Since you're forced to do this and can't cheat when you're sick of it, I'm curious. How is it as a primary PC? Have you gone crazy yet? Are you counting the days for when you can use a 'normal' PC on a daily basis again?
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.
Mine is primarily a low-powered BitTorrent (transmission-daemon) server and network file server, but I occasionally also use it to test some of my code out on ARM.
i want to build a machine that will lock my hubs on my 4WD truck from the cab via remote control. That way I dont have to get out of the cab in a sticky situation to engage 4WD.
Havent done it, but one of the simple, open source machines I feel will have an audience of at least 1000 that feels my pain and would appreciate the solution.
It's great to have a cheap-to-buy, cheap-to-run computer around for doing random stuff. I also want to collect a few RPis to prototype an idea I have for a distributed system, but I'm not giving that one away yet.
I just got one and set up OSMC on it, pretty easy to do. I like the fact that if I need the hardware for a day, I can swap out the SD card to get an entirely different OS and swap the OSMC card back in when I'm done. I've also set it up to store the library in a MySQL server, so other Kodi/XBMC clients (such as the ones on my Mac and PC) sync with playback information.
I also own one which was quickly forgotten because it was being picky about SD cards. I may buy a few more in the future to make a computing grid but I won't be touching it in a while.
Do you know if there ia still a special OS version needed to do somewhat reasonable floating point operations? Is the free graphics driver they announced available yet? I haven't chacked in a while.
I currently have a model B (the old one with 256MB) at home with an uptime of almost 500 days. It is used to share an external drive to the network, serves some static pages to the web and is a gameserver (nethack, moria, etc) for me and a couple of friends. It is also my ssh-entrypoint from the outside, and running a mumble-server (umurmur) which can handle a couple of people without problems.
I've been meaning to do something cool with it, but the limited power is, well, limitng. But it excels everywhere where you just need any computer. Most of the load is coming from umurmur, some Django dev-server I forgot was even on there (including a running MySQL instance), and, when in use, NFS and SMB servers. It is currently running with ~10% CPU usage, a loadavg around 0.1 and 54M of used memory, with the rest used for cache. And I can continue playing my current run of nethack anytime I want without problems whatsoever. It seems, computer power gets vastly underestimated. I should also mention, it is running a preemptive kernel, mainly because it came with the distro and I don't want to sacrifice the glorious uptime.
I have a Raspberry Pi B+ that's been sitting idle on the shelf for a little over half a year now...been trying to get my lazy self to setup a custom thermostat controller for a mini fridge that I converted into a kegerator. Maybe another six months and I'll eventually get started :P
20 comments
8 u/buddy-fletcher 23 Jun 2015 22:35
I use it as my main computer now as my other computers were repo'd and it's all I can afford
5 u/vornth 24 Jun 2015 00:57
Since you're forced to do this and can't cheat when you're sick of it, I'm curious. How is it as a primary PC? Have you gone crazy yet? Are you counting the days for when you can use a 'normal' PC on a daily basis again?
1 u/flipcoder 24 Jun 2015 06:35
I sure hope it's a Pi 2.
6 u/Orangeapple 23 Jun 2015 22:49
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.
3 u/skeeto 23 Jun 2015 21:44
Mine is primarily a low-powered BitTorrent (transmission-daemon) server and network file server, but I occasionally also use it to test some of my code out on ARM.
3 u/NassTee 24 Jun 2015 00:54
I use a Raspberry Pi 2 as a media player running OpenElec. The only real project was adding an IR receiver to it, and that was pretty simple.
2 u/avgwhtguy1 23 Jun 2015 22:25
i want to build a machine that will lock my hubs on my 4WD truck from the cab via remote control. That way I dont have to get out of the cab in a sticky situation to engage 4WD.
Havent done it, but one of the simple, open source machines I feel will have an audience of at least 1000 that feels my pain and would appreciate the solution.
2 u/b3k 23 Jun 2015 23:23
I have one I've used as:
It's great to have a cheap-to-buy, cheap-to-run computer around for doing random stuff. I also want to collect a few RPis to prototype an idea I have for a distributed system, but I'm not giving that one away yet.
2 u/KLOP5 23 Jun 2015 23:54
My Pi is currently a Mumble and print server. While not very cool per se, it's been very useful so far.
1 u/JesTheRed 23 Jun 2015 22:39
A similar question was asked here: https://voat.co/v/AskVoat/comments/162422
...and has some traction as well.
1 u/frankis 24 Jun 2015 01:05
I just got one and set up OSMC on it, pretty easy to do. I like the fact that if I need the hardware for a day, I can swap out the SD card to get an entirely different OS and swap the OSMC card back in when I'm done. I've also set it up to store the library in a MySQL server, so other Kodi/XBMC clients (such as the ones on my Mac and PC) sync with playback information.
0 u/Stavon 23 Jun 2015 21:36
I own at least 3 and haven't done anything cool with them. I also own a bunch of similar boards which suffer the same fate.
1 u/lola18 [OP] 23 Jun 2015 21:40
are the projects very troublesome or something?
1 u/Stavon 23 Jun 2015 21:42
No, I just have better computers to use, so I don't use the slowest ones.
0 u/vladcula 23 Jun 2015 22:04
I also own one which was quickly forgotten because it was being picky about SD cards. I may buy a few more in the future to make a computing grid but I won't be touching it in a while.
0 u/Stavon 23 Jun 2015 22:12
Do you know if there ia still a special OS version needed to do somewhat reasonable floating point operations? Is the free graphics driver they announced available yet? I haven't chacked in a while.
0 u/runnerman1 23 Jun 2015 22:35
Dust Collector.
0 u/sulami 24 Jun 2015 18:35
I currently have a model B (the old one with 256MB) at home with an uptime of almost 500 days. It is used to share an external drive to the network, serves some static pages to the web and is a gameserver (nethack, moria, etc) for me and a couple of friends. It is also my ssh-entrypoint from the outside, and running a mumble-server (umurmur) which can handle a couple of people without problems.
I've been meaning to do something cool with it, but the limited power is, well, limitng. But it excels everywhere where you just need any computer. Most of the load is coming from umurmur, some Django dev-server I forgot was even on there (including a running MySQL instance), and, when in use, NFS and SMB servers. It is currently running with ~10% CPU usage, a loadavg around 0.1 and 54M of used memory, with the rest used for cache. And I can continue playing my current run of nethack anytime I want without problems whatsoever. It seems, computer power gets vastly underestimated. I should also mention, it is running a preemptive kernel, mainly because it came with the distro and I don't want to sacrifice the glorious uptime.
0 u/for_satan 25 Jun 2015 06:28
Raspbmc hooked to my tv
0 u/ferspec 29 Jun 2015 22:54
I have a Raspberry Pi B+ that's been sitting idle on the shelf for a little over half a year now...been trying to get my lazy self to setup a custom thermostat controller for a mini fridge that I converted into a kegerator. Maybe another six months and I'll eventually get started :P