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?
Here is a controversial thought; do you need to replace the 4?
- 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.
Oh and you can put Adguard on home assistant too as an add on.
What do you use the Pi for now?
I had a bunch of Pi 3Bs sitting around, so I made piholes for a few friends and family, I made a dedicated MAME emulator that I never have time to play, and I gave one to each of my kids to learn about computers and linux. I also use one for work as a linux test environment for our software, but the 3 hardware doesn’t really keep up.
Right now I use it for:
- PiHole
- Plex/Jellyfin
- WireGuard VPN
- Sonarr/Radarr and all that follows.
I would consider giving it away to family for the same purpose. Thanks for the suggestion!
I’d add a 2nd Pi-hole (sounds like you have one already?) for redundancy.
Yes, here the question is if you really need to upgrade to 5, and if you really need, why not buy a dedicated NUC for example that would be a lot more powerful and extensible than the 5, while also consuming not too much more power.
Pretty sure I just saw a decent specd one on sale for Black Friday. I almost bought it but realized I have 3 mini PCs already.
IDK what’s happening… Pretty soon my toaster will somehow be run by these things… They just multiply.
I have 2 pi 4. One of them runs Vaultwarden as my self-hosted password manager. The other runs TPLink Omada SDN management software to manage my switch and WiFi APs.
