Do any of you use Raspberry Pi’s ?

atomWood@lemm.ee to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 179 points –

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?

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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

My usecase required a GUI. I was trying to have a mini PC connected to my TV to watch live sports games in a web browser (pirated streams). I was getting micro stutters with a raspberry pi, which made sports unwatchable.

I had similar problems doing the same thing with a Pi 4.

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

Get an eMMC module ($10) for the Pi or buy something similar with one built-in. Much faster and more reliable.

I snagged an enclosure with a little adapter for a SATA m.2 drive. It’s amazing!

Hey where? I need that! Have a spare m2 and want to use it!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MJ3CSW7

This is my case! It only takes SATA m.2 drives, which which I also had a spare of sitting around!

So now I have this badass SSD pi4 4GB and all it does is share a 5TB hard drive between all my computers through OMV.

I need to learn how to do a docker. I HAVE FAILED at docker and Portainer. All I want is to have it also torrent through a VPN.

Edit: OH AND I FORGOT it turns your rubbish mini HDMI bullshit ass dick connectors into REAL HDMI

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.

OMV is quite limiting and maybe a little heavy for the pi(?)

Docker is straightforward Idk what to say You install docker and docker compose on host and run some compose.yml's to spin up your services

I’m an extreme a Linux nub… would you happen to have any further reading or videos you would recommend? Without OMV, how would I share my HDD on my network?

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:

  • Scrypted so I can view my ring cameras in the Apple Home app and so I get the “someone is at the door” notifications on my Apple TV
  • Pi-Hole
  • Pi-VPN

I feel old, I don't understand 90% of words in this thread lol.

I just have kodi on Libreelec with a jellyfin plugin on my rpi4 and even that struggled with overheating at times. So I run most stuff on my pc instead. I'm tempted to try the portainer to get some experience with docker tho.

6 more...

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 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.

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)

I use rasp as Bluetooth receiver for my home assistant sensors (Ruuvi tags mainly)

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.

Yeah but they’re really only good for single purpose things I keep killing sd cards trying to do more.

Boot from USB is your friend! Use a USB to SSD connector and boot from SSD. Havent had a single storage problem since I switched to SSD :)

Home security system, VPN, DNS server with pihole.

security? For surveillance or something more?

Wireless Z-wave module, door sensors, fire alarm, motion sensors, hidden on/off switch. Raspberry itself works as the camera and has motion detection if needed. Event notices are sent using xmpp.

Very interesting. So you basically have an alarm system in software then? What do you use for software? Do you have an arm/disarm function?

Raspberry Z-wave module came with rudimentary software, that was just awful. Documentation and debug tools were utter crap and I never want to do that kind of trial and error bs ever again.

I basicly use the software to pass trigger events to linux and handle the timing and remote UI. Linux commandline clients then handle sending messages, capturing images/video and sending captured material to a cloud server.

Software allows remote control through webpage, that you can access either directly in LAN or through an obscure server that uses reverse SSH to get past your firewal.

I blocked the shady SSH connection and only use it directly through my VPN.

I assume by "Raspberry Z-Wave module" you mean the RaZberry z-wave addon board, and I couldn't agree more. I tried to get that thing going with another home automation package and gave up after a few hours of fucking with it.

That said, these days I'm using Home Assistant on a RPi with a Nortek z-wave/zigbee combo radio USB interface and I couldn't be happier. If you've never used HA it's worth trying out; used to require a lot of scripting but now it's a beautiful and polished system that has all the tweakability a nerd wants with a nice high-WAF GUI. They have a plugin that does exactly what you're doing and makes a virtual alarm system out of existing sensors.

I also agree block connections and use a VPN to access it, I do the same thing.

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.

