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For those of you who use Raspberry Pi’s in your home environment, I’m curious as to what you use them for. What applications are you running on them? Do you have your Pi’s setup in a cluster?

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I own a raspberry pi 4. Every time I try to use it, I spend half my time trying to fix the stuttery/non responsive UI by fucking with the compistor and such. And then I give up.

I eventually got a new gaming PC and turned my old one into a Linux server, and haven't really touched my Raspberry Pi since.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (6 children)

RPI4/400 is perfectly capable as a little home server. All it needs is a good SD card.

Owntracks,photoprism,monocker,brave go m-sync,libre photos,wallabag,radicals e,Baikal,Firefox sync,Joplin web,webdav server,jellyfin,vaultwarden,wireguard

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

This lemmy instance is running on my Pi

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Lets see...

  • nord vpn client
  • qbittorrent (through nord vpn)
  • proxy server (through nord vpn)
  • wireguard vpn server
  • ssh client so I can port forward through the vpn server to/from connected clients
  • jellyfin
  • ntfy (self hosted notifications)
  • pi-hole (vital for the local dns)
  • nginx
  • gitea
  • wallabag
  • minecraft server
  • container registery
  • smb share for my friend (I help them with content creation)
  • smb share for a live recording profile I set up on android

Those are just docker containers, it also is a backup server for all the devices I own. It also runs all non sensitive data on an unencrypted partition then will auto decrypt the sensitive partion through ssh via my desktop. This means my vpn server will always run so I can connect, wake on lan my desktop, decrypt it and log in. Im sure I'm missing things.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

It runs the KBin instance I'm using to reply to you :)

Also Adguard home.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I have one pi (rpi 4b) that I still use. I have it in an Argon One V2 case for the daughter board that lets me boot from an M.2 SATA SSD. I got tired of the corrupted SD cards. It’s actually reliable now.

Anyway, I mainly only use it because in the event of a power outage, as soon as power is restored, it automatically turns on. If I’m not home, I can SSH back into my network and send a WoL packet to my actual server to turn it back on.

The pi also runs:

  • Scrypted so I can view my ring cameras in the Apple Home app and so I get the “someone is at the door” notifications on my Apple TV
  • Pi-Hole
  • Pi-VPN
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I feel old, I don't understand 90% of words in this thread lol.

I just have kodi on Libreelec with a jellyfin plugin on my rpi4 and even that struggled with overheating at times. So I run most stuff on my pc instead. I'm tempted to try the portainer to get some experience with docker tho.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I have a Pi4 running octoprint, pi-hole and some of my own containers.

The rest I run on a Hetzner VM.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Cluster of Pi4 8GBs. Bought pre-pandemic; love the little things.

Nomad, Consul, Gluster, w/ TrueNas-backed NFS for the big files.

They do all sorts of nifty things for us including Nightscout, LanguageTool OSS, monitoring for ubiquiti, Nextdrive, Grafana (which I use for home monitoring - temps/humidity with alerts), Prometheus & Mimir, Postgres, Codeserver.

Basically I use them to schedule dockerized services I want to run or am interested in playing with/learning.

Also I use Rapsberry Pi zero 2 w’s with Shairport-sync (https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync ) as Airplay 2 streaming bridges for audio equipment that isn’t networked or doesn’t support AirPlay 2.

I’m not sure I’d buy a Pi4 today; but they’ve been great so far.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have one Pi 4b for my Homeassistant. It is fixed to a wall, next to the routers, running 24/7.

I did not want to include this on my other Homeserver to avoid the dependency.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I made a python soft that uses the pi camera and scans qr codes, and plays the playlist that's on the eventual qr code. Just show the album and it plays.

But they have become so incredible expensive, and banana pis etc just doesn't work that well, so I just stopped the whole Raspberry Pi craze.

Today I just collected a 55€ Lenovo thinkcenter (like 18cm squared x 3.5cm) with a quad core, 8GB/256GB. I think it will replace my next rpi quite well and when it breaks, I can get another one quite simply.

If I want to do more to the metal electronics stuff, I'll just use a 2560 Mega or an esp8266 or similar.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I used to run pretty much all my workloads on Raspberry Pis, mostly in docker containers. I've since moved over to some ex enterprise servers and Proxmox, so I really only have a couple of Pis left in service, running:

  • Frigate: nvr for my IP cameras
  • exim: mail relay server for my stuff to be able to email out (nothing in)
  • Wireguard: outbound VPN server connected to Mullvad
  • Pi-hole: 2nd instance for redundancy, also runs cloudflared (for DNSoHTTP) and pihole-exporter (for putting Pi-hole stats into Prometheus)
  • Mosquitto: because I haven't moved it yet
  • Prometheus: ditto
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

RPi 4B > DietPi > Pi hole + Unbound.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use it as a media remote for my computer via infrared. IR sensor sends analog data to an arduino which converts it to digital and sends it to a raspberry pi which then invokes commands to control media on my computer by invoking rest apis on a “unified remote” server running on the computer.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Feeling impressed here...

If I want to have this, too: is there a kinda tutorial or quick-setup, or is it more like 6 weeks of tinkering? :-)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah but they’re really only good for single purpose things I keep killing sd cards trying to do more.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Boot from USB is your friend! Use a USB to SSD connector and boot from SSD. Havent had a single storage problem since I switched to SSD :)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yes, it's probably pretty demanding of the hardware but my Pi4 4GB runs:

  • Heimdall
  • Portainer
  • Vaultwarden
  • Flatnotes
  • ownCloud
  • FreshRSS
  • Paperless
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have 6 4b's running PiCorePlayer for home audio. I control them with LMS and can sync them or play different things in different rooms.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Home security system, VPN, DNS server with pihole.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

security? For surveillance or something more?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Wireless Z-wave module, door sensors, fire alarm, motion sensors, hidden on/off switch. Raspberry itself works as the camera and has motion detection if needed. Event notices are sent using xmpp.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I wanted to reuse one for octoprint, but it turned out to be unreliable. So I switched to my NUC instead.

