I’ve owned many Pis through the years. Always for personal/hobby stuff, but they have been workhorses all the same.
I ran a Pihole server on an ancient 1A for several years. It was considered underpowered but worked great. I’ve run Homebridge services which was a great way to integrate various IoT stuff into HomeKit that lacked native support. I’ve since moved these things onto other hardware to consolidate things (not because of anything inherently wrong with the Pi).
For about a year now I’ve been using a Pi as a BLE data collector to slurp data from a weather station I have on my deck. That being said, the onboard Bluetooth on the 3 and 4 is pretty awful in my experience. I needed to use an external dongle to make it reliable.
For over a year I used a Pi 4 to run multiple SDRs to record and rebroadcast trunked police/fire scanner traffic. I eventually had to retire it for that purpose when the trunked system changed to digital and the Pi just couldn’t keep up with the workload anymore.
Those were all applications that I ran for months/years at a time using Pi hardware. I’d consider them “serious” even though they weren’t anything impressive or enterprise-worthy.
Other things I’ve done with them are use them as emulation stations. Even older Pis are more than capable of emulating 8 and 16 bit consoles without a hitch. Their compact size makes them portable and easy to plug into a TV and work with a Bluetooth controller.
I ran a Pihole server on an ancient 1A for several years. It was considered underpowered but worked great. I’ve run Homebridge services which was a great way to integrate various IoT stuff into HomeKit that lacked native support. I’ve since moved these things onto other hardware to consolidate things (not because of anything inherently wrong with the Pi).
For about a year now I’ve been using a Pi as a BLE data collector to slurp data from a weather station I have on my deck. That being said, the onboard Bluetooth on the 3 and 4 is pretty awful in my experience. I needed to use an external dongle to make it reliable.
For over a year I used a Pi 4 to run multiple SDRs to record and rebroadcast trunked police/fire scanner traffic. I eventually had to retire it for that purpose when the trunked system changed to digital and the Pi just couldn’t keep up with the workload anymore.
Those were all applications that I ran for months/years at a time using Pi hardware. I’d consider them “serious” even though they weren’t anything impressive or enterprise-worthy.
Other things I’ve done with them are use them as emulation stations. Even older Pis are more than capable of emulating 8 and 16 bit consoles without a hitch. Their compact size makes them portable and easy to plug into a TV and work with a Bluetooth controller.