Which also gives me time to consider/research smart devices before I buy.
100% recommend. It’s addicting actually.
I’ll add as well, that there are open source and free alternatives to volumio that you can run alongside home assistant on a pi 4 easily, that will still let you use the audio output. As well as the built-in media player functionality.
Also definitely agree on the addicting part. I recently picked up some cheap bulbs at Costco that are susceptible to the Tuya Cloudcutter vulnerability. So now I have a bunch of new ESPhome devices to play with.
