Can't wait to buy this, boot it up, play with it for four hours, then stick it in the same desk drawer with the other Pis I have bought over the years.
(The upgrades look great, just my attention span is not so great)
(The upgrades look great, just my attention span is not so great)
I've got:
* A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet.
* A 3B+ running the UniFi controller for my home network.
* One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day.
* One is built into an internet connected dog treat dispenser I built as a gift.
* A rather dusty Pi is running CNCjs so I can have a decent interface to my cheap grbl CNC.
* And finally I have a Pi running OctoPrint for my 3D printer.
And that's just the ones currently running. I've got two more in progress. One to automate an exhaust fan based on inside and outside temperatures. Another is destined for the garage where it will replace the not-so-great MyQ "smart" functionality of the garage door opener.
To each their own I suppose, but I've been consuming RasPis like candy. $60 all-in gets you a fairly beefy platform with almost all the I/O you could require and a vast ecosystem of software and HATs. Honestly their only downside is that at some point I'll have to reconfigure my home network when I start exhausting my current internal /24 with 200 RasPis.
Do you have any resources on how to set up something like that?
Ooooh do you have the code up somewhere for this? I would love to set it up at home :)
If you have Home Assistant, someone built code for that: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/circadian-light-with-p...
As for mine, it's a total hack job, but for what it's worth: https://gist.github.com/fpgaminer/7840a6f2fb2d3a3be83625d7ac...
I don't do the fancy minute by minute adjustments to the color temperature; just a couple fixed settings for time of day and based on when the sun sets. And I just have it adjust a scene, which I have my Hue switches configured to use when I turn the lights on.
There's no good way to have this system work with, for example, turning on the lights through Alexa/Siri/etc since they won't use the Circadian scene that's been setup. But what I've got works well enough for now.
https://github.com/beaugunderson/sleep-lights/blob/master/sl...
We have neighbors that smoke, and sometimes based upon wind patterns it blows into our yard. Any idea if they have sensors that can pick up this sort of thing so I can close our windows?
I have some code to read from this, it's not too hard. PM me if you're interested in my code. (I can open source it.)
[1] "CO2Meter RAD-0301 Mini CO2 Monitor" on Amazon, $70
You are posting here, so at least internet access you should have :)
EDIT: What about a magic mirror? https://forum.magicmirror.builders/
I also considered a magic mirror, but my problem with a magic mirror is that I don't have the tools necessary to build my own frame.
What software are you running? I have been using Dietpi for almost all my projects. Plex comes native( as an option to install) and a bunch of other software.
Normally you need a laptop or something hooked into it over USB to feed it your G code, or do manual control. But I didn't want my laptop in the shop getting dusty while the CNC runs, and I also didn't want to risk the cheap CNC failing and throwing a voltage spike into my laptop.
So I opted to use the RasPi. Also makes it nice to have a web interface, and you can add lots of stuff to it (e.g. camera).
(Sainsmart sells an offline controller attachment, which allows manual control with buttons and feeding gcode off an sd card. But the RasPi is only a little more money and you get the web interface, etc)
P.S. I should tack on the usual warning about hooking up a life threatening device like a CNC to the network. I use an SSH tunnel to keep mine secure, instead of exposing CNCjs directly.
Do you even need a RPI for this? Some of these seem overengineered.
Oh for sure. Normally I'd throw the Hue automation software on my home server, but it's busy with other stuff.
Other than that, for the other stuff I listed, I would have said the same a few years ago and opted for ESPs, Arduinos, STM32s, or some other "lightweight" solutions. But the Pi has gotten to this nice sweet spot now that they've got WiFi built-in and most of the rough edges are gone. They can do almost everything the other solutions can do, and for the things they can't you can buy HATs that fill in the gaps. So it's just nice to have one big, universal hammer that I can pull out for my crazy projects.
Most importantly, I don't like wasting time any more, and I'm willing to spend a couple tens of bucks on RasPis that might be overkill, rather than save X dollars making the best, slimmest, most engineered solution around the perfect STM32 chip.
What's the unifi controller?
The RasPi itself is so cheap I think a lot of people cheap out on the power supply and such, which ends up giving them lots of problems.
Anyway, given the poor reviews I've seen on the Cloud Key regarding hardware failures, especially on the newer versions, I just went with a Pi. But yeah, if someone has a machine on their network already, that's a great option too. I just wish Ubiquiti would release an official Docker image.