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:

  • Frigate: nvr for my IP cameras
  • exim: mail relay server for my stuff to be able to email out (nothing in)
  • Wireguard: outbound VPN server connected to Mullvad
  • Pi-hole: 2nd instance for redundancy, also runs cloudflared (for DNSoHTTP) and pihole-exporter (for putting Pi-hole stats into Prometheus)
  • Mosquitto: because I haven't moved it yet
  • Prometheus: ditto

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

https://github.com/openhab/openhab-addons/blob/main/bundles/org.openhab.binding.unifiedremote/src/main/java/org/openhab/binding/unifiedremote/internal/UnifiedRemoteConnection.java

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 :)

Yes, it's probably pretty demanding of the hardware but my Pi4 4GB runs:

  • Heimdall
  • Portainer
  • Vaultwarden
  • Flatnotes
  • ownCloud
  • FreshRSS
  • Paperless

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!

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 use mine as a minimalistic NAS and media server

Just one RPI 4 with Soulseek and NFS shares.

Are you using slskd, SoulseekQT or Nicotine++?

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

Forget SD cards for Raspberry Pis - boot from an SSD in a USB enclosure, they have better longevity than SD cards.

Not all of them can run reliably without an external power supply and not all enclosures/usb hubs/sata adapters are supported. But yeah lot of people recommend that. I also had great experience with sd cards, but that might be just a luck

Small piece of tape on one of the 4 exposed USB leads on the connector trick fixes this problem.

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 don't buy any pis because they are $100+ in Canada.

Remember when it was supposed to be a cheap computer? Ya..

Have you checked recently? According to the rPi locator, they’re starting to be available again

Just checked. All of the "cheap" ones require you to order 2+, and then have insane shipping costs. The rest are $100-120 CAD.

I don't think these things will ever be affordable. People who want one badly, will pay the money, and everyone knows it. No need to sell them at MSRP.

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.

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'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?

It allows me to connect into the house via the VPS without opening ports or knowing my home address.

Nowadays there are various companies offering tunnelling services, but my setup has been working for a long time and I see no reason to change.

I clearly don’t know enough about reverse ssh connections.

My understanding is that you tell the VPS to connect to your computer, a shell pops up on your end, and commands run in it will control the VPS. It helps get around firewalls and makes it less obvious to defenders that an attacker has control of a box because it’s not an inbound connection, it’s an outbound connection.

What’s your workflow? So you ssh into the VPS and maybe use Tmux or Screen to connect to a terminal session, that session is connected to your home machine but instead of sending commands back to the VPS, it sends commands to your home computer?

2 more...

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is exactly why I’ve never taken a legitimate look into the hobby. I think I’ll keep admiring from afar until I find a good use for it

received images directly from the amateur station on the ISS

This concept makes sense but I always assumed ham radio was just about audio. That’s pretty cool

So now I'm more into Linux and self-hosting

You probably know about this already but just in case, since you have an interest in radio and you have experience with antennas, you might have a cool project that could benefit from LoRa. There’s a few open source projects that incorporate the tech to make sensors for crops or messaging friends at festivals when cell towers are overloaded

I'll check it out, I can probably buy some stuff and add it to my half finished projects pile :-D

This concept makes sense but I always assumed ham radio was just about audio. That’s pretty cool

Digital modes is one of the big growth areas in the hobby, along with the revolution of SDR

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

changedetection.io

librex

shlink

speedtest-tracker

unbound

wg-easy

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

That’s a smart idea. Separating services across devices seems like something a low powered PC would be a great use for.

Thanks for the great sarcasm mate

I wasn’t being sarcastic. I’m apologize if I missed something though.

Apologies accepted, seems like I missed something:)

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.

I am actually using a OrangePiPC as:

  • WLAN access point (hostapd)
  • LTE Internet via a E3372 USB dongle
  • radio via DVB-T dongle/Internet
  • USB speakers for the radio
  • Bluetooth dongle to connect to Bluetooth-enabled speaker in another room
  • USB temperature sensor, motion sensors via GPIO
  • VoIP telephone with connected USB headset
  • small LCD display to show the current temperature and incoming call information

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 have a Turing pi V2, currently with only one CM4 module in it, running some *arrs, paperless, smb and some monitoring.

