Curious to see what everyone uses their Raspberry Pi for.
I currently use mine for…
- Wireguard as a gateway into my home LAN.
- Pi-hole server running Dns-Over-Https (Doh)
- Syslog server for my router and other devices
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I use it as a media center through Kodi on LibreELEC. Listening to music, watching online TV, Youtube and of course watching movies. Sometimes even using it for online radio.
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Currently it’s a great dust sequestration device. 
But I PLAN on finally getting a spare monitor and sticking it in the kitchen as a recipe computer (and to listen to some tunes whilst cooking). 
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I haven’t thought of a use yet, which is why I haven’t bought one, (that’s not to say I don’t want one, but my flat is too full of junk and obsolete kit I wouldn’t know where to put one).
We just installed LibreELEC on a RPi 3+. It seems to run great, but we can’t get any sound to come out through the HDMI cable connection to a LCD TV that we are using for the display device. Any ideas what we might have missed?
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Had the 3b for a few years. Still haven’t used it 
Think I’ve booted it twice in the time I’ve had it, but I found mine to be pretty laggy with the Raspbian OS it came with. Haven’t tried any other distro with them.
Dunno about the Pi4 tbh.
In our small office (which only seats 4 people), we have a Pi 4 which is usable at one desk for those who don’t have their own laptop, but want some basic desktop-grade web surfing, using the 32" HD monitor there (which laptop users use as dual-head, just for the time they are sitting there). There are about a dozen people here who breeze in and out of the office at various times of the day, to spend about an hour or two.
The Pi 4 just has stock Raspbian on it. The Web browser allows basic webmail, and Youtube. Filezilla allows GbE-speed FTP access to our OMV fileserver, where we have several TB of videos, MP3’s, and documents.
remmina and x2go are also installed. This allows the Pi 4 to be used as sort of a thin client, to a beefy hexacore Linux Mint MATE desktop across the room. Linux Mint MATE can be connected to using x2go, allowing simultaneous users to run their MATE desktops independent of each other. So the Pi 4 stretches the value of the much more expensive hexacore desktop (we spent ~$1300US on it, recently).
The hexacore desktop also can run Windows 10 Home in a Virtual Machine (VM). This VM can start up automatically at boot time, by a user that nobody logs in as (isn’t an admin user, but is effectively an administrator of Virtualbox, to stop the VM, snapshot it, or back it up over GbE ethernet to the OMV server).
What do we do in that Windows VM? Run Microsoft Office, and that’s about it. It’s just there for when users try to open some .docx file in LibreOffice (in Linux Mint MATE), but then occasionally the formatting is so broken that only true MS Office will do. So then they can FTP, or Syncthing the .docx file into the VM, and then open it there, where it will be rendered perfectly. So the Windows VM is just there for legacy reasons. LibreOffice is the first go-to word processor in Linux Mint MATE (and virtually all other desktop apps run, and work happens, in Linux Mint MATE first and foremost, on that desktop machine).
This VM can be connected to using reminna, either by the user sitting in front of the hexacore desktop, or the user on the RPi 4, using remmina. Of course, only one user at a time can connect, as Windows isn’t truly multi-user that way (in the way x2go can allow). As you know, Windows is multi-user, but only in the sense of one-user-at-a-time-logged-in-and-using-their-desktop.
How do I get that Windows VM to start at boot time in Virtualbox? I had to find some arcane Virtualbox lore to allow that.
PS: We use an aluminium Flirc case for the Pi 4, which I highly recommend. It’s dead silent, and dissipates the heat well.
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Hot glue guns are great to affix small gadgets to the undersides of desk surfaces. 
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Something I’d to try in the medium term, when time and resources allow, is to try to install a Mattermost docker image onto a Raspberry Pi 4. The newly released Balena OS for the RPi 4 claims it can do 64-bit docker images.
Mattermost is written in Go, and I think it might be lean enough and efficient enough to run decently on an RPi 4 with 4GB of RAM. I’ve started a thread on that here, should anyone else find this interesting.
PS: Discourse is clearly too heavyweight for an RPi 4, that’s the answer I got when I asked their community on their forum.
Retro gaming arcade. I bought the Microcenter kit and have over 2000 arcade games available on it.
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PiHole for me and I love it.
…need to put this in docker and run it on my laptop. Netflix spoiled me with no commercials, now PiHole has spoiled me with no ads.
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I also own a RPi 3 B+ if I remember correctly. It is connected to my TV via HDMI cable but I use external speakers that are connected to the TV. Though the principle is the same. The sound comes from the Pi.
Maybe open a new thread in the support section. Try to look in the sound settings in Kodi.
Hey, @esbeeb this is perhaps off-topic but… do you have experience with nomachine vs x2go? As I understand x2go is the foss version (fork) of nomachine. I learned that recently but I have been using nomachine for some time and didn’t occurred to me that a “libre” fork existed. Would you recommend to change to x2go?
Also, I use my Raspi as a bridge for VPN networks. It keeps the VPN clients running and I connect to the remote servers through it from any computer in the house by adding just a couple of route rules. Also of course pi-hole and transmission.
Sorry, no. You’d do well to create a VM of Linux Mint MATE, install the x2goserver, then remotely connect to the VM with the x2go client, and spend some time, and see how well the MATE desktop behaves. You’ll notice some quirks for sure. None of those quirks were show-stoppers for me, but might annoy your users who might be accustomed to a smoother experience with NoMachine’s products.
I wish the x2go project would mentor some Google Summer of Code students, and clean up the quirks that are experienced when connecting to the desktops of distros like Linux Mint MATE, Xubuntu, and Ubuntu MATE. Note: I tried all three of those distros recently with x2goserver, and it was Linux Mint MATE which had the fewest quirks.
PS: I would love to hear if anyone out there has found a relatively mainstream distro where x2go server works with no quirks for the end user (I said distro there, not DE). And sorry, no 90’s-era-feeling DE’s like LXDE, IceWM, Fluxbox, tiling WM’s, etc, those won’t cut the mustard for my non-geeky end users. It needs to be a DE at least as convenient and modern-feeling as XFCE or MATE (which have great file browsers with good SMB share support, with discovery of said SMB shares).
What I just said above might seem really OT, but I feel it’s fair and forthright to clarify the very careful caveats which make my Raspberry Pi use case work whatsoever.
I have been wanting to do that for a while. It would also make a excellent gift for Christmas.
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Too many to list here but over the years a media centres , pihole , access control , plant monitoring, a smart clock, Mycroft, tvheaded server, LED controller etc. Plenty of uses really. Though some solutions suit the Onion Omega better these days.
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No, I run all three of those services on one Pi3b. They are very light services and do not require much throughput.
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Default sound comes from the 3.5mm jack. You have to tell the pi to use sound over HDMI. I do this through retro pi at the moment but I’m sure the setting can be found in the normal OS. I just don’t know where without looking. At work currently. I can take a look if you can’t find it.
I use a RaspberryPi in a church to display announcements that can be easily updated weekly by the office lady. I created an ftp link that she can just click on and drop whatever she wants on there. It’s been MOSTLY reliable but it has had some issues. I think I am more interested in Arduinos than I am Pis… today…
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