Do any of you use Raspberry Pi’s ?
For those of you who use Raspberry Pi’s in your home environment, I’m curious as to what you use them for. What applications are you running on them? Do you have your Pi’s setup in a cluster?
I own a raspberry pi 4. Every time I try to use it, I spend half my time trying to fix the stuttery/non responsive UI by fucking with the compistor and such. And then I give up.
I eventually got a new gaming PC and turned my old one into a Linux server, and haven't really touched my Raspberry Pi since.
Try running a server image on it without desktop and then logging into it over the network from another device like a laptop via ssh
RPI4/400 is perfectly capable as a little home server. All it needs is a good SD card.
Owntracks,photoprism,monocker,brave go m-sync,libre photos,wallabag,radicals e,Baikal,Firefox sync,Joplin web,webdav server,jellyfin,vaultwarden,wireguard
Hmmm, I’m just using OMV on mine to make it a server that I can use to transfer files around my house.
Do you have any tips on where I could get started doing more? I haven’t had success with Docker or Portainer and I’d love to have some software hosting files like OMV, and a torrent client running through a VPN in another container.
Lets see...
Those are just docker containers, it also is a backup server for all the devices I own. It also runs all non sensitive data on an unencrypted partition then will auto decrypt the sensitive partion through ssh via my desktop. This means my vpn server will always run so I can connect, wake on lan my desktop, decrypt it and log in. Im sure I'm missing things.
My list is very similar but I have my Pis in a k3s cluster with a NAS for PVs. That allows me to not worry about what physical device is hosting the service, and I built it so I can intermix amd64 devices when I start adding in my used laptops into the mix.
This lemmy instance is running on my Pi
I have a Pi4 running octoprint, pi-hole and some of my own containers.
The rest I run on a Hetzner VM.
Cluster of Pi4 8GBs. Bought pre-pandemic; love the little things.
Nomad, Consul, Gluster, w/ TrueNas-backed NFS for the big files.
They do all sorts of nifty things for us including Nightscout, LanguageTool OSS, monitoring for ubiquiti, Nextdrive, Grafana (which I use for home monitoring - temps/humidity with alerts), Prometheus & Mimir, Postgres, Codeserver.
Basically I use them to schedule dockerized services I want to run or am interested in playing with/learning.
Also I use Rapsberry Pi zero 2 w’s with Shairport-sync (https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync ) as Airplay 2 streaming bridges for audio equipment that isn’t networked or doesn’t support AirPlay 2.
I’m not sure I’d buy a Pi4 today; but they’ve been great so far.
I have one pi (rpi 4b) that I still use. I have it in an Argon One V2 case for the daughter board that lets me boot from an M.2 SATA SSD. I got tired of the corrupted SD cards. It’s actually reliable now.
Anyway, I mainly only use it because in the event of a power outage, as soon as power is restored, it automatically turns on. If I’m not home, I can SSH back into my network and send a WoL packet to my actual server to turn it back on.
The pi also runs:
I have one Pi 4b for my Homeassistant. It is fixed to a wall, next to the routers, running 24/7.
I did not want to include this on my other Homeserver to avoid the dependency.
I use rasp as Bluetooth receiver for my home assistant sensors (Ruuvi tags mainly)
This is basically my setup except I don’t have any other homeserver stuff yet :) (I will once I build my new gaming pc, planning to use my old one for that stuff)
Octopi
I use it as a media remote for my computer via infrared. IR sensor sends analog data to an arduino which converts it to digital and sends it to a raspberry pi which then invokes commands to control media on my computer by invoking rest apis on a “unified remote” server running on the computer.
Feeling impressed here...
If I want to have this, too: is there a kinda tutorial or quick-setup, or is it more like 6 weeks of tinkering? :-)
It actually turned out to be easier than I thought.
The infrared reader (arduino code) is based on
https://github.com/Arduino-IRremote/Arduino-IRremote
The code running on my raspberry pi was written in Java using spring boot which is probably overkill but I am more comfortable with java than python so I used
https://github.com/Fazecast/jSerialComm
to read data from the pi’s usb port and just sent instructions to the unified remote server which does most of the heavy lifting. I used
as a reference along with some verbose logging on the unified remote server to see what codes needed to be sent over the rest api.
Happy to help you along if you want to give this a go :)
I run PiHole on mine
I used to run everything with Pis, but then got a x86 USFF to improve Nextcloud performance.
With the energy price madness last year in Europe, I moved most things to cloud VPSs.
One Pi is still running Home Assistant, hooked to my heating/ventilation unit via RS485/modbus.
I had a ZFS backup server with 2 HDDs hooked up over USB to a Pi 8GB. That is just way too unreliable for anything serious, I think I now have a lot of corrupted files in the backups. Looking into getting some Synology unit for that.
