That's silly. RasPis are stupidly useful.

I've got:

* A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet.

* A 3B+ running the UniFi controller for my home network.

* One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day.

* One is built into an internet connected dog treat dispenser I built as a gift.

* A rather dusty Pi is running CNCjs so I can have a decent interface to my cheap grbl CNC.

* And finally I have a Pi running OctoPrint for my 3D printer.

And that's just the ones currently running. I've got two more in progress. One to automate an exhaust fan based on inside and outside temperatures. Another is destined for the garage where it will replace the not-so-great MyQ "smart" functionality of the garage door opener.

To each their own I suppose, but I've been consuming RasPis like candy. $60 all-in gets you a fairly beefy platform with almost all the I/O you could require and a vast ecosystem of software and HATs. Honestly their only downside is that at some point I'll have to reconfigure my home network when I start exhausting my current internal /24 with 200 RasPis.

> A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet.

Do you have any resources on how to set up something like that?

Adafruit sells a lot of air quality sensors that can work with RasPi, Arduino, etc. They also have lots of guides. So I'd just go on there and take a look. My setup isn't really unique. I used this link: https://www.balena.io/blog/build-an-environment-and-air-qual... as my guide for setting up something with logging and graphing. I didn't do a full Docker-fied Balena cloud deal; I just replicated the stack manually and used their guide as inspiration. It's overkill, but was quick and works fine.

> One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day.

Ooooh do you have the code up somewhere for this? I would love to set it up at home :)

Hue has a Labs addon that does this. You can try that easily. Didn't work for me though.

If you have Home Assistant, someone built code for that: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/circadian-light-with-p...

As for mine, it's a total hack job, but for what it's worth: https://gist.github.com/fpgaminer/7840a6f2fb2d3a3be83625d7ac...

I don't do the fancy minute by minute adjustments to the color temperature; just a couple fixed settings for time of day and based on when the sun sets. And I just have it adjust a scene, which I have my Hue switches configured to use when I turn the lights on.

There's no good way to have this system work with, for example, turning on the lights through Alexa/Siri/etc since they won't use the Circadian scene that's been setup. But what I've got works well enough for now.

Not the OP but I use Kelvin for this, works great! It basically treats my Hue White Ambience bulbs like Flux, where they automatically dim and warm in the evenings. Those changes happen gradually over the course of minutes/hours so it's not jarring.

https://github.com/stefanwichmann/kelvin

I'll throw mine in as well, it automates changing the color temperature to help with better sleep:

https://github.com/beaugunderson/sleep-lights/blob/master/sl...

> * A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet.

We have neighbors that smoke, and sometimes based upon wind patterns it blows into our yard. Any idea if they have sensors that can pick up this sort of thing so I can close our windows?

Next step. Have the pi auto close your windows

You'll probably need to research what the particle size(s) is(are) for cigarette smoke, but this detects a bunch of different sizes: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15103

I have some code to read from this, it's not too hard. PM me if you're interested in my code. (I can open source it.)

Should be picked up by a PM2.5 sensor.

Which CO2 sensor did you go with and how happy are you with it, if you don't mind talking about it?

I haven't used it yet, only have the PM2.5 hooked up right now. But for what it's worth I grabbed the Adafruit SGP30 breakout. I'm not going to be "happy" with it, since it's not a real CO2 sensor, but I don't have $1000 for a real sensor. Hopefully it'll be interesting regardless. The PM2.5 sensor for all its faults has at least given me a better idea of what activities around the house cause increases in particulate matter. It's not useful information, but it's fun and interesting.

I'm using a co2meter.com one [1] connected with USB. Reading out the values is a bit slow, but I just do that in a cron job every 5 minutes and log the results. This does exactly what I needed it to do with a minimum of fuss, so I'm happy with it.

[1] "CO2Meter RAD-0301 Mini CO2 Monitor" on Amazon, $70

How great would it be if Apple built CO2 and particulate sensors into their products.

