As a complete beginner, what can I do with a raspberry pi 4b?
I’m basically completely new to networking and currently setting up a NAS. I have this raspberry pi 4b that I got but now can’t think of a use case for it…
Any ideas of something that is very useful to host or have running on the pi4b?
Edit: I’m a complete beginner, and will use trunas on another server with jellyfin so my raspberry pi gets blown raspberries atm 👎
- Ubuntu desktop - the whole shebang including office apps
- PiHole ad-blocker
- Jellyfin video server
- Minecraft server
- Local LLMs
- On-site VPN service
- Home Assistant smarthome controller
So many things, and much more…
That’s a pretty big computer. It’s bigger than an American pickup truck. God damn!
Load bearing Mac Mini vs gigantisch raspberry pi. Wonder who would win in a fight?
Minecraft server!
I run Movary on my NAS in a docker container so that my partner has a place to add to our watch-list.
I also run a personal kbase that I built on top of Docbase and Markdown files.
And I recently started using HTTP2Shell to throw commands at a local networked device. This is useful to me personally, maybe not for others, because I’ve written my own automations.
I recently considered adding Home Assistant, but it doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen because we have lamps that don’t remain in an “on” state when unplugged; any devices I might buy to add wifi to them wouldn’t actually turn them on remotely as a result. Shame cause there’s one that’s pretty necessary at night that’s between a wall and a sofa that’s pushed back against it because that’s just the layout of the room. I don’t mind manually controlling the others, but that was the one that would have been nice to trigger from my phone. Our thermostat and robot vacuum would have been on the same system, but they already have dedicated apps anyway.
You’re only limited by your imagination and curiosity (and wallet).
Pihole is great, little hardware projects are fun (touchscreen calendar in the kitchen). They also make great emulators for old systems if you want to install a gaming oriented OS like retropie or lakka and get a gamepad or two.
I personally wouldn’t use it for a server, but it’s a good learning environment to figure out how to run services.
The beauty of the pi is it is an SD card swap away from doing a different job. You can buy a few fast cheap 16-32gb SD cards and play around with different options and operating systems.
Or you can do what I do: get it all set up, shut it down, and forget it exists until you have some wild idea.
I host a web server and gemini capsule on mine. I previously hosted a Minecraft server, but moved it over to my desktop recently.
Look into volumio to make a whole home music streaming solution. You can buy various pi Hats to get better DACs than the internal pi one.
Pihole. Protect your network from ads.
I wouldn’t recommend network apps to a complete beginner. They might loose their network for a while and get afraid of tinkering. My 2p
I’d recommend technitium over both pihole and adguard these days. Its an actual DNS server vs just a sinkholr, had recursive resolving out of the box, Root server mirroring at the click of a button, cluster mode etc
I’m using Pi-hole for half a year now and am super happy. What is unbound?
A DNS service that gets all its DNS data directly from “root servers”, without the middlemen (like your ISP, Google, Cloudflare, etc).
Unbound is just an alternative to bind. Pihole does not handle full-fledged DNS functions like zone transfers and start of authority records.
Sell it
I’m dead serious. They can go for a decent price which should cover the cost of a X86_64 machine
Why would I want a x86 machine if all I need runs so well on my Pi and uses like under 5 Watts?
The mini-pcs that people typically recommend use around that at idle, and are much more powerful and have more reliable storage. But if you all you need is a Pi that’s fine of course.
What are the mini PCs people typically recommend?
Lenovo Tiny series for example, and I believe there are HP and Dell equivalents.
idk about a 4b these days but the 5’s are stupid priced. You can get a refurbed 6th gen intel machine with 16gb of ram and an SSD for the price of a 4Gb Pi 5. Add an ESP32 running ESPhome or Firmata and you’ve got everything you could do with a Pi and a lot more.
Got a link? I’d love to get me one of those
Something like the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 will do the trick, they are all over eBay
If they’ve already got a 4B there’s no reason not to use it for one of the many low-power low-profile uses, especially when the cost of PC components is going nuts now
Whats an x86_64 equivalent of a pi these days? I’d love to find one, especially worried if pi goes the way of Arduino
Check out the Futro S740. It is more powerful than the pi, uses comparable power and still quite compact.