For anything serious that requires file storage, I'd steer clear from USB or SD cards. After getting used to SATA performance, it's hard to go back anyways. I'd really like to use the Pis, but family photo backups turning gray due to bitflips is unacceptable.
They are a great entrypoint to self-hosting and the Linux world though!
I have 6 4b's running PiCorePlayer for home audio. I control them with LMS and can sync them or play different things in different rooms.
I'm curious about your setup, did you follow a particular guide and what kind of speakers are they connected to? Thanks!
I don't think I followed a specific guide. I'm using the HifiBerry Amp2 amplifier with the Pis. The house I moved into had Bose in-wall speakers in a couple of rooms and I added some in-ceiling speakers and a couple of outdoor speakers. Most of the speaker wires are routed down to the basement, so I can have all the Pis connected right to the switch via Ethernet.
Running speaker cable is by far the hardest thing about this. You could also connect the Pis via Wi-fi; I haven't tried that but it is supposed to work pretty well.
On the software end, it's pretty simple. PiCorePlayer is just an image you burn to an SD card and boot up on the Pis. I run LMS in a docker container. As long as the PiCorePlayer instances and LMS are all on the same subnet, they will auto-discover each other. If they're not, it's just a matter of configuring the LMS server URL on the PiCorePlayers.
LMS configuration is also pretty simple... you point it at your music folder and it will scan and index your MP3s and other audio files. It has plugins for Spotify, Tidal, Youtube, and some other apps. You can control it via browser, or there are Android and iOS mobile apps.
Once you buy the Pis, amps, power supplies, and cases, you are looking at probably $140 or so per zone... so it's not entirely cheap, but I think it's cheaper than Sonos or other pre-built systems. It sounds great and the different Pis sync very well. I don't hear any sync issues walking from zone to zone.
pihole and an always-on syncthing node.
I wanted to reuse one for octoprint, but it turned out to be unreliable. So I switched to my NUC instead.
I have the feeking that those SD cards just don't perform well and wear out more easily, and I really use good ones.
For RPi the two major causes of issues (in my experience) are low spec power supplies and low spec SD-cards.
Power supplies drop voltage when the loads gets too high, which is especially pronounced with high power USB devices like external harddrives.
SD-cards tend to get worn out or give write errors after enough writes. Class 10 SD cards are recommended for both speed and longevity. And ideally try to avoid write intensive stuff on the SD card
Small piece of tape on one of the 4 exposed USB leads on the connector trick fixes this problem.
I made a python soft that uses the pi camera and scans qr codes, and plays the playlist that's on the eventual qr code. Just show the album and it plays.
But they have become so incredible expensive, and banana pis etc just doesn't work that well, so I just stopped the whole Raspberry Pi craze.
Today I just collected a 55€ Lenovo thinkcenter (like 18cm squared x 3.5cm) with a quad core, 8GB/256GB. I think it will replace my next rpi quite well and when it breaks, I can get another one quite simply.
If I want to do more to the metal electronics stuff, I'll just use a 2560 Mega or an esp8266 or similar.
Currently on my Pi4 I'm running Home Assistant for home automation, Semaphore for nightly runs of my Ansible playbooks, and Wireguard for VPNing into my local network. I've moved from PiHole to AdGuard running on my router, as it's far fewer moving parts.
On my Pi Zero I'm running Pi-Star for my amateur radio needs.
I use a RPi3 for pihole and a RPi4 with debian + docker to host a bunch of stuff (in no spécific order): goaccess-for-nginxproxymanager
filebrowser
smokeping
searxng
duplicati
whoogle
nginx-proxy-manager
flaresolverr
linkding
ntfy
librex
shlink
speedtest-tracker
unbound
wg-easy
I've been running OSMC (Kodi on Debian) plus a few useful things like maintaining a reverse SSH connection to a VPS.
Just curious, why have the reverse ssh connection to a VPS?
I have a pi 3 running my primary instance of Adguard Home, a pi 4 I don't know yet what to do with, and a Pi B that has RISCOS on it for fun. Seriously, if you ever just want to poke around a unique OS, download the official RISCOS image in the Raspberry Pi imager. Any UK folks reading this know what I'm talking about. But as an American I'd never heard of it and it's just friggin' neat!
I have 2 Pi 4s in operation. One is a Moonlight/USBoverIP stream gaming portal. It automatically turns on and connects to a VM running Sunshine on my Proxmox host, passes any USB controllers/bluetooth etc to the VM so the big loud gaming box is in the basement and the tiny Pi is next to the TV. 1080p60 works great, minimal lag.
The other acts mostly as a quorum server for the proxmox servers, I have two proxmox hosts and use the second Pi to ensure the cluster doesn’t get split brain. It also acts as a USBoverIP host for my home automation Zigbee and Zwave usb sticks, so that either proxmox host can connect to the USB sticks and the home automation VMs aren’t locked to a physical host.
