
Ask HN: What have you done with Raspberry Pi so far? - clanrebornyes
I am curious how you ultilize this small piece of hardware to make your life interesting and maybe easy?
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heelix
I'm a pilot - the bug masher kind flying general aviation. I use a pi with a
couple USB digital radios and wifi to read adsb weather and other aircraft
locations when flying, adding it to the moving maps on a tablet. The stratux
project ([http://stratux.me](http://stratux.me)) started off as a bit of
interesting hacking on reddit, and really took off into a mature bit of
software/hardware. This does almost everything the $800+ stratus does for
pennies on the dollar.

~~~
clanrebornyes
Wow, do you ever plan to replace fly by wire electronics with a Pi?

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jamieweb
I've had a Pi running 24/7 for around 3 years - I use it to run network
monitoring scripts, basic IDS for my website, uptime monitoring, etc.

When the Pi Zero came out I bought 4 of them and put them together into a
5-node grid computer, which to this day I use to run Einstein@Home.

You can see live statistics here:
[https://www.jamieweb.net/projects/computing-
stats/](https://www.jamieweb.net/projects/computing-stats/)

And a video of it here:
[https://twitter.com/jamieweb/status/1062048785352871936](https://twitter.com/jamieweb/status/1062048785352871936)

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brutus1213
Did you use some opensource IDS software or just your own scripts? Stuff like
nmap, snort? I've been wanting to do this for a while .. just tracking comms
statistics from various devices so I can see what phones home.

~~~
jamieweb
No it's a bit more primitive than that. :)

For basic IDS, it's a Python program I wrote a few years ago which does a
recursive wget over my entire website, then generates SHA256 hashes of each
page. Then it compares the hashes against the previous scan, and emails me if
there are any changes. For very dynamic websites this doesn't work very well -
luckily my site is almost 100% static so I can just whitelist the few allowed
changes to prevent false-positive alerts.

I also monitor my DNS and WHOIS for changes, so that if my domain or DNS is
hijacked, then I hopefully will know about it more quickly.

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pvas
Pi 2B user here, have been utilizing it to download stuff periodically and
push it to my telegram chennels. I also use it as a pi-hole so as to block ads
at the router level. Also as a ftp server which hosts my files that I share
within my home.

I believe there are even better ways to utilize this mini powerhouse, as the
tasks I use it for are pretty light.

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ioddly
I'm currently building a small reminder and timer device with time tracking
functionality. Touchscreen, maybe battery powered for a bit if possible (it'll
probably be plugged in most of the time but it would be nice to move it around
the house).

I'm sure there are phone apps that do this, but I hate my phone and I want to
integrate it with one of my web applications to some extent.

It's been fun playing with and hits the sweet spot between convenience and
price. A nice break from web development.

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timonoko
When first Raspberry Pi came out 2012, I had a cheapo phone with no USB host
capability. Found out however that Raspberry makes phone USB tethering
connection automatically. And then if you enable FTPD and in TELNETD in
Raspberry you can access it from the phone quite transparently. As an example
I could now move videos and photos from the phone to USB hard disk while in
the wilderness. Or use TV-dongle in Raspberry and stream it to the phone.

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codemusings
I'm Running my own cloud at home with Nextcloud[1] and use a VPS as a "dynamic
DNS" to be able to use a public domain.

I can sync files, contacts, todos and calendars across all my devices.

[1] [https://nextcloud.com](https://nextcloud.com)

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stevefan1999
Used to run it with Pi-Hole, but ultimately failed and I have to resolute to
use my homelab. I was facing egregious segfaults and kernel panics due to the
SD card controller, in high mysterious, cannot respond to IO requests. This
also happened to my Rock64.

~~~
timonoko
SD-card is not suitable for hard disk replacement. They always fail after
month or two. In newer rasberries you can boot from directly from the USB-
disk.

In older Rasberries you need to boot from SD, because USB is not recognized as
boot device but soon thereafter you chroot to USB-disk.

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super_cereal
I suggest checking out this site:
[https://hackaday.io/projects?tag=raspberry%20pi](https://hackaday.io/projects?tag=raspberry%20pi)

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tcbasche
I have a Pi 3B+ which I run RetroPie on. It's great for older NES, SNES and
GameBoy games, but not so great for N64 games (it tends to lag a bit)

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stefkors
Being annoyed at it for being slow and always needing more packages, installs
and cryptic options that need to be changed in config files.

btw: is there a alternative that “just works”?

~~~
tcbasche
I guess this comes down to what you use it for - I have a 3B+ for emulating
games and it works perfectly

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feistypharit
Pihole, Been running a few years. Best endorsement was wife remarked one day
"it's really annoying to use the internet when I'm not home"

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recov
Use a zero to dive a LED board for a desk clock. I really need to make an
enclosure for it but with no 3-d printer it's too much work.

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diegoperini
Lent mine to a friend who wanted to plug it to her tv to turn it into a smart,
media device with a useful browsing capabilities.

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andrei_says_
A pi-hole for my home network. I love it.

