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?
Sell it
I’m dead serious. They can go for a decent price which should cover the cost of a X86_64 machine
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
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.
I use them from time to time. Sometimes to tinker on, or have a specific purpose. For instance one runs a display that I can shuffle through all my surveillance cams. One runs a Magic Mirror. Pretty neat little project with useful applications.
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.
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.
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.
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 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’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.
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.
I installed mainsail os and use it as my main controller for my 3d printer, sounds complex but it just needs a usb cable and the firmware can upload itself
What’s currently running on mine:
- 10 commodity SSDs through a powered USB hub forming a poor man’s NAS with snapraid + mergerfs
- Podsync for converting my favorite YouTube channels to podcast feeds
- Syncthing for generic file synchronization
- K3s for whatever projects coming to my mind
- Retroarch for occasional gaming needs
- MPD with a floppy disk interface as my music station
- CUPS for printserver
10 commodity SSDs through a powered USB hub forming a poor man’s NAS with snapraid + mergerfs
How did you end up with this setup? Did you just already have a bunch of SSDs from over the years? That’d be cool af if you posted a photo of it.
I use mine as a low power server. Whenever I feel like tinkering with a website or something, I can just ssh into it without thinking about electricity usage. Jellyfin and such is also a good usecase
To build on all the great suggestions here, you can install DietPi (a pared down version of Debian), and then use Docker on top of that to run almost any of the services mentioned in this thread on a single RPI host machine.
I run Adguard Home without any issue on an RPI Zero so installing only that on your 4b will leave some performance on the table.
Pihole+unbound, navidrome for your music. Tailscale for remote connection to your music. Setup your own photo library with immich. An invidious instance
I use mine to run RetroPi, it has a bunch of old console emulators. Get a big torrent of old ROMs and you are set for retro gaming.
I run nextcloud on mine.
If I were doing it again today, I would try the AIO installation
You can easily run Jellyfin and Immich (I disabled the machine learning bits though) on this. As an extra I also run Metube for easy downloads of youtube videos.