That’s awesome! Turing Pi has always fascinated me.

I run OpenSprinkler Pi on my raspberry Pi 3 and HomeAssistant on my Pi 4. Works incredibly well for both.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

All the arrs, HA, pihole and a few smaller containers running on pi4. It was my gateway into the world of self hosting.

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.

I have 3.

  1. Dakboard above the fridge shows calendar and shared photo album. It also runs bluetooth and serves as a relay for Homeassitant and a few kitchen devices (ie: igrill mini probe for meat).

  2. pikvm for a desktop

  3. pikvm+ kvm for lab rack esxi servers.

the latter two also run tailscale and allow me to SSH proxy if needed as a back VPN/remote access utility.

There is also a 4th. It runs NUT/UPS tools for their network gear and a mail relay for alerting and also tailscale so I can proxy if necessary.

Since its tailscale etc. Only key based auth is allowed on these boxes.

I use RPI4 with the YunoHost platform and I think it's positive. However YunoHost does not install Lemmy on the Raspberry.

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

Only use it as a backup pihole now. Used to have an *arr stack on it, but needed a beefier pc

I bought a pi0 when I first started hosting things. It ran a pihole and piVPN instance for about 3-4 years before it died.

I would love to have another one, they are great pieces of hardware.. but are just scalped to hell. I'll keep buying old desktops and laptops with higher specs for cheaper until the costs go down.

One Pi Zero 2W runs NodeRed to control a few lights in the house. Another used to run Octoprint until it recently stopped responding. I haven't gotten around to troubleshooting it yet.

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 have a Raspberry pi 1b that runs adguard home and a VPN server

I'm running a Pi Zero W as a network extender!

I used to use them for all my setups. Then the shortages stopped that. Nowadays I just use one big server.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have RetroPi that can run Kodi inside of it.

Yep that's also how I set it up, it boots up in RetroPi and then you can start Kodi from there, but now I mostly boot up on the MPD SD card instead. I have also configured it to be a Bluetooth speaker, so I can attach the phone.

What did you do/use to turn it into a Bluetooth receiver/speaker?

I couldn't find a simple plug and play solution, so it took several tries to find the right guides, especially because raspbian have changed their Bluetooth/audio setup, so the old guides don't work.

The solution I found uses a script/daemon that sets up the speaker and waits for Bluetooth connections.

I'll look for the script...

Edit: found it https://github.com/fdanis-oss/pw_wp_bluetooth_rpi_speaker

I added a systemd service running as root.

I run a Pi4B 8GB as a home server for Plex, Nextcloud, and Torrenting. Works fine for up to 1080p x264 stuff but I might grab a Pi5 or alternative when it launches because I'd like to start storing x265 stuff too. I even opened it up to a few family members outside the household too and we barely notice the extra load

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 have one 3B running adguard and a wireguard vpn server. Another 4B doing the same, plus kitchenowl and home assistant.

ADS-B antenna that feeds Flightaware, FlightRadar24, and ADSBexchange

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
HA Home Assistant automation software

~ | High Availability HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP | Internet Protocol MQTT | Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking NAS | Network-Attached Storage NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) Plex | Brand of media server package RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC | Single-Board Computer SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access VNC | Virtual Network Computing for remote desktop access VPN | Virtual Private Network VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) Zigbee | Wireless mesh network for low-power devices nginx | Popular HTTP server


[Thread #170 for this sub, first seen 27th Sep 2023, 16:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I have a couple of Pis, but currently only using the Pi 4 which is my Kodi box (LibreELEC). I planned to use my older Pi 3B as a web server, but I also have Proxmox on a NUC running as my main home server, so I don't know if there's any advantage to using the Pi at this point.

Yes, a Pi 4 with 2GB RAM. It is running Navidrome (music server) with my music collection on a 2TB SSD connected to it. Works great.

