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I am currently running (outdated) Home Assistant on it but there isn’t much I can connect it with (yet, getting the flashable/compatible ikea smart lightning zigbee?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!
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!
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.