I have a unused RPi4 (the 8Gig one) running DietPi. I did use it as a playground but ever since I am renting a Hetzner machine for (playground) stuff that I want web accessible, I don’t have particular use for the Pi.
I am currently running (outdated) Home Assistant on it but there isn’t much I can connect it with (yet, getting the flashable/compatible ikea smart lightning zigbee? bridge thingy is on my bucket list). Obviously I do have a pihole there.
Shoot me any other ideas I could run there. Some kind of monitoring of my rented infra would be cool (I already have uptime kuma on the dedi hetzner box). One idea I had was if there are some OSS security scanning “daemons” I could use on to monitor my other infra.
Thanks a lot!
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Grab yourself an antenna and filter and feed adsbexchsnge, flightaware, and flightradar24.
This! Im planning on getting this set up on a spare pi one of these days™. You get a free premium acc on the tracking sites, so you can track where tf all those planes and helicopters above your house are going
I used RTL-SDR dongle and it basically just worked! Also got some recordings of the nearby airport, really cool !
Uhh, this seems like a completely new rabbit hole to dive in.
I did this for a hot second (already have RTL-SDR set here) but the current location of the RPi is just bad for reception and moving it closer to some window would mean connecting through wifi (can’t lay ethernet cables, renting) and that’s bad for other services where low response times are preffered/needed (pihole) :(
Most people seem to just want to use RPIs as a very slow Linux server for some reason…
Use it to play around with hardware integration with the GPIO pins. Get a sensor HAT and start recording temperatures, write some code that turns on/off an LED, build a robot controller, etc. There are lots of kits and documentation on the various things you can do!
I’ve been wanting to use multiple raspberry pi zero w with sensory hats to feed data to a central home monitoring system. Would be a fun project.
It is! Especially if you want to write the code yourself. It’s an interesting design problem if you start to consider cases where the PI may be offline (mobile on a battery in my case). Do you lose that data? Store and forward? In memory or to a local data store? It’s a fun rainy-weekend project.
Word of caution - HATs can be a rather inaccurate in their temperature monitoring. The Pi gets warm. I had done my work using a PTC thermistor that was distanced from the Pi itself. I’ve got a friend using a HAT and it’s been very off (up to 10C above ambient!). A Pi Zero may not give off as much heat as, say a Pi4 though. YMMV.
Unluckily last time I wanted to do sensor stuff the ~20 euro air quality multi-sensor (co2, pm1-10, humidity, voc?) board got lost in transit and I didn’t bother since :(
The original plan was use it with my esp32 dev board (wroom32, so wifi) to have a portable sensor, this RPi was supposed to be the collection server (mqtt, influx, grafana).I should revisit this idea soon, thanks for reminding me!
SBCs like the RPi are kind of awkwardly in-between a microcontroller like an Arduino or ESP32 that you can actually trust with handling GPIO and data logging, and a real Linux system that can actually do meaningful computational work.
Pretty much the only task I’ve found them reliably appropriate for is running OctoPrint, really really light computer vision tasks for robotics, or hooking up an RTL-SDR to use as a police/HAM scanner. Outside of those, it’s so much easier to use either a cheaper and more reliable MCU or a much more powerful old laptop or desktop.
That’s one of the nice things about them.
You can write code that has access to more resources. I had a RPI once that showed code build status on an led strip (red failed, green passed). It was a Java program that connected to AWS SQS for build event notifications. A micro controller would be much harder to do that on.
- Wireguard + wireguard-ui
- Linkwarden
- Filebrowser
- Dockge
- Trilium
- Paperless-ngx
- OCIS
- AdGuard Home
- Jellyfin
- Rocket-Chat
- Vaultwarden
- Mailcow
That’s my actual mess.
Thanks for sharing! The only thing I’m surprised to see in your list is paperless - how long does OCR take on a pi?
Idk, exactly I put near 500 pdfs in it, and after 3 days it was complete
About a minute, 1:30 maybe (edit: per page on a pi4). I use an app to upload jpegs though, I don’t have a normal scanner at the moment. The higher quality scan and smaller file size may make some steps of the process quicker (no need for alignment and color correction for example) if you use a normal, proper scanner.
It doesn’t matter though. When I get home and see I got a letter I scan it and by the time I drank something, put away my clothes and stuff i had with me, the pi is done and I can edit the metadata in the web ui.
Thank you! That’s really interesting, the performance with a pi 3 was way worse - even more than the pure spec difference would’ve lead me to believe.