So uh...what if I have no interest in home automation or possess a CNC or a 3D printer?

Then perhaps this would interest you: https://pi-hole.net/

You are posting here, so at least internet access you should have :)

EDIT: What about a magic mirror? https://forum.magicmirror.builders/

I actually set up a pihole a week ago. Still trying to figure out to how optimize my use out of it as it doesn't block everything (mainly Chinese stuff).

I also considered a magic mirror, but my problem with a magic mirror is that I don't have the tools necessary to build my own frame.

That is awesome, it took me awhile to start using mine. I just put together a pi hole, plex server on Rockpro64 and I just bought a tinker board from Frys for $50. Runs a bit hot though

What software are you running? I have been using Dietpi for almost all my projects. Plex comes native( as an option to install) and a bunch of other software.

I actually came here to ask which would be a better platform for building a CNC, Raspberry Pi or Arduino. Is your cheap grbl CNC using an arduino to control the steppers?

Yeah it's the cheap 3018 Pro from Sainsmart. An Arduino runs GRBL to control the steppers. I tacked on a RasPi 3B+ running CNCjs so the CNC could be operated headlessly.

Normally you need a laptop or something hooked into it over USB to feed it your G code, or do manual control. But I didn't want my laptop in the shop getting dusty while the CNC runs, and I also didn't want to risk the cheap CNC failing and throwing a voltage spike into my laptop.

So I opted to use the RasPi. Also makes it nice to have a web interface, and you can add lots of stuff to it (e.g. camera).

(Sainsmart sells an offline controller attachment, which allows manual control with buttons and feeding gcode off an sd card. But the RasPi is only a little more money and you get the web interface, etc)

P.S. I should tack on the usual warning about hooking up a life threatening device like a CNC to the network. I use an SSH tunnel to keep mine secure, instead of exposing CNCjs directly.

I do the same thing! Plus, with the webcam integration you can keep an eye on it from another room. (Not too far though in case something goes wrong)

>* One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day.

Do you even need a RPI for this? Some of these seem overengineered.

> Some of these seem overengineered.

Oh for sure. Normally I'd throw the Hue automation software on my home server, but it's busy with other stuff.

Other than that, for the other stuff I listed, I would have said the same a few years ago and opted for ESPs, Arduinos, STM32s, or some other "lightweight" solutions. But the Pi has gotten to this nice sweet spot now that they've got WiFi built-in and most of the rough edges are gone. They can do almost everything the other solutions can do, and for the things they can't you can buy HATs that fill in the gaps. So it's just nice to have one big, universal hammer that I can pull out for my crazy projects.

Most importantly, I don't like wasting time any more, and I'm willing to spend a couple tens of bucks on RasPis that might be overkill, rather than save X dollars making the best, slimmest, most engineered solution around the perfect STM32 chip.

* A 3B+ running the UniFi controller for my home network.

What's the unifi controller?

Just the software that runs Ubiquiti equipment. You can run it on anything, the "cloud key" device Ubiquiti has is probably the most popular, I just run it on a Windows server in my network. Some people run it on a rpi, though I've never understood why.

Probably because it's cheaper than the Cloud Key.

It is, but in my experience the reliability factor is pretty ugly for the rpis. I'd rather either pay directly for the device designed for it, or just run the software on a machine already on the network. Obviously that doesn't work for everyone.

RasPi reliability is tricky, for sure. The recipe that's working for me now is brand name power supplies (RasPi foundations, CanaKit, or Adafruit) and brand name SD cards. Don't trust SD cards that come in RasPi bundles or kits, even from Adafruit; I've had those fail horribly. So far all my Samsung cards are working great. I've also been using A1 grade SanDisks, no issues so far (only been a few months) as well as using cheap SSDs for one RasPi. I highly doubt the SSD is going to run into any issues, and it works seamlessly on the new Pis with a nice boost in performance.

The RasPi itself is so cheap I think a lot of people cheap out on the power supply and such, which ends up giving them lots of problems.

