So most of my raspberry pi 4’s are deployed. But I still have a 3B, Zero 2W, Zero, 400 and a 1A that I have that I’m not doing anything with. I don’t know what would be a good project to use them with. Looking for some inspiration/ideas.
Edit: my current 4’s are hosting my pi hole, homebridge and Immich frame.
400: 8-bit computer emulators (i.e., Commodore, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, etc.) since the form factor would be reminiscent of those.
3B: Network camera
Not sure about the Zeroes and the 1A because I’m not entirely familiar with their capabilities.
I use a 3B as a low-power NUT server and power orchestrator with my UPS and a managed PDU. It’s set up with a read-only file system to protect against corruption. It’s connected to the UPS for status so that if power goes down it can manage the power off timing for servers and network gear. I have a low power rack and a long runtime UPS to keep the core Internet access components up as long as possible.
If the UPS runtime ends the 3B gets a bad shutdown. But with the read only fs it’ll happily boot when power returns and then it brings up all the gear in a controlled way. This has saved me a couple of times already while traveling.
I always have my sdcards just be the grub disk and all the root and other partitions are on a USB drive that is on it (I moved mostly to clones that have eMMC but this is what my older pis use).
Same here. I have 2 other Pi servers and they’ve got no SD card - one has a USB SSD and the other is NVMe on the Pi 5.
On this one I was only somewhat concerned about SD rot. It was more that on a read/write file system any bad shutdown has a small chance of corrupting something. I wanted it to be bulletproof since it’s got to come up to start the other gear when I’m far from home and unable to fsck and troubleshoot.
My Pi2 is my Christmas Tree. I think the older version is discontinued, but they have this one:
https://thepihut.com/products/3d-rgb-xmas-tree-for-raspberry-pi
It’s super simple to put up and take down. :) I have an sd card with the software set up to automatically run the lights when booted. I keep a bluetooth dongle plugged in, and when a cron job recognizes that the bt dongle has been removed it shuts down the rpi. Simple solution and everyone who sees it loves it.
i have a pair of pi2’s and this looks like it’s cat friendly; i think i might start doing xmas again. lol
If you have a 3D printer, ou can make a wifi enabled camera out of the zero 2W if you buy a small raspi cam module and connect it to a powerbank and or solarpanel. As a security camera or if you add some basic motion detection a nature/animal camera.
You can still easily use them to host some stuff on the internet, like a chat bridge or bot etc.
You could still use them as small, tangible containers.
I want to have a smart frame (calendar and photos, maybe some home controls) with my zero, I’m just too lazy to actually do it. There are also cool “smart mirror”s I’ve seen. Zero can also become a WiFi pwner (https://pwnagotchi.ai/) and gameboy sized emulator
That might be a really good use for my zero to make a touch screen home controller. Emulation of games is neat but unfortunately I’ll probably never use it.
You might be able to make an ADSB reciever. It’s transponder signals that power sites like ADSB Exchange
