
What people use their Raspberry Pi's for - jeffreyfox
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1f607z/owners_of_a_raspberry_pi_what_do_you_use_it_for
======
general_failure
I see some complaints about the excessive creation of media projects on the
pi.

Taking a step back, from the hardware point of view, the pi showcases
VideoCore and not the ARM. This is the reason why the CPU is severly
underpowered with respect to the GPU. The GPU is actually a total SoC - it
doesn't need the CPU at all. The only reason the ARM CPU exists is to run
traditional programs. VideoCore does kick ass media decoding and can output to
HDMI. In case, you didn't know, the pi actually boots from the GPU and not the
CPU. That's right, the VideoCore comes up first and then gets the CPU going
unlike traditional systems. From Broadcom's point of view, the pis sole reason
of existence is to showcase their GPU. To this end, it has served it's purpose
really well. Unfortunately, they have been terrible in releasing proper image
and video decoding drivers.

~~~
asb
The Raspberry Pi is not a Broadcom project.

~~~
general_failure
I didn't intend my post to mean that. The design of the pi was inspired by the
bcm2835 (which is the same thing as the roku 1). What I meant was that the way
broadcom designed BCM 2835 with showcasing the VideoCore in mind.

Thanks for all your work on the pi btw :) I have been using your debian images
last year.

~~~
asb
Ok, I get what you're saying. You're right that the VC4 is the main selling
point of the chip. Regarding image and video decoding...well, we do have
OpenMAX which is a Khronos standard. It's just pretty horrific for normal
people to use. GStreamer 1.0 supports the Raspberry Pi, and v4l support is in
development for the camera.

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bennyg
I've got a TON of music on my external harddrive, and I haven't felt like
putting all of that music on my new computer or phone. It just takes up too
much space. So I decided I'd set up a cloud radio player for it with an iPhone
app to listen. So, I turned one of my Pi's into a lamp server with mysql and
php and made it public facing. I then wrote a small PHP script that filled the
database with 3 columns: the name of the song, the artist, and the path on the
harddrive to the audio file. From there I just made a simple iOS app that
queries my db and fills in a list of the songs, then streams from my Pi. It's
pretty sweet right now, it shuffles the playback and retains the filtering
options through the shuffling (so if I wanna' play Jimi Hendrix music, it'll
shuffle Jimi). It plays in the background. The next step will be querying some
online db of album artwork to put up/show in the background. Here's a
screenshot of my app: <http://imgur.com/dQzHYSe>

I'm thinking of open sourcing the app and writing a really detailed tutorial
of how I did it all on Github. Anybody want something like this?

~~~
dude_abides
I use gnump3d ( <http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/> ) for this exact same
purpose. It's quite an awesome piece of software and worth checking out.

~~~
bennyg
Looks cool, I'll have to check that out in more detail. I pretty much just
curated all of the bits and pieces of mine (php script to get metadata info on
mp3s and then add to db, etc). Haha, so mine ends up as a mishmash of
different things, a beautiful hack basically.

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taternuts
Ugh, I use mine as a paper-weight with a 64gb mem card that makes me feel
guilty every time I see it because I'm not using it

~~~
codeulike
Stick XBMC on it, link it to your speakers, and use it as a remote controlled
air-play enabled media player

~~~
npsimons
This is what I do with RaspBMC. It's fairly nice, except for times that XBMC
locks up (like when indexing all of my music on my fileserver over UPnP). It
appears that more than a few places in XBMC they aren't checking return values
(eg, calls to malloc() and such). It's something I've been meaning to look
into, but time is not always available.

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orangethirty
Well, I didn't post there, but I will post here what I use mine for.

\- Cheap servers. Use them for a little business I own. Rather than rent a box
on some datacenter, I ship out the Rpis ready to be used with my software.

\- Hydroponics controller. I have a small hydroponics cilantro crop. The board
controls/monitors it.

\- Learning tool for my nieces. They are learning to program whilst using
minecraft for the pi. Plus they are also learning a bit of Python along the
way. This summer we have a 2 weeks programming "camp." The Rpi will be the
center piece.

~~~
icebraining
Do you use the SD card as storage for the software, or doesn't it need any? I
considered using one for the same purpose, but the SD was both too slow and
unreliable to use even to store just a few hundred MBs.

~~~
orangethirty
I don't store much data in them, but have an API that they talk to and pass
data around as JSON. Like so:

request --[JSON]-- > | RPi magic | response --[JSON]--> DB

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sriram_malhar
A jukebox that scrapes songs from the internet and from my own collection and
pipes it to a small FM transmitter (from a Jameco kit). This is for my
technophobic inlaws, who are used to radios.

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agentultra
Testing stuff. I'm writing a stream processing server for monitoring
distributed applications and I use a few pi's to send me streams of
random/semi-random/garbage event messages and stuff.

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btw0
I use it to watch the air condition of Beijing urban area
<http://madk.org/beijing-sky-photo.html>

~~~
bennyg
This is a cool project idea. You should run some sort of automated "clarity"
detection to get numbers/statistics on air quality in Beijing.

~~~
btw0
Thanks. I am thinking about the same thing on the "clarity" detection and
numbers can be used to do some visualisation. Yes, I am going to try it out.

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alexcroox
Built a fully automated media center for my mum using OpenElec (SickBeard +
Couchpotato + SABnzbd + Usenet + XBMC). Had the setup running for a few years
on my Mac Mini at my house, but was awesome to see it achieved for a fraction
of the price.

Oh and at work we are using it to control a robot but can't say much more for
another couple of weeks :D @sidgtl

~~~
Phargo
I'm blown away that you can load up and run with this. Isn't SABnzbd pretty
RAM intensive? Are you doing this with local storage or networked storage?
Does this handle 1080p, or are you running mostly 480 media?

