Got a Pi4 this morning for my birthday, still going through the initial configuration.

What all do you guys use your Pi for, apart from a micro computer?

Thinking about a 3D printer in the near future.

I have a 3B+ currently set up as a media center with LibreElec/Kodi, soon to be replaced by a 4B+. I want to get it to boot from a USB SSD before swapping it in (the 3 currently boots from a USB thumb drive so it should be possible, but I want to partition the SSD into root and data partitions, and this is proving to be a hurdle). The 3 will be moved to the treadmill so as to watch videos, listen to music, etc. while working out.

I have found that using a decent case (metal with fan cooling) is pretty important to not run into occasional over-heating situations.

I also have a 2 sitting on the shelf that I am flirting with the idea of a battery-powered, weatherproof box for perimeter property/wildlife monitoring. The dog does a pretty good job, but isn't equipped with a camera. Maybe I can mount the Pi on the dog's collar? Yeah, with a speaker so I can issue commands at a distance, and/or a cell phone so I can GPS track him. This kind of stuff can be a serious rabbit hole.

Oh, and BTW, Happy Birthday!

I have one with OctoPrint for a Prusa 2.

another one is an SMTP gateway system that relays email through gmail for me. UPS, thermostat, zoneminder, ..

Use one with OctoPrint and one as an arcade game emulator. Handy little machines.

I'm using two 3Bs, one as an Octoprint server with my Ender 3 3D printer, the other as a Pi-Hole. In my limited understanding, Pi-Hole ignores pop-up ads that would otherwise show up on pages you browse. Makes web browsing a lot quicker and more enjoyable.

They are very flexible on what you can do with them. It largely depends on how technical you are, but a lot of tutorials are out there to help you if you aren't.

Common projects include:

Pi-Hole Ad blocker for your network. pi-hole

Raspberry PI NAS - I don't have a direct example, but you can essentially make a network share for your computers for document sharing and backups. Its not going to provide the best performance (nor reliability I assume - mainly risk of the microsd card corrupting or the usb hard drives failing), but it is good enough if your backup strategy is good robust enough. You can improve reliability and performance a bit if you boot (install the os - earlier responses mentioned this) from a USB 3.0 SSD (flash disk drive).

Sub-software you may be interested in if you setup a NAS disk for backup would be syncthing.

You can create your own Stratum-1 NTP server for your network with a raspberry pi with a GPS hat and antenna.

You can setup an ADS-B Receiver and feed the data to FlightAware (and get a free pro subscription in the process). You can do everything from scratch or buy kits from FlighAware Pro Stick / PI Aware. Similarly you can do other RTL-SDR (DVB-T) based projects as well.

If you want a reason to buy some more PI4s (probably 8g models) you could always setup a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster. If you don't know what Kubernetes is, then this probably won't be of any use to you.

Home Automation through Home Assistant or OpenHAB.

I think you can use PIs to stream video/audio to your TVs through software like Kodi.

There is also the RetroPie Project - which is a video game emulator project (Nintendo, Sega, etc).

For other project ideas you can get the MagPi Magazine PDFs free from MagPi Magazine.

Reddit is also a good place for project ideas / examples - r/raspberry_pi.

Note that you aren't limited to the official Raspberry Pi OS images (NUMBS or Raspberry Pi OS) - Some Options

I would probably use it for streaming music. I’d probably have one right now if it wasn’t for my Mac mini.

I have a few “project” Pi’s.

I have a Darth Vader model that I received as a Christmas gift from the kids and used a Pi to blink the LEDs I put in his chest controller and put speakers on so that he can play sound clips.

Another is connected to 3 32x32 RGB LED matrix array to have a scroller for text or some other graphics.

One is my OctoPrint controller for the 3D printer.

Fun to think of a project to do, add some extra parts (hats) and tinker with.

I have an old Pi 3 that I use as a game emulator for mostly the 8 bit games of my youth (NES and SMS). I use RetroPi and like well enough.

Everyone should have a pihole ad blocker in their house.

I have one that I use as an Emulator.
It uses RetroPi.

Screaming Cockatoo was kind enough to configure and set it all up for me like 3 years ago.
I use a wired Microsoft Sidewinder controller that I have had for like 15 years.
Works pretty well. Would like to try to use an XBOX One controller.

Retropie gaming console for me, too. I rock the shit out of NES and SNES games. DOS, too.

One is an AirPrint server for an older massive HP LaserJet.

My husband is scheming on making the other a programmable thermostat (he’s commercial HVAC) to control the various automation he’s built into our boiler controls.

Streaming music with VolumeIO software. Works great!!!

Octoprint
Rasplex/Kodi (media client)
RetroPie (game system emulator, bunch of old nintenod games)

I had this dream of using it to mine for bitcoin..... but.....

just not enough computing power. But back in the day I think people were doing this with an Rpi.

Giving some serious consideration to picking up a 3d printer.
Need to browse through the recent threads here & research a bit.

The emulator route may get explored as well.

I use mine as media players so that I can stream video from my "media server" to my TVs. Kodi runs faster on the Pi than using the Amazon Fire TVs.

quote:

Originally posted by architect:
I have a 3B+ currently set up as a media center with LibreElec/Kodi, soon to be replaced by a 4B+. I want to get it to boot from a USB SSD before swapping it in (the 3 currently boots from a USB thumb drive so it should be possible, but I want to partition the SSD into root and data partitions, and this is proving to be a hurdle). The 3 will be moved to the treadmill so as to watch videos, listen to music, etc. while working out.

I'm disappointed that the new Pi needs heat sinks and fan. This seems to be going opposite of the original mission of the Pi.

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
I'm disappointed that the new Pi needs heat sinks and fan. This seems to be going opposite of the original mission of the Pi.

the fan is apparently optional, but was included, so I wired it in. Has high & low settings to suit your noise tolerance.

Re-imaging the Pi right now, adding on Recalbox.