The OCR devs have made a really awesome job!
I have a pi4, 4GB. And running off of an SSD (connected via SATA to usb adapter). Sorry, forgot to specify.
Even slower would still be worth it IMO, digital document management is just so much better than keeping multiple folders of paper organized. Also I can access all my paperwork from anywhere, because the pi and my phone are both in my wireguard VPN network.
I wish you hadn’t posted this \s. Now I have so much more to play with on my server. Great software here!
A tor guard/middle relay or bridge/snowflake and i2pd node.
I might have a look actually, though if any of these require publicly accessible IP then that won’t be possible because of CGNAT :(
Snowflake and i2pd could work but not in the best conditions.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT DNS Domain Name Service/System HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability IP Internet Protocol LXC Linux Containers NAT Network Address Translation PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) PoE Power over Ethernet RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) Zigbee Wireless mesh network for low-power devices
[Thread #439 for this sub, first seen 19th Jan 2024, 13:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Vaultwarden password manager
Vaultwarden is super, but I’d be hesitant to run it on a Raspberry Pi unless I had good backups in place. I’ve always run stuff off MicroSD cards with Pi’s, but I’m sure there’s a way to use real drives which would make me feel better.
You could just plug an external drive in it
You don’t need permanent backups of it. Vaultwarden is more like a secure “syncthing”. I crashed a system with vaultwarden had to rebuild everything but after connecting it to my devices I got the passwords from them back again and nothing was lost.
Yeah that’s true, your devices will still have a cached copy. Still… losing the host would be a pain. It looks like (from the browser extension at least) I can export the vault, so maybe it’s not as bad as it seems.
It has some amazing caching, but that doesn’t mean a backup is not necessary or recommended.
I’m running mine off an SSD using an M.2 to USB adapter
A local jellyfin installation so you can watch/listen to your media even if your internet is down.
Donate it to your local school.
RPi4 + USB Storage works as a network connected backup space for home PCs. With dyndns and a split vpn tunnel I imagine you could have your Hetzner machine place backups there too.
Seems both nagios and zabbix work on RPi:
https://peppe8o.com/network-monitoring-with-raspberry-pi-and-nems-nagios/
https://bestmonitoringtools.com/how-to-install-zabbix-on-raspberry-pi-raspbian/I ran HA on mine for a while before I moved it to a VM. Right now I’m using my Pi as a secondary wireguard VPN in case my primary is down for some reason.
Also, quick tip, I found that ikea zigbee bulbs work really well but have really bad coil whine when off, don’t use them for bedside lighting.
Someone posted the code for circadian whole home lighting, running on a pi not too long ago. Might be kinda cool to try out.
OpenVPN host to keep mobile devices behind pihole and able to access non-public lan services.
got CGNAT here :( that’s why I am renting the hetzner machine
Ah; then host the OpenVPN server from hetzner, the pi as a client, then configure the server to route traffic out through the pi client into your LAN. Your own little vpn tunnel, instead of using something like cloudflare tunnels.
Wan client > Hetzner > pi client > lan service
Immich! It’s an amazing self hosted Google Photos replacement.
Zigbee definitely fun with HomeAssistant. I have an SLZB-06M adapter which has PoE (important for me) and is a fairly “open” product (don’t need to jump through hoops to flash firmware). I read somewhere that it may offer Thread support at some point but wouldn’t count on that.
You can setup a tunnel from your Hetzner VPS to your home with say Netbird and then run stuff that would be a bit to expensive to run on rented hardware. Like say Nextcloud, Matrix or game servers, on your RPi while still having them web accessible thanks to the tunnel.
I rent dedicated machine so the HW I have is the limit - I pay the same rate every month, no matter the usage, so with the bit outdated but still performant Ryzen 5 3600 and 64GB of RAM I was very happy to throw minecraft/zomboid/vallheim servers at it and few more services, aye aye;)
Though the possibility of tunneling services out from the RPi is something I am aware of, but except for stuff that would benefit from video HW accel there isn’t much that would be better to run on the RPi instead of on the server directly.
Cool, but I’m guessing that ain’t especially cheap right? I pay $60 a year for 4 cores and 8 GB RAM (400 gb storage). Which I consider a pretty OK price. $5 a month.
Yeah it’s not it’s closer to paying your yearly cost but per month. L
I run a modded Minecraft server for my friends, PiHole for my home network, DDclient, and a discord bot for my discord server on a RPi4 8GB. I also use another as an emulation station.