The energy consumption at around 3-4 W, pretty neat!

I have a Pi4 that is running Homebridge and pihole.

Using a Pi3b to run AdGuard Home and a TailScale subnet router.

I've got another Pi3b running Octoprint/Klipper for a 3d printer, but I'm currently migrating that to Mainsail running on an old SFF PC so I can run multiple printers with Klipper off the same PC.

The rest of my stack is on an actual server running UnRaid with like 50tb raw storage.

I will say that TailScale has been annoying asf with their subnet router setup not actually forcing the correct DNS for AdGuard Home so I can have ad-blocking while away from home. I had to move back to a pure Wireguard setup directly on my router for DNS to work properly.

One runs Home Assistant (Pi4), and an older one runs RetroPi (Pi3) for my arcade cabinet.

I have another Pi3 that I used to use as a Steam Streaming device to put my PC games on the projector.

I'm only using Pi 4 hardware:

  • OpenWrt gigabit routers with SQM, multiple locations
  • Home Assistant Yellow
  • NAS with RAID1 (mirror), deprecated

I have a Pi 3 running Home Assistant. I also have two Pi Zeros that I have MP4 Museum installed.

I use MP4 Museum to run projected Halloween decorations mostly but it's great to have a little box that will take a video file from a thumbdrive and dump it out the HDMI port on boot.

I have four Pis. They're running Pihole DNS & DHCP, a reverse proxy, and torrent clients. I don't have them setup as a cluster, been meaning to look into it but I don't want to add complexity so I'm putting it off.

I've got one as a Pi Hole, one as a Kodi box, and a few others I keep around as basically electronic multitools.

Home Assistant setup, along with media hosting for a hard drive full of all my music and movies.

Use an old Pi 3B for running zigbee2mqtt on docker.

I used to run just the Linux version of it but decided to install docker on the Pi so it's as easy as doing docker-compose pull to update it.

This is so I can control my various lights and switches using Home Assistant.

I run AdGuard Home (mostly for malware domain blocking and DNS caching) on my home server, and the Pi acts as a secondary DNS server. I use AdGuardHome-Sync to keep the config in sync across the two.

pi3 once died on me so i tried pine64 sbc and they never die...so no, i wont buy pis anymore.

I have a water container I need to take care of in my house. An ultrasonic sensor hooked to my raspberry 3b uploads the collected data to my vps that later serves an html through Flask to show the water level. It has a few alarms so that I can take action at the appropriate time. The ultrasonic sensors HC-SR04 suck and I have to replace them quite frequently. Other then that it works really well.

One for home assistant, one for very basic network services (dns, auth, dhcp) that I want up all the time even if I have to shut down the router+firewall. If I have to upgrade the firewall box I don't want to be unable to print, or use smart home stuff.

I have one set up as an irrigation controller. I was going to build an OpenStack cluster to test configuration settings on (I run a production cluster at work), but gave up when the supply chain problems happened and prices skyrocketed.

I only have one that's hooked up to my 3D printer for Octoprint. I'd like to set up another one as a SDR, but I leave my app hosting to more powerful machines.

I have a 4 meg Pi 4b running Pi-hole and Mini-DLNA. It’s rather under-utilized for those tasks, but it serves them quite well.

Mostly as kodi/plex front ends. I've set them up as a kubernetes cluster in the past but they didn't have enough ram to run my torrent client. Now I just use an old Thinkpad running talos.

use it for home assistant. I'm astonished because my test install from years ago on a pi that's around 7 years old is going with no intervention aside from updates. it's crazy robust.

for a while my laptop was slow and I needed a test local environment rebuilding with webpack so I set up a newer pi that ran the Dev servers so my laptop didn't choke. I've got a better laptop now.

Home Assistant is pretty stable. The only reason you’ll run into that it’ll break is if the storage media breaks, which happens semi often with SD cards.