They can be found (in Germany at least) for 40€ with 4gb RAM and about 50€ for 8gb of ram. Ram is upgradeble, so is storage.
If you want something (much) more powerful, there is the Lenovo tiny line, for example the m710q or m720q (one cpu generation newer).
Much appreciated will check it out! 😃
I’m running Home Assistant on mine at the moment. It’s amazing. Really. Apart from being an great smart home solution I’ve found it a good solution to create dashboards for life.
I have set up our family calendar, train schedules that change routes depending on the time. Waste collection notifications. It warns me to get a raincoat and umbrella in the morning. I get news headlines for my interests…
Before that I’ve tried a lot. It was my first step into home labbing 2 years ago. It brought me back to my youth. Breaking the family computer and trying to fix it before anyone noticing it.
Most of the stuff I ran used Docker.
- Joplin notes
- Mealie
- Immich
- Authentic
- Wanderer
- Homarr
- pihole
- portainer
Within a year I grew out of my pi setup and bought a second hand mini Lenovo that now runs Proxmox. Minor investment, huge upgrade. Moved away from dockers also.
The pi is a fun gateway drug.
Why no docker?
Big +1 for second hand corporate mini PCs
They’re cheaper and better in every way than the Pi
Only get the Pi if you need a specific HAT or GPIO. And even then get a zero.
Only get the Pi if you need a specific HAT or GPIO. And even then get a zero.
Or if you want to run the machine via PoE.
There are machines (like the Futro s740) that can be powered by POE as well.
A Pi 4 can do quite a bit. Maybe start off with some Docker apps. Try and host PiHole for ad blocking at home?
Mine was my local Forgejo server, NAS server, DHCP -> DNS server for ad blocking on devices connected to the network, torrent server, syncthing server for mobile phone backup, and Arch Linux proxy, since I’ve a couple of machines that basically pull the same updates as each other.
I’ve retired it in favour of a mini PC, so it’s back to being a RetroPie server, have loads of old games available in the spare room for when we have a party, amuses children of all ages.
They’re quite capable machines. If they weren’t so I/O limited, they’d be amazing. They tend to max out at 10 megabyte/second on SD card or over USB / ethernet. If you don’t need a faster disk than that, they’re likely to be ideal in the role.
I got my Pi4 to be a media player - LibreElec or Kodi - for my old, not-smart TV. It plays my library of CDs&DVDs, frontend for OTA TV, and a variety of streaming services. Fanless, so it doesn’t distract from audio, low power, so I don’t mind leaving it on 24/7. You can configure it to listen to a USB IR receiver, but I control mine from phone via web. The actual media library/NAS and tvheaded run on an old desktop in another room.
My favorite thing is all the sensors you can hook up. Adafruit & Sparkfun have a wide array of sensors with breakout boards for simplicity and well documented python libraries. I started just logging temperature, humidity, then air quality, CO2 to my own database and web page, but eventually expanded to full HomeAssisstant system.
Pihole.
@tburkhol @rook Protip for Pi4B TV usage: if your TV has a USB port, you might be able to power the Pi from it. I turn the TV on and my 4B gets power from it, boots up, and starts Kodi (I’m using libreelec) automatically. When I turn the TV off, the TV hardware stays powered for like 5 mins before going into a low power mode which kills power to the Pi.
many don’t deliver enough power for a Pi 4.
There are some sites dedicated to suggestions, or if you download the pi image burner tool it has a bunch of OS suggestions in the menu, like Pihole, Kodi media box, home assistant, etc.
I have a few running. One was setup as NAS and dlna music server using OpenMediaVault, one is a Volumio music player, my other one is Home assistant.
If you like old 80s-90s games there is RetroPi.
Too many choices really :)
For the NAS, what do you use for storage? Do you have an external drive hooked up via USB or something else?
Yes, I bought a rocketfish drive enclosure years back, so dropped a drive in that, and attached vias USB. Never had issues with it.
Assign as data drive in Openmediavault.
Openmediavault had some plugins and settings to set folders2ram so that the initial SDcard OS is writting to RAM instead of constant writes to the SDcard.
