Submitted 1 year ago by atomWood@lemm.ee to selfhosted@lemmy.world
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?
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.
I got 4 of them and they are collecting dust now. I find the 1L usffpcs way more powerful.
What’s that?
Things like this:
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
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.
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.
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.
Do you run OSMC in a container on your pi or as the base image installed with the pi imager?
It's the root OS; that Pi is a media centre in the living room (plus it's taken on a few extra duties since it's always online). It's been going for a good few years now, 8+?
How do you like your Omada gear? Any reason you went with their stuff over Ubiquiti?
For me that can be answered with 90% of the feature set for 50% of the cost.
Only use it as a backup pihole now. Used to have an *arr stack on it, but needed a beefier pc
I have one 3B running adguard and a wireguard vpn server. Another 4B doing the same, plus kitchenowl and home assistant.
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 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’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.
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.
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.
I’ve got a few
pi3 once died on me so i tried pine64 sbc and they never die…so no, i wont buy pis anymore.
Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with Pihole. Its hard to look at websites without Pihole
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, searching my eyes at night.
I have 3.
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).
pikvm for a desktop
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.
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 use RPI4 with the YunoHost platform and I think it’s positive. However YunoHost does not install Lemmy on the Raspberry.
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.
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 run OpenSprinkler Pi on my raspberry Pi 3 and HomeAssistant on my Pi 4. Works incredibly well for both.
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’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.
I have a Raspberry pi 1b that runs adguard home and a VPN server
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.
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.
I used to use them for all my setups. Then the shortages stopped that. Nowadays I just use one big server.
All the arrs, HA, pihole and a few smaller containers running on pi4. It was my gateway into the world of self hosting.
clavismil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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
glnpf148@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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!
clavismil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sure you can check trash-guides.info
and here is my setup, I’m using podman containers for everything