I have the feeking that those SD cards just don't perform well and wear out more easily, and I really use good ones.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I run PiHole on mine

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Home Assistant

[–] poke 4 points 1 year ago

pihole and an always-on syncthing node.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I used to run everything with Pis, but then got a x86 USFF to improve Nextcloud performance.

With the energy price madness last year in Europe, I moved most things to cloud VPSs.

One Pi is still running Home Assistant, hooked to my heating/ventilation unit via RS485/modbus.

I had a ZFS backup server with 2 HDDs hooked up over USB to a Pi 8GB. That is just way too unreliable for anything serious, I think I now have a lot of corrupted files in the backups. Looking into getting some Synology unit for that.

For anything serious that requires file storage, I'd steer clear from USB or SD cards. After getting used to SATA performance, it's hard to go back anyways. I'd really like to use the Pis, but family photo backups turning gray due to bitflips is unacceptable.

They are a great entrypoint to self-hosting and the Linux world though!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

RP4 running Home Assistant. Running HA in a docker container is harder than running it as the OS on a Pi4. Running HA is how I get into this, i kept trying to put more crap into HA as addons before realizing i should set up a proper server.

I assembled a handful of temp/humidity sensors (that are actually running on Wemos D1 minis).

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I use mine as a minimalistic NAS and media server

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not much love here for the Pi Zero W. I love them for being so flipping cute. I have a couple I use when I am learning a new system admin tool or service and I need to be able to let it run undisturbed to observe stability and function.

Lately I am learning MQTT so am using one as a broker to manage some homemade smart devices.

If I can ever find one in stock, i want a couple of Zero 2 for similar projects that would benefit from the extra oomph.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't buy any pis because they are $100+ in Canada.

Remember when it was supposed to be a cheap computer? Ya..

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Have a pi4 8gb and every time I need it for some mini graphics project, the GPU lags no matter how much vram I give it, so I usually end up using some old laptop with a GPU and the pi goes back to random things like data collection with sensors or some funny breadboard projects.

Also use it to evaluate lightweight linux distros.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes. I use it for my PiHole and Wireguard VPN.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I have a pi 3 running my primary instance of Adguard Home, a pi 4 I don't know yet what to do with, and a Pi B that has RISCOS on it for fun. Seriously, if you ever just want to poke around a unique OS, download the official RISCOS image in the Raspberry Pi imager. Any UK folks reading this know what I'm talking about. But as an American I'd never heard of it and it's just friggin' neat!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Using Pi's to run services in my homelab which I want to keep separate from my server (to have some sort of failover in case the server goes down). Status/Monitoring, VPN server and so on

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I've been running OSMC (Kodi on Debian) plus a few useful things like maintaining a reverse SSH connection to a VPS.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I use a RPi3 for pihole and a RPi4 with debian + docker to host a bunch of stuff (in no spécific order): goaccess-for-nginxproxymanager

filebrowser

smokeping

searxng

duplicati

whoogle

nginx-proxy-manager

flaresolverr

linkding

ntfy

changedetection.io

librex

shlink

speedtest-tracker

unbound

wg-easy

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

One 3B+ runs my network services - things I need to stay up if I restart the production server. Another one has a specialist role - IP gateway into the ham radio AllstarLink network - connected to a 70cm radio with a modified USB sound dongle.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm new to the party and am still experimenting, not super tech savvy but I've been doing a few things.

I have one SD set up for retro gaming via Lakka. Wish Lakka had an option to add a desktop like RetroPie but just really love the interface and ease of use. Tried recalbox and it's nice as well! Can't remember why I settled for Lakka.

Another SD is for experimenting at the moment. As mentioned I'm brand new to the pi community so I've installed Raspbian on it and have just been testing the waters. Set up iirc my first VNC network between it, my PC and my phone. Also have been using it to rip and burn DVDs via brasero. Don't have wifi at home, I use a hotspot which complicates using my printer wirelessly so I'm considering using the pi as a network for that. There's also a cool program I found where you learn musical coding? It's pretty interesting though I still don't really know what it's for haha.

I'd really like to do more with it but as mentioned am just learning. Hell, I just got it running a few weeks ago after it had been down for a couple years so I'm sure I l'll be doing more when I find the time.

I'd love to set it up in my vehicle and have Spotify, gps navigation, retro gaming etc through it but seems like a big project with my limited understanding ATM.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I am actually using a OrangePiPC as:

  • WLAN access point (hostapd)
  • LTE Internet via a E3372 USB dongle
  • radio via DVB-T dongle/Internet
  • USB speakers for the radio
  • Bluetooth dongle to connect to Bluetooth-enabled speaker in another room
  • USB temperature sensor, motion sensors via GPIO
  • VoIP telephone with connected USB headset
  • small LCD display to show the current temperature and incoming call information
[–] Anafroj 3 points 1 year ago

I'm using a pi4 8gb as my server, with a pi4 2gb as backup in case the first one dies. It's a very classic server, running postfix/courier-imap for mails, lighttpd for web, bind9 for dns, ergo for irc, sqlite3 for databases. I also use fail2ban for IDS and cron to run tons of various task. All of that is hosted on a Gentoo linux OS.

The one thing I don't want to use is docker. I love docker for development or for deploying the main app at work, but it makes managing updates a nightmare for handling multiple services on my server (most your containers probably contain vulnerable software due to lack of system updates), and it eats resources needlessly. Then again, it's made possible because I avoid the big webapps that usually need it.

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