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Comment by antongribok | Hacker News Reader

My biggest problem with the Raspberry Pis is not having enough time. I'm serious. The ultra low price point makes it very easy to go out and buy one (thanks MicroCenter) but then finding time and energy to complete a project from start to finish is currently my biggest challenge.

I have several at home "in production" doing things like Z-Wave home automation, Proliphix thermostat chat-ops, wifi AP, some web scraping scripts...

But, at the same time I have a bunch of other ideas that I have a hard time finding time for.

My next project will be setting up Pi Cameras for home security and this new platform is looking very promising for that. Very exciting, but I'm dreading not finding time for it.

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I have much the same problem! I am in the process of using Raspberry Pis to control my model trains. I have sensors in in the tracks that are connected to GPIO pins. I need a network of Raspberry Pis to control my whole system but only one of them needs to be a model 3, the others can be these new Pi zero Ws.

Are you using multiple RPis just to get more GPIOs? Why not use a BeagleBone instead, which has way more IO than the RPi?

Or even a multiplexer chip or two.

I've spent the past 2-3 months slowly learning about hardware with cheap ESP8266 boards. So much fun wiring small wifi-enabled boards to random sensors and output devices.

I suspect I'll graduate to using PIs in the future, I used to own one that was solely used for emulation, but it didn't survive my international relocation.

The projects you listed seem quite involved. I prefer to do smaller projects I know I can finish in a weekend or two. You even say it yourself:

> The ultra low price point makes it very easy to go out and buy one

Which is exactly why I don't feel bad if my project is not some amazing thing that will change my life.

I love having my pi set up as a headless in-home media server. I have it always-on and my nas mounted to it.

Another thing I would like to do is set another pi up as a DNS server.

Haha, you already seem to have more time for it than me ;) Mine just switches the outside lighting at sunrise/sundown.

Hi! Do you do the z-wave packet radio yourself, with something like the RFM69HCW [1]? Have tried finding some specs on z-wave protocol without any luck yet.

1: https://www.adafruit.com/products/3176

Found zwavepublic.com now :-)

I use a cheap USB Z-wave dongle that I got from Amazon. I haven't really gotten into SDR.

One project that I've thought of was to use an SDR to monitor Z-wave traffic for security. This is very low on my list at the moment.

problem I sometimes see is even if "electronics geeks" have project pages online, there isn't always so much collaboration, or information sharing.

There are so may projects doing the same things ala https://xkcd.com/927/

I think some real initiative to standardise common projects, and make them explicitly communal, with the creation of tutorials as the main focus, would do wonders.

I see sites like hackaday.io, for example, and it is all descriptions of personal projects (most unfinished, or early on), and the problem is rife.

A better medium is perhaps "instructables", where the focus is obviously to instruct, and the average quality (result over finesse) encourages sharing, even of unrefined instructables.

incidentally, do you have a project space? Some of those ideas you are working on are interesting, I'm working on a few myself, in collab with local hackspace.

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