I got around this by only booting from the SD card, the root fs lives on a $15 256GB mSATA SSD from fleaBay in a $5 USB enclosure.

Hell yeah; this is the way.

You can actually boot directly off the SSD iirc, by patching the Pi. Though I don’t recall how as it’s been a few years since I looked into it.

Yeah there was a bootloader update a few years ago, it might be only for 3 and newer, but it enables booting from USB and the network.

I've got a few

  1. Pi 4 with a 1tb SSD for my proxmox backups
  2. Octopi for 3d printer
  3. One running as a Spotify connect client for some "dumb" bose speakers in the lounge

Testing ideas with kubernetes before moving to the POC stage

Yes.

The jobs they do:

LAN print server

Running OctoPi for a 3D printer

PiHole and VPN for the home LAN

Experimenting with OpenHab

Portable Kodi box.

And a crappy mass storage server via USB.

I use a pi 3 to host backups from my main server via restic. I also have a pi 4 that I use as a VPN server

Pi 4 running Home Assistant.

A second one sitting in a box meant to be the first of a cluster, until they disapeared

One for pihole

I used one in the past for Unify Controller but it broke

Another one is a USB wifi hub to control my telescope equipment remotely.

I have a single Raspberry Pi 3b as a local file/media server running Jellyfin. I'm also running BOINC and seeding torrents of various Linux distributions. External HDD for storage, plus a thumb drive for the local media and another for the torrents so it only has to spin up when someone's actually using it.

It's not super-fast by any means, but it's fast enough to listen to music over my LAN, which is the main thing I need it to do quickly. Though eventually I plan on setting up a better NAS on something with faster I/O.

I used a pi 3 to host a Foundry server (TTRPG software).

I use Docker to simplify things, since I run two instances of it. Simple port forwarding setup within the docker container. the main reason I used a pi instead of my computer is so my players could access their dnd stuff all the time.

I stopped because I switched ISPs and they won't let me port-forward. My vpn supports it but the latency isn't ideal. I host the same thing through a cheap server now.

Incase you wanna go back to port forwarding, you could try ipv6! Just gotta make sure all your party members computers have ipv6 enabled

Dunno enough about ipv6, wouldn't my ISP still need to allow it?

That's my understanding, and there's no option in their locked-up router to enable it, for ipv6 either.

I have been for about a year with one 8gb Pi 4 with a 500gb ssd. I bought it as a way to dip my toes into self hosting. Started with Home Assistant OS, but now I have a bunch of containers set up, such as Home Assistant, Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, qbittorrent, and a few others. I will eventually get something a little beefier to host my media, but will absolutely keep the Pi running.

I have a 2 running teamspeak for gaming with my wife (separate rooms and don't want to yell) and pihole. And a 3 hooked to a 3d printer running octoprint.

I use a Pi4 to run one of my HAproxy nodes. It does die once in a while from not enough power because my power brick is pretty old at this point. Other than that its great. I used to have a cluster of Pi3's bit I'm transitioning cluster managment systems so they aren't doing anything right now. I recently got a Lichee pi and that will most likely replace them once I get it all working.

I have 3 of the 3rd generation ones to mess around on.

I used to have a self-built, locally-hosted power strip with individual outlet control that served it's own interface. It was powered by a Model B+. I've since moved to home-assistant and zigbee plugs since my self-built solution was pretty bulky, but it was by far my longest lived Pi project.

I've got several for random little tasks that crop up, but main use is for the conbee II I have running the zigbee network for all the smart lights. I've got a UPS hat using some old 26650 cells for battery backup, mostly so that if power cuts off I don't run into any issues with the setup and the rare cases where I have to take the power off the server rack for whatever reason. RPi has actually been rock solid for couple years now so no issues with that side, wife approval factor has likewise been high

Also got a Turing Pi but haven't had a change to play with it too much yet. For most everything else I'm running a docker and VMs in TrueNAS, but would probably change that setup at some point..