this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

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I am currently running (outdated) Home Assistant on it but there isn't much I can connect it with (yet, getting the flashable/compatible ikea smart lightning zigbee?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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[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (3 children)
  • Wireguard + wireguard-ui
  • Linkwarden
  • Filebrowser
  • Dockge
  • Trilium
  • Paperless-ngx
  • OCIS
  • AdGuard Home
  • Jellyfin
  • Rocket-Chat
  • Vaultwarden
  • Mailcow

That's my actual mess.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Thanks for sharing! The only thing I'm surprised to see in your list is paperless - how long does OCR take on a pi?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Idk, exactly I put near 500 pdfs in it, and after 3 days it was complete

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I wish you hadn't posted this \s. Now I have so much more to play with on my server. Great software here!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Wait aren't the system requirements for Mailcow crazy high? How can you run it + other software on a mere Pi? Also: do you have a static IP?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Grab yourself an antenna and filter and feed adsbexchsnge, flightaware, and flightradar24.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Uhh, this seems like a completely new rabbit hole to dive in.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I used RTL-SDR dongle and it basically just worked! Also got some recordings of the nearby airport, really cool !

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

To report back, my system is up and running. Used my spare odroid xu4 with dietpi for it. Put it all in a case and attached a cheap Nooelec stick. Waiting for my antenna today and to decide where to put it under the roof.

Fine tuning for best reception location will be taking a while to be honest.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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) :(

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Instead of connecting it to WiFi, have a look into power line adapters. They route your internet through the copper wiring in your house.

I have a router in my subterranean ground floor linked to a power line adapter, a wired router in my front room a floor up so my PC, TV, Playstation, etc are connected via LAN, and another power line 2 floors above that plugged into another WiFi router running in bridge mode, which supplies WiFi to the top two floors, and another playstation wired in to that router

Basically it means that my ground floor router is hooked to the internet and everything else in the house that needs wiring in is wired in because of the power line, and the WiFi is coming from 2 routers, one on the top floor and one on the ground.

My ISP thought a WiFi router on the ground floor of a 4 storey house was a great idea, but they're stupid. WiFi should be in the highest point of your house.

With a few Power line adapters you can sort your internet out for £25

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Vaultwarden password manager

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

You could just plug an external drive in it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I'm running mine off an SSD using an M.2 to USB adapter

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

A tor guard/middle relay or bridge/snowflake and i2pd node.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I might have a look actually, though if any of these require publicly accessible IP then that won't be possible because of CGNAT :(

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

14 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

[Thread #439 for this sub, first seen 19th Jan 2024, 13:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Donate it to your local school.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

A local jellyfin installation so you can watch/listen to your media even if your internet is down.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

try Jackett + sonarr + radarr + qBittrorrent or sell it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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/

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Someone posted the code for circadian whole home lighting, running on a pi not too long ago. Might be kinda cool to try out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Navidrome is neat

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

OpenVPN host to keep mobile devices behind pihole and able to access non-public lan services.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Use it to make a webcam server. You could probably afford to plug in multiple webcams since it has USB 3. Great for checking on the home when you're away.

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