Over the last few years with the raspberry pi people selling their inventory to enterprise customers instead of the hobbyists that have using them for 10+(?) Years ive found that x86 thin clients are actually a much better option in terms of price and upgradability. Most modern thin clients (wyse, HP, etc) have m.2 storage expansion, sodimm sockets, and sometimes even pcie expansion. If you get lucky you can get a decent current-ish gen thin client for ~100$ depending on the specs. What are pi 4s going for these days?
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2023
14 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
125 readers
1 users here now
Post articles or questions about technology
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Depends where you buy it. If you can get it from adafruit or something it's like $45 to $75 depending on the memory.
I have two in use right now, one with RetroPi connected to a small tube TV in my living room (did you know that the headphone jack on the pi can also output composite video!?, I didn't until recently).
The other I have setup on a bookshelf as a model PDP-11 (from the great PiDP-11 kit). It's mostly just some pretty lights to look at, but it's also a functional PDP-11 simulator. Theoretically it could also run pihole, but my router has openwrt which has the same capability.
I've been looking for a functional excuse to do a PiDP-11 but haven't been able to talk myself into it.
I'm not sure that there can really be a practical reason to build a PDP-11 simulator in 2023, other than that it's fun.
After my NAS suddenly stopped booting, I bought a cheap USB hard drive enclosure, plugged it into the Pi and now my Pi is a poor man's NAS.
I mostly use my 3B+ as a development and sysadmin sandbox. Lately I've been using it to test out a few IoT-type projects.
I'd love to get my hands on a Pi Zero W at some point, but chip shortage.
If you're on mastodon I suggest following rpilocator bot @rpilocator@mastodon.social and setting up alerts. It tracks in stock pis. I've gotten a few pis from those notifications.
I have one running pihole and another as my main emulator platform.
One runs a Bitcoin Lightning node and the other runs Octoprint for my 3D printer. I've thought about setting one up for pihole but adblock does such a good job for every site I visit I haven't really bothered.
I run retropie on mine
pihole is basically it at this point. Got eonugh spare machines sitting around to do the rest anyway
One as a NAS storage for my security camera.
Another one as a media server running docker with Plex, Emby, Arr's, File server. Portainer to mange and Watchtower to automatically update the containers. And finally Pi hole.
It's actually amazing the stuff it can pull off for a device of such small form factor
FYI podman has a container image self updater which makes watchtower redundant. Ive been moving from docker to podman on many of my boxes and this was one of the best features I discovered.
https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-auto-updates-rollbacks
https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-auto-update.1.html
Thanks for letting me know. Didn't know Podman existed. I might switch over to Podman next time I get some time off. Just curious, have you faced any major issues on any of your containers running on Podman. Docker has been absolutely painless for me so just doing due diligence.
Nope. Its pretty much a drop in replacement for docker. The only hiccups I had were running it rootless but I had the same issues on docker. Portainer even works with it, however I have since abandoned it and just run all my containers with systemd services.
https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/docker-to-podman-migration-guide/
Ah i see. Well thanks for the info. Really appreciate it.
One for pihole. One for Home Assistant. One for an office dashboard.
Do you really need three pis for that?
Pihole is on an old Pi 2 or 3. HA is in my network hub and attached to external storage. Office is in another building.
The only thing I’m running a pi for lately is RetroPi
I use a 4 primarily for Sonarr/Radarr and Emby for streaming.
Nice! I use Sonarr and Radarr on my NAS via openmediavault. Love that software.
I haven't been lucky enough to secure an actual pi so I've been playing with a few different rock chip boards. I have a libre renegade doing pi hole duty. Then I have an orange pi 5b on retro game duty. And I just got an odroid m1 that will be an android tv box / dvr when I get around to it.
I only know about orange pi. I'll have to look into the others. Exciting!
I'm sure the learning curve is steeper than a real pi, but that's part of the fun.
DLNA music server, mostly for access to our old CD collection.
What OS and how are you running a cluster on pi zeros? I've been wanting to try that.
I'm using a ClusterHAT: https://www.pishop.us/product/cluster-hat-v2-4/
The makers of it have their own custom raspbian image.
I just bought one of these. Super excited to do some basic clustering.
My Pi 1 sits in my drawer. My Pi 2 sits in a retro game emulator all in one controller thing at my friends house. my old old Pi 3 sitting in semi retirement as a dedicated pihole. One Pi 4 as my NAS, qbittorrent box, and generally anything storage or multimedia related. And finally my other Pi 4 is a local web and minecraft server.
I bought one a while ago and had a delightful time setting it up, and then I put it away and haven't used it since...I already have a NAS and home media server that I can host things on. But I'm glad to have it on hand, since I hope to be working on some software where it would be useful to test that it compiles and runs on a rpi sometime in the future.
One for running AdGuard Home and another for running various bits including hosting a backup drive over SMB, running Vaultwarden, and doing monitoring of the rest of my home lab stuff.
I also have one for pihole, and one that's a staking node for a weird altcoin I was really into a couple years ago.
I have it as http proxy to the Wayback machine. This way I can browse internet as it was in 1999 on my windows 98 build.
view more: next ›