I have a unused RPi4 (the 8Gig one) running DietPi. I did use it as a playground but ever since I am renting a Hetzner machine for (playground) stuff that I want web accessible, I don’t have particular use for the Pi.
I am currently running (outdated) Home Assistant on it but there isn’t much I can connect it with (yet, getting the flashable/compatible ikea smart lightning zigbee? bridge thingy is on my bucket list). Obviously I do have a pihole there.
Shoot me any other ideas I could run there. Some kind of monitoring of my rented infra would be cool (I already have uptime kuma on the dedi hetzner box). One idea I had was if there are some OSS security scanning “daemons” I could use on to monitor my other infra.
Thanks a lot!
- Wireguard + wireguard-ui
- Linkwarden
- Filebrowser
- Dockge
- Trilium
- Paperless-ngx
- OCIS
- AdGuard Home
- Jellyfin
- Rocket-Chat
- Vaultwarden
- Mailcow
That’s my actual mess.
Thanks for sharing! The only thing I’m surprised to see in your list is paperless - how long does OCR take on a pi?
About a minute, 1:30 maybe (edit: per page on a pi4). I use an app to upload jpegs though, I don’t have a normal scanner at the moment. The higher quality scan and smaller file size may make some steps of the process quicker (no need for alignment and color correction for example) if you use a normal, proper scanner.
It doesn’t matter though. When I get home and see I got a letter I scan it and by the time I drank something, put away my clothes and stuff i had with me, the pi is done and I can edit the metadata in the web ui.
Thank you! That’s really interesting, the performance with a pi 3 was way worse - even more than the pure spec difference would’ve lead me to believe.
The OCR devs have made a really awesome job!
Wait aren’t the system requirements for Mailcow crazy high? How can you run it + other software on a mere Pi? Also: do you have a static IP?
Most people seem to just want to use RPIs as a very slow Linux server for some reason…
Use it to play around with hardware integration with the GPIO pins. Get a sensor HAT and start recording temperatures, write some code that turns on/off an LED, build a robot controller, etc. There are lots of kits and documentation on the various things you can do!
I’ve been wanting to use multiple raspberry pi zero w with sensory hats to feed data to a central home monitoring system. Would be a fun project.
It is! Especially if you want to write the code yourself. It’s an interesting design problem if you start to consider cases where the PI may be offline (mobile on a battery in my case). Do you lose that data? Store and forward? In memory or to a local data store? It’s a fun rainy-weekend project.
Word of caution - HATs can be a rather inaccurate in their temperature monitoring. The Pi gets warm. I had done my work using a PTC thermistor that was distanced from the Pi itself. I’ve got a friend using a HAT and it’s been very off (up to 10C above ambient!). A Pi Zero may not give off as much heat as, say a Pi4 though. YMMV.
SBCs like the RPi are kind of awkwardly in-between a microcontroller like an Arduino or ESP32 that you can actually trust with handling GPIO and data logging, and a real Linux system that can actually do meaningful computational work.
Pretty much the only task I’ve found them reliably appropriate for is running OctoPrint, really really light computer vision tasks for robotics, or hooking up an RTL-SDR to use as a police/HAM scanner. Outside of those, it’s so much easier to use either a cheaper and more reliable MCU or a much more powerful old laptop or desktop.
That’s one of the nice things about them.
You can write code that has access to more resources. I had a RPI once that showed code build status on an led strip (red failed, green passed). It was a Java program that connected to AWS SQS for build event notifications. A micro controller would be much harder to do that on.
Unluckily last time I wanted to do sensor stuff the ~20 euro air quality multi-sensor (co2, pm1-10, humidity, voc?) board got lost in transit and I didn’t bother since :(
The original plan was use it with my esp32 dev board (wroom32, so wifi) to have a portable sensor, this RPi was supposed to be the collection server (mqtt, influx, grafana).
I should revisit this idea soon, thanks for reminding me!
Grab yourself an antenna and filter and feed adsbexchsnge, flightaware, and flightradar24.
This! Im planning on getting this set up on a spare pi one of these days™. You get a free premium acc on the tracking sites, so you can track where tf all those planes and helicopters above your house are going
To report back, my system is up and running. Used my spare odroid xu4 with dietpi for it. Put it all in a case and attached a cheap Nooelec stick. Waiting for my antenna today and to decide where to put it under the roof.
Fine tuning for best reception location will be taking a while to be honest.
I did this for a hot second (already have RTL-SDR set here) but the current location of the RPi is just bad for reception and moving it closer to some window would mean connecting through wifi (can’t lay ethernet cables, renting) and that’s bad for other services where low response times are preffered/needed (pihole) :(
Instead of connecting it to WiFi, have a look into power line adapters. They route your internet through the copper wiring in your house.
I have a router in my subterranean ground floor linked to a power line adapter, a wired router in my front room a floor up so my PC, TV, Playstation, etc are connected via LAN, and another power line 2 floors above that plugged into another WiFi router running in bridge mode, which supplies WiFi to the top two floors, and another playstation wired in to that router
Basically it means that my ground floor router is hooked to the internet and everything else in the house that needs wiring in is wired in because of the power line, and the WiFi is coming from 2 routers, one on the top floor and one on the ground.
My ISP thought a WiFi router on the ground floor of a 4 storey house was a great idea, but they’re stupid. WiFi should be in the highest point of your house.
With a few Power line adapters you can sort your internet out for £25
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 |
| CGNAT | Carrier-Grade NAT |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HA | Home Assistant automation software |
| ~ | High Availability |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| LXC | Linux Containers |
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
| PoE | Power over Ethernet |
| RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| Zigbee | Wireless mesh network for low-power devices |
14 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
[Thread #439 for this sub, first seen 19th Jan 2024, 13:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
A tor guard/middle relay or bridge/snowflake and i2pd node.
I might have a look actually, though if any of these require publicly accessible IP then that won’t be possible because of CGNAT :(
