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Comment by gchokov | Hacker News Reader

Can anybody actually share useful projects with Raspberry? Yeah I have links to some "common and cool" projects that you can find over the first page in Google, but there's rarely something really useful..

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We used about 50 of them on a job for Nike earlier this month, reading from a USB-attached credit card reader from MagTek and sending the data to the server over Wi-Fi and in the streetcar, over Bluetooth LE to a co-located iPad Pro (and from there we used its cellular connection to talk to the server). Each Pi worked alongside an iPad Pro as part of an on-site digital retail experience called SNKRS XPRESS where we replicated Nike's "SNKRS" app on the iPad Pro and people bought shoes off the app and picked them up immediately. Four simultaneous locations: Toronto, New York, Chicago, and Santa Monica (i.e. Los Angeles).

Other fun tech: Node.js on the Pis, NaCl for all crypto, TypeScript on the server (and Node.js), Stripe for handling payments, GraphQL for query handling for the iOS clients, and we used QR code display and reading to distribute public keys during setup. The Bluetooth LE data transfer code between Node.js and iOS was also a nice bit of work by my friend Erik van der Tier in the Netherlands.

[0] (Warning: autoplay.) http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/02/10/nike-snkrs-xpress-to...

[1] http://hypebeast.com/2016/2/nike-snkrs-xpress-pop-up-nyc

[2] http://weartesters.com/nike-snkr-xpress-experience-recap/

This seems genuinely interesting. Any more details about the tech side?

hahaha, this comment is hilarious. Your parent comment shared an x-ray level of detail about the tech including naming the credit card reader model (MagTek), and a complete inventory of their technical stack ("Node.js on the Pis, NaCl for all crypto, TypeScript on the server (and Node.js), Stripe for handling payments, GraphQL for query handling for the iOS clients") and technical implementaiton details (QR code display and reading to distribute public keys during setup, Bluetooth LE data transfer code between Node.js on the Pis and iOS) in addition to the point of the whole solution ("sending the data to the server over Wi-Fi and in the streetcar, over Bluetooth LE to a co-located iPad Pro, and from there we used its cellular connection to talk to the server.")

What more details could you possibly want? He's gone above and beyond in sharing.

Thanks, erichocean

Pretty awesome! Thanks for sharing. Up-voted.

I have them running home automation, energy usage, security cameras, and temperature monitoring (outdoor, and indoor home brew). Plus streaming audio and an inevitible xbmc http://pauly.github.io/lightwaverf/ https://github.com/pauly/raspbrewery http://pauly.github.io/pi-motion/

I use them with webcams and motion software for a budget cctv solution. I had some issues with reliability that I kludged around by setting them to reboot once a day. I also use them for basic network monitoring with munin and smokeping.

I have exactly the same! I understood it to be down to network issues, maybe that'll be solved with on board wifi?

Retropie is awesome. It has lots of emulators in it and can be controlled by a gamepad. I bought a wireless controller and it is great.

My last-gen RPi is my primary non-interactive-media device. With Kodi / OSMC it makes a superb media center, capable of playing everything up to and including 1080p video. Very few compatibility issues, easily extensible, file transfer from my desktop via SFTP, and consumes little enough power I just leave it on 24/7.

Doesn't do H.265, sadly. I wonder if the new one will...

EDIT: Ars Technica says "yes". "The new Pi also gains H.265 support for the first time but is limited to 1080p at 30fps."

Have you (or anyone else here) got tvheadend working on the Pi? It's supposed to work, but for me falls over at the very last hurdle of never actually tuning in any channels.

But it's not hardware HEVC right?

No hardware HEVC according to [1]Sam Nazarko at OSMC. It's software decoding for HEVC. He's already had his hands on it.

[1] https://discourse.osmc.tv/t/raspberry-pi-3-announced-with-os...

I have one setup for logging temperature and heating/cooling usage from a Proliphix thermostat in my house. It also acts as a firewall to protect the thermostat from the rest of my home network.

I've another one for several years as an SSH jump host that runs Screen, Ansible. Rock solid.

Now that the Ethernet port and WiFi are on separate buses, I'm looking to test RPi3 as a home firewall.

A project that's been in my backlog is to setup a stratum 1 NTP server. This is pretty easy now with much better GPS modules available as compared to what was available 4 years ago.

I've got two setup to encode audio from a scanner for liveatc.net feeds (KCPS Tower and KSTL Approach). The one for KCPS Tower also provides ADS-B data for flightaware (https://flightaware.com/adsb/)

jasper project voice recognition with raspberry pi.

hook it up to your garage door, your lights, whatever!

http://jasperproject.github.io/

Rapid prototyping for smart mirror development. [0]

[0] http://innate.cc

I have mine reading my solar generation meter.

Thanks all for the comments.

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