EDIT: I'm not necessarily arguing that people use RasPis for UniFi controllers, or that you personally should. I just thought your comment was a good opportunity to discuss RasPi reliability, because I know a lot of people have trouble with that.
Long-term, my plan is to mod some flavor of computer PSU and get properly regulated 5V out of it.
Also, I'm one of those people who runs a UniFi controller on a Pi. I used Docker, it's been totally fine for my uses.
Maybe it's a personality flaw, but I get plenty of satisfaction from just reading blog write-ups if things I could have done with my tech junk, without all the associated time invested.
It's much easier to vicariously enjoy projects like these, which is why I think drawer-dwelling is an inevitable destiny for most of these widgets.
That's also why I'm tring microcontrollers, it's back to low level, less shiny projects, but mentally saner.
[0]: https://docs.rust-embedded.org/discovery/index.html
[1]: https://github.com/rust-embedded/embedded-hal
[2]: https://github.com/japaric/cortex-m-rtfm
[3]: Such as https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/stm32f3discovery.html
http://www.ti.com/design-resources/embedded-development/hard...
Seems like the number of them has gone way up so if you don't want to waste time thinking about which one to try, here are some suggestions.
Cheap and minimal ($10): http://www.ti.com/tool/msp-exp430g2et
High spec for things like motor control ($34): http://www.ti.com/tool/LAUNCHXL-F28379D
The Adafruit Trinket M0 was what I needed for a recent project. It's $8 and tiny. The feather boards also look very neat, if you need BLE, the ability to stack peripherals, etc. They all integrate with Arduino so you can be up and running in a minute. (They also support Python running on the device, which is maybe even easier than Arduino.)
I'm sure it's a 'flaw' that most of us have.
I also like getting grand plans for a (hardware) project, ordering the parts from Ali express, then losing interest before the parts have arrived, so they still end up in 'the drawer'.
My wife refers to this as the raspberry pile.
It essentially blocks tracking and advertisements on all devices, not just my computers with ad block. Just need to keep the block lists up to date every couple weeks, but it's honestly great.
After having various weird network issues and instability on a different OS with Pi-hole (updates often broke), I switched to DietPi, and now my PiHole and OS upgrades are extremely stable.
The DietPi installer/configuration for Pi-hole sets up all the networking for you in the install "wizard", took all the weird networking headaches out for me
A few weeks ago I switched to Ad Guard Home. Has been rock solid since. The big dancehaus it doesn't support the exact same filter files.
What I meant is it doesn't seem to parse the same range of formats, so it rejected some of Pi Hole's filters as malformed.
I use to run ZoneMinder on an old PC, but it was a bit flakey, way too crazy to set up for a home system; I had learned how to config and admin it over the last several years, but I was just plain tired of it. It's another great system for security cameras, but not really for a home, unless you have a ton of cameras that need monitoring, and don't mind the dedication of a beefy machine to the task.
MotionEye OS is more a distributed solution. It is possible to set it up so one install can monitor multiple cameras (in some manner - I haven't played with it), but I like it as a simple single IP camera turn-key solution. It basically can turn a Rasperry Pi into a cheap wireless IP camera that isn't locked down or tied to a proprietary ($) cloud system.
Using a RasPi Zero W and the cheapest camera you can find, you can build such a camera for under $50.00 USD off Amazon; probably cheaper if you shop around a bit more. The only cheaper option I've found (but it takes more to set it up properly) is the ESP32 camera modules that you can get.
My wife doesn't have a clever name, but instead of usually rolling her eyes at yet another unfinished project, she loves this particular drawer because it's perfectly (and neatly) organized, like the best of unused item drawers.
One downside to the 4 is that it is moving from the low power to laptop realm in terms of power consumption which was my main interest in them. If top performance is what you care about, the Raspberry Pi is the wrong place to go looking for it.
These pi models are all tailor-made options. I think its a mistake to think in terms of "older models" when you consider the lower power requirement and higher physical stability of the rpi2 (doesn't overheat even without a fan, for example). The Zeros are less powerful but still belong in the range because of exactly that.
I've been - cross my fingers - lucky with MicroSD cards (usually Samsung, sometimes SanDisk), but having USB3 on the new model is quite the game-changer.
ETA: I do have rsync backing up my Pi setups, so losing a MicroSD would be merely annoying rather than catastrophic.