The Raspberry Pi CM4 is the main system processor for our open source solar powered farming robot called Acorn. I designed a custom motherboard for it in Kicad. We also use the Raspberry Pi RP2040 processor on our custom dual brushless motor controllers (also designed in Kicad).
* 1 CM4 for a PiKVM on my desktop (my main home server uses a proprietary iLO).
* 1 CM4 as router running OpenWrt, to replace my ER-Lite.
* 3 CM4s in a Turing Pi 2, one Jetson Orin for ML. This is my homelab. The CM4 are running Dietpi.
* 2 RPi4 as remote VPN (Wireguard) endpoints to do tech support for my mother-in-law and mother. Also serves as Jellyfin server containing old movies, and jumphost for NAS backup.
* 2 RPi0 2 W with Enviro+. One indoor, one outdoor (with different, custom 3D printed casings). Runs Raspbian, will switch these to Dietpi.
* 1 RPi3 for with my portable HackRF (with custom 3D printed case). Batteries included!
* 1 RPi0 W for Pwnagotchi. Not really used anymore but too cute to break.
* 1 RPi0 W for Pimoroni grow to track water management in plants (with 3D printed case). Need to get that project moving, it is for my mother.
All my Docker containers run on my main server but I'm considering to switch to my Turing Pi 2. I got solar, so the Xeon is OK for now, but still...
Then I got: 1 RPi3B+, 1 CM4, 1 RPi2B, 1 RPi0 W. I should sell as they're right now 'Raspberry Piles'. Won't use them. To be frank I'd like to upgrade the RPi3 with the portable HackRF at some point, and once I get a 3D printer I might need Octoprint so I suppose I could use one of these machines for that.
I went with Dfrobot [1] because they also sell a case (and it is all in stock). Had the CM4 already. I wouldn't have minded another one if I could've 3D printed the case but I didn't find such. Btw, I did have to go from 3 to 2 ports.
Right now it is hooked up on my switch. I intend to put it between my desktop and my switch and run some iperf3. Because I'll get fiber soon, and I'd like to be able to saturate that.
Yes! I’ve used RPi SBCs for various purposes over time:
- One early RPi I bought when RPi was very new to the market. I played around with it for a while and then I put it in a drawer.
- Months later I pulled it out of the drawer and started hosting my website on it for a while. I have since moved on from using RPi at home for hosting any of my sites. Might do again at some point in time.
- I use an SBC as one of the pieces of electronics that I use for controlling over 9000 LED pixels on a sculpture for which I created the light setup and programming. The LED strips we bought are from China and were supposed to be IP65 but even so we now have a bunch of the pixels showing only red, which is bad. No fault of the SBC. Also the SBC in this installation is not an RPi. But relevant nonetheless.
- I hooked up an image sensor with a lens to an RPi and put it in a surveillance camera housing, and added PoE to it. Currently not in use but would like to deploy somewhere in the future if given the chance to do so.
- I have an RPi that I have connected a 5TB drive to in an enclosure I bought from AliExpress. This RPi I both ssh into from my phone to download things for the future, and I also run a squid proxy on it via which one of my laptops connect.
> If you pair the raspberry pi with cache in cloudfare I think you can host on it
Yup. That’s actually what I did :)
And then the reason I stopped hosting my site on my RPi was because I felt like, well if I depend on Cloudflare anyways, I might as well just use a VPS, or GitHub pages, or Cloudflare Pages :p
But there is something appealing in hosting things from home still. And doubly so when doing it without relying on Cloudflare etc
What I will do however, is that next time I set up some internet reachable hosting of content at home I will maintain one version of it that is directly served from the machine at home itself, and then I will keep an up to date copy of it on one of my externally hosted servers.
I've got one setup at work as a display for some networked security cameras. Displays 4 concurrent 720p streams on a TV for the office 24/7. Cheaper than Ubiquiti's solution [0] as we didn't need more than the 4 streams.
At home I've got one for Home Assistant, one as a TV box because Netflix's sharing blocking check is only on smart TV apps. I've also got multiple as 3D printer controllers (klipper/octoprint).
A Rpi3 as an octoprint server for my 3D oeubter, including canera feed.
A friend uses his as a HomeAssistant server to monitor and manage his home lights, temperature and garden watering needs.
And I have one as a nifty remote KVM (TinyPilot) that we also use for work. Connect it to the Internet and a PC and you can control that machine remotely.
Lots of them are also going into commercial products, eg https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/production-and-supply-chain... from a time of tight supply said "We spend a lot of time on backlog management. We have to balance volume demand from commercial and industrial customers with the demand we see from individuals. Right now we feel the right thing to do is to prioritise commercial and industrial customers – the people who need Raspberry Pis to run their businesses – we’re acutely aware that people’s livelihoods are at stake."
