Alot of us who have a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 might upgrade to the Raspberry Pi 5.
Doing so would leave us with 2 Pi’s. What are some great use cases for the older Pi, that would no longer be the main machine?
- Octoprint if you have a 3D printer
- Volumio (or similar) if want a device you can cast music to
- for astronomy can install astroberry for remote control of your scope and camera
- run home assistant for home automation
- pihole for use as a DNS server that blocks ads
- plug a camera in and use it as a webcam/ security camera
Thanks man!
I will try Volumio for sure! I also want to try home automation some time, but I don’t think I have enough hardware to run with it yet.
I started my home assistant journey with 4 smart globes, a Google home speaker with a pi 4. I learned how to use it and started integrating things I don’t need hardware for, such as shopping/Todo lists, weather, Spotify, last.fm, calendars, basically anything I can learn without hardware. Right now I’m working on getting a shopping list sent to me when I enter the shops zone.
Then I bought a bunch of NFC tags (they’re cheap) for medication reminders, kitty litter reminders/tracking. I have a music poster in my house I’ve stuck an NFC tag to and it opens up the album on Spotify, turns on Bluetooth and connects to my speaker.
I’ve slowly been adding more devices as I go along due to cost constraints. Not that smart home stuff is expensive, I just can’t afford to do it all at once. Which also gives me time to consider/research smart devices before I buy.
100% recommend. It’s addicting actually.
What is a smart globe?
It’s a light globe for the house that has some sort of connectivity with it. Like wifi, bluetooth, zigbee so that you can control it remotely or automate it.
I’ll add as well, that there are open source and free alternatives to volumio that you can run alongside home assistant on a pi 4 easily, that will still let you use the audio output. As well as the built-in media player functionality.
Also definitely agree on the addicting part. I recently picked up some cheap bulbs at Costco that are susceptible to the Tuya Cloudcutter vulnerability. So now I have a bunch of new ESPhome devices to play with.
Ooh nice. I need to figure out some other type of bulb. The ones I have are TP Link Tapo Wifi and they’re too unreliable.
I got 12 bulbs for AUD$10 each so I was really happy. Definitely check out if there’s any compatible Tuya stuff for cheap locally to you. They’re a Chinese company that makes white label smart home stuff that a lot of department stores and cheaper brands sell.
Oh and you can put Adguard on home assistant too as an add on.
