How to use Raspberry Pi most effectively
How to use Raspberry Pi’s most effectively is a question frequently asked. I will share my experiences in brief.
Sure you start with projects like:
- Pi Mirror (never tried)
- Pi radio (really nice project and with a little antenna can reach long distance)
- Retro gaming device (interesting project, never tried)
- Media server (Kodi etc.)
- Pi-hole (stopped using as ad block+ serves the purpose and saw significant lag in DNS resolution at one time)
- Media downloading server (transmission etc.)
DietPi is a good OS which comes with many of the above pre-built and with choices. It is lightweight and very suitable for such projects.
One of the most effective use of Raspberry Pi is interfacing with hardware devices and use for purposes such as:
- Person detection and automated entry
- IoT Hub for sensors with analysis, cloud integration etc.
- Custom solutions for Seniors which integrates with TV (IR), Echo devices (voice recognition can become a problem with Seniors). I am working for such a solution which uses rfid cards to enable certain services like play songs from a singer, start tv on a specific channel (it is cumbersome with using Smart TV coupled with set-top Dish TV box which requires two separate remotes to operate), detailed weather, local news etc.
Soon you will realize that Raspberry Pi is a full computer, so you can run multiple processes at once, limited only by CPU and memory. Even then you would be surprised at how powerful it is. I have successfully run 3 Java based marketing automation software on one without any issues.
However, when you have heavy-duty services to run like mqtt server for interfacing with multiple publishers and subscribers and heavy message load, it is advisable to run it in a single Pi for several reasons:
- dedicated disk & network IO
- sufficient RAM
- easy to provision for fail-over
- easy to manage without impacting other services
The above also is good justification to run on Pi instead of containers (like lxd or docker) on your desktop / server.
I will end this with particularly good use I found of Raspberry Pi, use as a load balancing and failover device for multiple internet connections. I used hardware solutions from DLink & Mi and found both to be unreliable and with quirks and limitations.
Let me know all good uses you found with your Raspberry Pi in comments below.