The only one I'm using now is a Pi 3 (B?) with a DVB TV hat. I'm using it to stream broadcast TV to my tablet or phone. I can watch TV anywhere in my house. I very rarely turn on my TV now.
I have another PI in a drawer as backup. I replaced all of them with Odroid since it became nearly impossible to buy Pis. I wonder if they'll start to make them available again to normal people but I don't know if I'm trusting the company anyway.
I have a nice amp (Loxjie A30), but the bluetooth connection is both fidgety and subject to all the usual bluetooth incompetence (year 20 of the alpha test.)
I have a raspberry pi running a spotify connect implementation outputting audio to the amp via usb. It sits there and silently (or, well, not so silently) works; it's great!
There's some mucking with alsa to get it set up, but under 90 minutes.
One for Stratum 0 NTP server (using GSP module with PPS)
One for Home Assistant
One for monitoring the solar power at my cabin, using a 4G USB device to send data home.
The Home Assistant runs on a 4B, the others are using 3B's and a clone (NanoPi Zero).
Got some Pi 4's that I use for various Linux experimentation and such. Sometimes I find it easier to get a Pi 4 up and running than a VM, and other times I need the GPIOs.
As a controller for my lawn sprinklers that adjusts watering time based on historical rainfall data. Better than adjusting it every few months manually.
I used for some years a raspberry pi 2b as a media player with kodi. Then a bit as octoprint server to control a 3D printer.
I will explore a way to use a RP4 or now RP5 for a local NAS that would be extensible and that could run more services and yool that my current QNAP TS-28A but I'm not very confident I will follow
2. Web server (no external hosting hurray); TLS set up via LetsEncrypt.
3. Navidrome for streaming my music collection to my phone/computers. I ripped my thousands of CDs to MP3. I use subtracks on my phone for listening to it, and sonixd on my computers (Mac/PC). https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
4. mpd for driving some speakers via a USB audio interface so I can use some speakers plugged into the Pi for listening to music in the same room as the Pi (practicing guitar). I control this via the Supersonic app on my phone.
5. Wireguard VPN so I can connect home.
6. PiHole for my network at home. Combined with Wireguard, it means my phone is permanently connected to my home network and gets ad-blocking and stops apps dialing home. I use DroidHole on my phone to see what's going on.
7. xrdp server running, so a usable desktop is always available.
8. miniDLNA running connected to a NAS box so that I can watch all my DVDs easily on my TV downstairs (I spent weeks ripping them).
9. Tuya IoT API for turning some smart plugs in the house on/off via cronjob; I do this instead of using the timer in their app because it means my phone can be off the network/abroad and these plugs/lights still turn on/off.
11. Peer Calls (https://github.com/peer-calls/peer-calls) so I can video conference in decent quality without having to use Google Meet / Teams etc. I also host a STUN and TURN server on the Pi so that Peer Calls works behind NAT.
12. Runs CUPS so that my very cheap Samsung wireless laser printer actually shows up as an AirPrint printer for my wife's iPad/iPhone and shows up in Android printing. (The printer does not natively have AirPrint capability but CUPS means I can provide it to users on the network).
It fetches time over NTP on a cron job. It also blocks various ASNs and IPs by country on a cron job to stop annoying remote pests and cloud providers. It also runs Monitorix so I can see system load, and goaccess on a cron job so that I can see who's hitting my website without having to resort to analytics nonsense.
It boots from USB3 (it has a NVMe in an IcyBox caddy).
It's my Wi-Fi hotspots, gateway, and network servers. I've got more powerful machines but it can route packets, serve http requests, manage dhcp, simple things like that without problem.
I use a USB 3.0 Ethernet cable for the second port. It can keep up just fine.
Mine's reading temperature, humidity and pressure from sensors and uploading it to a VPS. My second one that is, my first one hasn't done more than collect dust.
Absolutely, ESPs are just microcontrollers. A Pi is a fully functional System-On-Chip. That being said the VPN is the only usecase you mention where you couldn't use a flavor of ESP.
Funny thing is that modern 3G/4G/5G modems are full System-On-Chip computers themselves supporting virtualization. The Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8916 is a popular SoC used for LTE dongles that runs the modem Baseband Real-time OS and Debian/Android OS on the same CPU.
The lifetime of an external USB drive is better than the SD card. My PINE64 after a few years stopped working due to the SD card giving up. It was a pain to recover my database from it but I did manage... that is why I am interested in this PI because of the PCI interface...
Home assistant instance with zigbee usb dongle, Volumio receiver connected to my speakers, screen for calendar, plant monitor, and for a while as a Kodi station.