I'm new to the party and am still experimenting, not super tech savvy but I've been doing a few things.
I have one SD set up for retro gaming via Lakka. Wish Lakka had an option to add a desktop like RetroPie but just really love the interface and ease of use. Tried recalbox and it's nice as well! Can't remember why I settled for Lakka.
Another SD is for experimenting at the moment. As mentioned I'm brand new to the pi community so I've installed Raspbian on it and have just been testing the waters. Set up iirc my first VNC network between it, my PC and my phone. Also have been using it to rip and burn DVDs via brasero. Don't have wifi at home, I use a hotspot which complicates using my printer wirelessly so I'm considering using the pi as a network for that. There's also a cool program I found where you learn musical coding? It's pretty interesting though I still don't really know what it's for haha.
I'd really like to do more with it but as mentioned am just learning. Hell, I just got it running a few weeks ago after it had been down for a couple years so I'm sure I l'll be doing more when I find the time.
I'd love to set it up in my vehicle and have Spotify, gps navigation, retro gaming etc through it but seems like a big project with my limited understanding ATM.
I'm using my RPi4 4gb to run a home media server, jellyfin and *arr stack all containerized and automated. Also syncthing for obsidian. Works perfectly
That sounds like the kind of setup I have been aiming at. Can you recommend any guides for not so advanced users lile myself? Thanks!
Sure you can check https://trash-guides.info/
and here is my setup, I'm using podman containers for everything
Yes, it's probably pretty demanding of the hardware but my Pi4 4GB runs:
Not much love here for the Pi Zero W. I love them for being so flipping cute. I have a couple I use when I am learning a new system admin tool or service and I need to be able to let it run undisturbed to observe stability and function.
Lately I am learning MQTT so am using one as a broker to manage some homemade smart devices.
If I can ever find one in stock, i want a couple of Zero 2 for similar projects that would benefit from the extra oomph.
I have a Zero with a macropad attached. Key presses are then sent to Home Assistant through MQTT. The zero is perfect for it, small and low power.
Still wondering what to actually do with my Zero 2.
RP4 running Home Assistant. Running HA in a docker container is harder than running it as the OS on a Pi4. Running HA is how I get into this, i kept trying to put more crap into HA as addons before realizing i should set up a proper server.
I assembled a handful of temp/humidity sensors (that are actually running on Wemos D1 minis).
What makes it harder in the container?
Maybe it isnt as bad as i remember, or maybe i tried doing HA Core on the debian server or something... maybe it got better or maybe im a fool? (I definitely am a fool).
I guess it just as much came down to that I already had the pi, so just running it on that like i had for a year was less hassle than starting it via docker on the other machine?
No HACS support out of the box. (HA as docker)
The only use for RPI is kodi and Mainsail for the printer. All of them boot from NFS, so no storage issues. Everything else is x86-64 or docker containers on those Intel/amd machines.
I used to run pretty much all my workloads on Raspberry Pis, mostly in docker containers. I've since moved over to some ex enterprise servers and Proxmox, so I really only have a couple of Pis left in service, running:
Yes. I use it for my PiHole and Wireguard VPN.
One 3B+ runs my network services - things I need to stay up if I restart the production server. Another one has a specialist role - IP gateway into the ham radio AllstarLink network - connected to a 70cm radio with a modified USB sound dongle.
Interesting! Which dongle did you mod to connect it to the radio?
A mate did that bit - CM108 I think.
What do you do with your ham radio? I mean, besides the enjoyment of getting licensed and learning how to use one, what do you do with it?
lol - great question. I was very excited at the start and did things like talk to a guy in Spain with 5W and a long bit of wire out in the bush, talked to people 400 km away by pointing a handheld antenna directly at a satellite as it passed overhead, received images directly from the amateur station on the ISS, met a heap of smart old guys who were doing interesting things with radio - designing antennas, setting up repeater networks etc. I went in a couple of competitions (in ham radio this is usually about how many contacts you can make over a time period). But ultimately, it turns out I like interesting technical problems, learning things, and buying stuff I don't need off the internet - more than chatting to people I don't know. So now I'm more into Linux and self-hosting which scratches a lot of those same itches.
I still have a short range radio in the car and a couple of handheld radios. With these I can key into that Raspberry Pi, have the audio travel over the internet and pop out anywhere in the world there's another AllStar point and go over the air to radios there, but I've sold all my HF gear (that allows you to talk direct to anywhere without infrastructure).
It is an interesting, and quite diverse hobby, and there's a lot of cheap Chinese radios, and a bottom tier license in most countries that's easy to obtain (for example without learning Morse code). I'd recommend it to people interested in tech stuff. It's a hobby that might not exist in 50 years - a lot of the radio spectrum allocated to ham radio in the old days was considered worthless, but now governments regard that as a valuable public asset that can be sold to telecommunication companies. Also there's growing interference from digital gadgets and wireless devices that requires innovative solutions to overcome.
