I have one in my tortoise's house. It does many things. I use it to control the ambient temperature in her house and her greenhouse. I use IFTTT to pull weather data to trigger a heat lamp in her greenhouse if the UV index drops below a certain point. I find the current low priced home automation products such as remote outlets and sensors to be very unreliable. I use it to control lights locally through my network rather than through a crappy cloud service. It also runs a web server that allows me to make changes to any of the triggers I have set. I have an cheap IR camera attached that aids in motion sensing and it works as a webcam. I have an arduino connected to it, with a servo motor glued to a dial on her heat pad to adjust according to changes in the ambient temperature. I have temperature and vibration sensors to detect her movement. If she leaves her house, her UV light turns off. If she is present in her house, her greenhouse heat lamp stays off. As time goes on, I add more and more stuff. I could go on for a while longer but I think you get the picture. It's a little overkill but it's been great for learning scripting, etc.
Edit:
I also have one as a dedicated torrent box. It downloads daily shows onto a 64 gb sd card. So if my computer is off, it still keeps up with everything. I have it set to send the shows monthly to an external hard drive on my network for archiving.
I have one in my tortoise's house. It does many things. I use it to control the ambient temperature in her house and her greenhouse. I use IFTTT to pull weather data to trigger a heat lamp in her greenhouse if the UV index drops below a certain point. I find the current low priced home automation products such as remote outlets and sensors to be very unreliable. I use it to control lights locally through my network rather than through a crappy cloud service. It also runs a web server that allows me to make changes to any of the triggers I have set. I have an cheap IR camera attached that aids in motion sensing and it works as a webcam. I have an arduino connected to it, with a servo motor glued to a dial on her heat pad to adjust according to changes in the ambient temperature. I have temperature and vibration sensors to detect her movement. If she leaves her house, her UV light turns off. If she is present in her house, her greenhouse heat lamp stays off. As time goes on, I add more and more stuff. I could go on for a while longer but I think you get the picture. It's a little overkill but it's been great for learning scripting, etc.
Edit: I also have one as a dedicated torrent box. It downloads daily shows onto a 64 gb sd card. So if my computer is off, it still keeps up with everything. I have it set to send the shows monthly to an external hard drive on my network for archiving.