I'm full of questions on this subject mainly because I've been holding out on
purchasing a Pi for this exact application until they come with a bit more
power.

~~~
alexcroox
Yep runs 1080p absolutely fine! You need a very lightweight theme without many
animations though.

I used one of my many old internal PC hard drives and bought a £10 case to
convert it to USB.

~~~
Phargo
Is there a good forum/site with information with notes on what does and
doesn't work for different setups, settings, themes, etc.?

edit: Nevermind, I saw your post below and realized that OpenELEC is a full on
media center distro. Thanks!!

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samuellevy
My brother and I are building an X/Y plotter with one, which is either going
to turn into an etch-a-sketch printer, or a CNC/3D printer hybrid.

The other one is either going to become a quadrocopter, or an arcade table
(cheap coffee table, cheap LCD, and some controllers).

~~~
nutmeg
I'd like to know more about the plotter. Any plans or links to share?

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ZanderEarth32
I've got two that I plan on tinkering with this summer. Not exactly sure what
I'm going to do with them, but considering my programming and building
experience is pretty novice, if I can get them to do anything remotely useful
will be a big win.

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mnutt
I hooked one up to the intercom/door unlock system at the office. Most
electronics with physical pushbuttons can be disassembled and wired in with a
relay for control by the Pi.

As usual, be very careful if you're disassembling something using AC.

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DanBC
Here's someone doing "bare metal MIDI" on their Pi.
([http://www.joebutton.co.uk/blog/baremetal-midi-
lv2-raspberry...](http://www.joebutton.co.uk/blog/baremetal-midi-
lv2-raspberrypi/))

------
tharshan09
I just put XBMC on it, and use it to watch TV Shows and Movies occasionally
using put.io service - Amazes every non technical person I know. No
interesting projects yet.

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patja
Early on I recall reading a lot of comments saying there were audio playback
glitches with the rpi. Are these resolved now? I have built 3 or 4 Halloween-
related audio projects on Arduino using Adafruit's wav shield and the somo-14d
module but they sure are a pain to work with. I would love to do my next
project on the pi but was sitting on the sidelines waiting for the early
glitches to work themselves out.

~~~
Moto7451
My understanding is that the Pi lacks real audio hardware on the analog
output. For audio heavy projects you should consider a USB sound card.

Edit:

This looks promising: [http://dbader.org/blog/crackle-free-audio-on-the-
raspberry-p...](http://dbader.org/blog/crackle-free-audio-on-the-raspberry-pi-
with-mpd-and-pulseaudio)

------
pothibo
I use my Pi to control my sprinklers valves
<https://github.com/pothibo/irrigation>

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logotype
I currently run node.js on the Pi, as part of a mobile device game controller.
It works quite well, albeit just being a prototype.

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buster
I just got my Pi yesterday.. now it replaced my mediacenter (a Boxee). Love
it, it's such a great project! No problem at all playing FullHD DTS movies
over WLAN at all, it's smooth! Even overclocked it to 1000 MHz and no problem.
The UI could be a little bit smoother, though, but only a very very minor
annoyance (it's smooth. just not every time)

------
jes5199
We're using Pi to drive the lights in <http://www.ma-brains.com/>

~~~
bennyg
This sounds like an awesome project! The artist in me loves stuff like this.

------
Kluny
I want one of those magazines like the old neckbeards talk about, full of
BASIC programs that you had to type in one line at a time and compile to run.
I know there's online tutorials and that, but the idea of having a paper
magazine and pecking out characters is just so appealing. Can anyone point me
the right way?

~~~
Wilduck
Unfortunately, I can't help you with finding dead tree magazines. However, you
should probably be aware that, unless you're commenting negatively on the
social skills of those older programmers, the word you were looking for is not
"neckbeards" but "greybeards."

------
luser001
I have a static IP at home. I use my Pi to enforce IP-based access
restrictions on most sites that allow it. I use ssh's built-on socks proxy (-D
on command line or DynamicForward config option) to do this. Firefox and
Chrome both support SOCKS proxies.

I also use it to deploy hobby web sites.

------
KaiserPro
I made this:

<http://www.whatcaniseefromtheshard.com>

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tmzt
In case you haven't seen it, there's a new approach to Wayland/Weston on the
Raspberry Pi.

[http://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/2013/05/weston-on-raspberry-
pi...](http://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/2013/05/weston-on-raspberry-pi-
accelerated.html)

------
dwrtz
Here's a quadcopter with a raspberry pi and webcam for vision sensing.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Cc3B4xG1c>

My team and I did this for a senior capstone project.

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meddlepal
M2M prototyping. Paperweight.

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growbag
mine is mainly an ornament. I think I got too worried about the shortage.
After I got it I realised it could not do anything I wanted it too (e.g. image
processing)

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nasalgoat
I'd like to use it for transcoding - anyone working on that?

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growbag
an ornament

------
telemaker
an ornament

------
didyousaymeow
?reddit?

------
ck2
But still no netflix support. Strange.

~~~
spacemanaki
Streaming TV and movies has got to be the most boring thing you can do with a
Raspberry Pi, at least after letting it sit in the box in a drawer.

~~~
Fuzzwah
I have two Pi's. One runs xbian and plays tv, movies and music. The other I
use for random projects. The one running xbian gets used every day. The other
one gets used every now and then. I love them both equally :)