Have a pi4 8gb and every time I need it for some mini graphics project, the GPU lags no matter how much vram I give it, so I usually end up using some old laptop with a GPU and the pi goes back to random things like data collection with sensors or some funny breadboard projects.
Also use it to evaluate lightweight linux distros.
Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with Pihole. Its hard to look at websites without Pihole. Oh! I have another running Octopi for my 3D printer.
Did you find any way to have pihole work with mobile properly? I tried it 6 months ago and while it blocked ads, it left giant gaping white spaces with Xs through em, searing my eyes at night.
I got a RPi 3B as my Pi-Hole that I'll eventually use as my Wireguard VPN, too. Hoping to get another Pi device for hosting Jellyfin on.
Using Pi's to run services in my homelab which I want to keep separate from my server (to have some sort of failover in case the server goes down). Status/Monitoring, VPN server and so on
Got a bunch of RPIs, some of them retired.
One of the active ones runs a MediaWiki engine (if it detects my home wifi on startup, it acts as a mirror slave to the master installation on the server, if not, it opens a wifi with my home wifi's credentials and offers the wiki as read-only).
Another one runs a DB that controls a number of ESP8266 clients controlling lights, motors, and sensors.
The first one is a Kodi player.
The second one was originally intended for RetroPi, but now it's a mp3 player running MPD, and connected to my sleep headphones.
The only one I have running atm is for Klipper/Moonraker/Mainsail for my 3D printers.
Otherwise I find them so slow to work with that I don't really like using them, just something like an apt upgrade can take several minutes or more.
I'm running a Pi Zero W as a network extender!
I have a Raspberry pi 1b that runs adguard home and a VPN server
Open Media Vault on a pi setup with external hard drive. Mainly for Samba Shares, and added the DAAP server. And since it comes with portainer I used that to setup HomeAssistant, Syncthing, CUPS, kanboard, whoogle, and Trilium Notes. Amazing little piece of tech.
I'm using a pi4 8gb as my server, with a pi4 2gb as backup in case the first one dies. It's a very classic server, running postfix/courier-imap for mails, lighttpd for web, bind9 for dns, ergo for irc, sqlite3 for databases. I also use fail2ban for IDS and cron to run tons of various task. All of that is hosted on a Gentoo linux OS.
The one thing I don't want to use is docker. I love docker for development or for deploying the main app at work, but it makes managing updates a nightmare for handling multiple services on my server (most your containers probably contain vulnerable software due to lack of system updates), and it eats resources needlessly. Then again, it's made possible because I avoid the big webapps that usually need it.
Only use it as a backup pihole now. Used to have an *arr stack on it, but needed a beefier pc
All the arrs, HA, pihole and a few smaller containers running on pi4. It was my gateway into the world of self hosting.
I use mine as a minimalistic NAS and media server
Ones dedicated to being an openvpn host for my phone to be permanently connected to (pi4), and a second runs pihole + nginx as a reverse proxy into the rest of my http(s) services (pi3b+). The vpn keeps my phone behind pihole when mobile + gives access to lan only services.
The proxy being separate lets me take any of the other machines offline and the proxy will serve a 'service unavailable'/'maintenance' page instead of just timing out the connection. It serves 2-3 8mbps video streams regularly without issue.
Basically this and a HomeAssisstant server on top.
Do you have any recommendations or good to go config for openvpn+android? I used my regular setup / config and somehow the VPN client I used didn't like it. I am not sure if it's that (there are some legacy / unsupported config settings which never clients don't tend to support) or I messed up somehow.
Anyway, I would be grateful for some pointers or a link on setting up the client and server config correctly.
OpenVPN is good but I'd recommend Wireguard or something built on top of it such as Tailscale. Way more flexible than a traditional client-server VPN. Wireguard doesn't have clients and servers; it just has "peers". You can have peers directly communicate with other peers (like a partial or full mesh), or you can route certain routes through a peer to simulate parts of a traditional client/server VPN.
A Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
It's connected to my 3d printer and runs octoprint allowing me to upload print jobs. and control the printer from my home network.
It serves up the Pi camera video stream.
It can also switch the printers light on and off.
No cluster setup.
I've got an original Pi running PiHole, I've got a Pi4 running my Plex + Servarr Suite, and a Pi2 B running a LAMPP stack and dev environment.
I run OpenSprinkler Pi on my raspberry Pi 3 and HomeAssistant on my Pi 4. Works incredibly well for both.
I used to use them for all my setups. Then the shortages stopped that. Nowadays I just use one big server.
I run a Pi Zero W over wifi as my backup pi-hole so that clients can still connect if my main system is updating or down. Planning to get a more powerful one for OctoPrint.