Anyway, given the poor reviews I've seen on the Cloud Key regarding hardware failures, especially on the newer versions, I just went with a Pi. But yeah, if someone has a machine on their network already, that's a great option too. I just wish Ubiquiti would release an official Docker image.

EDIT: I'm not necessarily arguing that people use RasPis for UniFi controllers, or that you personally should. I just thought your comment was a good opportunity to discuss RasPi reliability, because I know a lot of people have trouble with that.

For power supplies, my go-to is Apple iPad chargers (the older ones) because they're built to last.

Long-term, my plan is to mod some flavor of computer PSU and get properly regulated 5V out of it.

Also, I'm one of those people who runs a UniFi controller on a Pi. I used Docker, it's been totally fine for my uses.

I’m using a drok buck converter off of a 12vdc battery to run a jetson nano. Solid so far.

In my experience, anything other than the Cloud Key is quite unreliable. I have been running it on my Win10 desktop without many issues besides the annoyingly restarting after updating.

I run it as a Docker container on my unRaid server and it's been super stable.

I run it on Server 2016, it's bulletproof there.

Essentially, the thing that runs a local web UI to configure/manage other UniFi devices.

Thanks for the ideas :)

Don't forget to keep it powered while it's in the drawer so you could ssh and build something really awesome.

Maybe it's a personality flaw, but I get plenty of satisfaction from just reading blog write-ups if things I could have done with my tech junk, without all the associated time invested.

It's much easier to vicariously enjoy projects like these, which is why I think drawer-dwelling is an inevitable destiny for most of these widgets.

My flaw regarding SBCs, is that I want to master the whole stack (what variant of linux.. , how is <multimedia server> is written,...), yet I don't have the context to, so I get fed up with almost good use cases and lose interest.

That's also why I'm tring microcontrollers, it's back to low level, less shiny projects, but mentally saner.

Any suggestions on microcontrollers? I love my pi but I've been wanting to try my hand at something a little less, desktop-like.

STM32s have great Rust support[0] if that matters to you. Personally I strongly prefer the embedded_hal[1] and RTFM[2] APIs over the Arduino ones, although the peripheral coverage is a fair bit weaker. Their DISCOVERY kits[3] (preassembled boards that are ready to program, just like Arduinos) are ~$20, and also double as programmers if you eventually end up designing your own boards.

[0]: https://docs.rust-embedded.org/discovery/index.html

[1]: https://github.com/rust-embedded/embedded-hal

[2]: https://github.com/japaric/cortex-m-rtfm

[3]: Such as https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/stm32f3discovery.html

I love the TI launchpads.

http://www.ti.com/design-resources/embedded-development/hard...

Seems like the number of them has gone way up so if you don't want to waste time thinking about which one to try, here are some suggestions.

Cheap and minimal ($10): http://www.ti.com/tool/msp-exp430g2et

High spec for things like motor control ($34): http://www.ti.com/tool/LAUNCHXL-F28379D

I would recommend taking the path of least resistance and getting something Arduino compatible. After ignoring it for years, I tried it out last week. It is very easy to use. And the M0- and M4- based boards are very capable.

The Adafruit Trinket M0 was what I needed for a recent project. It's $8 and tiny. The feather boards also look very neat, if you need BLE, the ability to stack peripherals, etc. They all integrate with Arduino so you can be up and running in a minute. (They also support Python running on the device, which is maybe even easier than Arduino.)

ESP8266 or the ESP32 (if you want something beefier that also has bluetooth) give fantastic bang for your buck, especially if you get them from a trustworthy-ish store on Aliexpress

The ESP8266 is a fantastic platform and Adafruit has some great breakout boards for it. I’ve heard good things about its successor the ESP32 as well.

Well, same reason why so many people watch playthroughs of difficult games on YT without playing the games themselves. There is a pay off for seeing what you could do if you had the time or motivation to do so.

"Maybe it's a personality flaw"

I'm sure it's a 'flaw' that most of us have.

