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?
What do you use the Pi for now?
I had a bunch of Pi 3Bs sitting around, so I made piholes for a few friends and family, I made a dedicated MAME emulator that I never have time to play, and I gave one to each of my kids to learn about computers and linux. I also use one for work as a linux test environment for our software, but the 3 hardware doesn’t really keep up.
Right now I use it for:
- PiHole
- Plex/Jellyfin
- WireGuard VPN
- Sonarr/Radarr and all that follows.
I would consider giving it away to family for the same purpose. Thanks for the suggestion!
Since none of these require a Raspberry Pi to run, I would suggest using a mini PC (with an Intel N100 or similar) instead of a Pi 5. With all the accessories needed for the Pi, a mini PC can actually be cheaper and of course a lot more powerful. Since the Pi 5 is very power-inefficient, a mini PC can even be better in that regard too if that matters to you.
Especially for Jellyfin a PC with an Intel CPU with integrated GPU is awesome, since Jellyfin supports hardware transcoding with that.
What do you mean with a rPI 5 being power-inefficient? Did something change in their design?
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.
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.
- 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.
I hear rpi5 doesn’t come with hardware decoding, so that is something rpi4 is better at.