I also like getting grand plans for a (hardware) project, ordering the parts from Ali express, then losing interest before the parts have arrived, so they still end up in 'the drawer'.

> with the other Pis I have bought over the years

My wife refers to this as the raspberry pile.

That's pretty clever. You should marry her.

He can't, she is already married.

Marry his wife ? Again ?

(The GP was making a joke)

Yay, Reddit all over again...

Love it, A+

Just blow her a raspberry when she says that. ;)

I can relate. However these days I have found a new life for those abandoned Pis: I install Pi-Hole [1] on them and set them up for family and close friends.

[1] https://pi-hole.net/

I run a pi-hole as well and I have to say it's been an absolutely great addition to my home network.

It essentially blocks tracking and advertisements on all devices, not just my computers with ad block. Just need to keep the block lists up to date every couple weeks, but it's honestly great.

I wish pi-hole was just a tiny bit more polished. I found it takes a lot of work (and knowledge of linux networking) to get up and running properly and stable.

A great option I've found is to use the DietPi distribution that has Pi-hole configuration/install wizard built in (https://dietpi.com)

After having various weird network issues and instability on a different OS with Pi-hole (updates often broke), I switched to DietPi, and now my PiHole and OS upgrades are extremely stable.

The DietPi installer/configuration for Pi-hole sets up all the networking for you in the install "wizard", took all the weird networking headaches out for me

What issues have you encountered? I haven't seen any problems with it.

I've run into the same. It often would come back from a reboot without DNS restarted correctly. I never went through a Pi Hole update without having to manually fix things either.

A few weeks ago I switched to Ad Guard Home. Has been rock solid since. The big dancehaus it doesn't support the exact same filter files.

I believe you can add your own filter files, so in this sense you could basically link the same ones right?

Definitely, and I've added some of the same ones.

What I meant is it doesn't seem to parse the same range of formats, so it rejected some of Pi Hole's filters as malformed.

Yeah - I found it ironic that out of the box I couldn't get a pi-hole to do DNS lookups. It always took manual fixing.

I know this isn't terribly helpful to you, but I have never had any problems with using or upgrading Pi Hole. I have been running mine for a few years now, and everything has been smooth and error-free.

What else would you recommend along side pi-hole, something easy to setup and maintain like pihole?

MotionEye OS is good as a camera surveillance system. Needs a USB camera or a Raspberry Pi camera. Takes a bit of tweaking to get the optimal camera settings (using a GUI), but then it works well. LibeElec is useful as a home theatre setup, based on Kodi.

Second the idea of MotionEye OS - I have one running as a camera for the front door of my house, emailing me when it triggers to my phone's gmail account. So I have a kind of running "backup" of events if anything happens.

I use to run ZoneMinder on an old PC, but it was a bit flakey, way too crazy to set up for a home system; I had learned how to config and admin it over the last several years, but I was just plain tired of it. It's another great system for security cameras, but not really for a home, unless you have a ton of cameras that need monitoring, and don't mind the dedication of a beefy machine to the task.

MotionEye OS is more a distributed solution. It is possible to set it up so one install can monitor multiple cameras (in some manner - I haven't played with it), but I like it as a simple single IP camera turn-key solution. It basically can turn a Rasperry Pi into a cheap wireless IP camera that isn't locked down or tied to a proprietary ($) cloud system.

Using a RasPi Zero W and the cheapest camera you can find, you can build such a camera for under $50.00 USD off Amazon; probably cheaper if you shop around a bit more. The only cheaper option I've found (but it takes more to set it up properly) is the ESP32 camera modules that you can get.

I haven't looked at LibreElec in a while - have they improved the setup for infrared receivers and remotes? That's the main thing that caused me to switch to OSMC. I'm using an IR receiver hooked to the GPIO pins, and OSMC made it quite simple to set up with my old RC6 remote.

PiVPN, if you have the need to remote access your home network:

http://www.pivpn.io/

I have one with rutorrent that acts our house seedbox / file server. I also added droppy as a simple, user friendly file browser for my flatmates. Obviously, this all runs on docker-compose, because I'm a very weak man (but also, it makes managing the whole thing trivial once setup)

I have a raspberry pi zero w that I use with PivPN and Pihole and also I compiled tor on it. I can vpn into my home network , use tor as my socks 5 proxy and I also use pinhole to deal with tracking and advertising. best 5 dollars I've ever spent.

I used to run pi-hole, but just switched over to: nextdns.io It works like a charm!

That's why I switched to esp8266, smaller and 1$. Can fit a lot more in the same drawer.

esp32 is a great way to fill drawers as well.

shh don't tell all our secrets

I'm just laughing so hard at this thread. I also have a drawer, but with a bunch of Sonoff Home Automation devices. I promise I'll activate them one day!

My wife doesn't have a clever name, but instead of usually rolling her eyes at yet another unfinished project, she loves this particular drawer because it's perfectly (and neatly) organized, like the best of unused item drawers.

Sonoff with Tasmota firmware let you control all your devices easily (increadibly easy). You just need a raspi or a simple(and cheaper) orange pi zero with a mosquitto mqtt server.

This is exactly what I wanted to do. Flash them with Tasmota and have them be HomeKit devices.

There's a collecting factor to it too.

I ordered 2 of those years ago and they are still in the antistatic bag..

I did program one to helloworld over http.

Check out espruino and write the firmware in JS!

I use one of my Pis as a PulseAudio network sink that lets me stream music to it from every computer in the house. Not the most creative use but maybe some inspiration.

Right? The most use one has ever seen from me was about 3 hours of playing SNES roms until I realized it was distracting me from Netflix.

I have to confess that I have never even booted up my Pi-3. Now I wonder if it is worth booting up the Pi-3 or should I wait till I get my hands on the Pi-4. That way I don't have to think of upgrading.

The Pi 3 is no less usable than it was before the announcement. Why bother getting a Pi 4 when you haven't found a use for your 3 yet? I still use a Pi 2 with no complaints.

One downside to the 4 is that it is moving from the low power to laptop realm in terms of power consumption which was my main interest in them. If top performance is what you care about, the Raspberry Pi is the wrong place to go looking for it.

My growing collection of rpis includes an rpi2 with a usb wifi dongle that still gets a fair amount of use. Mostly for experiments, but truth be told, it's not an old slouch.

These pi models are all tailor-made options. I think its a mistake to think in terms of "older models" when you consider the lower power requirement and higher physical stability of the rpi2 (doesn't overheat even without a fan, for example). The Zeros are less powerful but still belong in the range because of exactly that.

Thanks for the informative answer. My comment was slightly tongue in cheek :-) but I appreciate you taking the time to answer. I will indeed make an effort to at least boot up my Pi-3.

Heh, I know the feeling. I have three retired Pi systems (two OG units and a 1B+), but I have three running 24/7 as well: first is a 2B+ running OSMC as my media center. The second one is a 3B with a sense hat, running rtl433 and MRTG to graph outdoor and basement temperature and humidity received from transmitters on-premises, barometric pressure from the hat (and also displaying data on the LED display). The last is a 3B+ running Home Assistant.

I've been - cross my fingers - lucky with MicroSD cards (usually Samsung, sometimes SanDisk), but having USB3 on the new model is quite the game-changer.

ETA: I do have rsync backing up my Pi setups, so losing a MicroSD would be merely annoying rather than catastrophic.

I sold a company and the hardware wasn't included. I have a bunch sitting idle, plus about 1500 RFID tags and 20 readers. Takes up space but I can't get rid of. Should sell them.

Ebay is your friend.

i'm interested...

In which part? We only have a handful of pi's and half belong to my co-founder, he may want them. As for the RFID readers and RFID tags, we could definitely part with those.

I have a few in drawers, but I do have three running at most times in my house. One is literally just a print server. One is for hobbies. One is for watching movies.