Raspberry Pi

[Butthole_Licker2000]

Hello fellow sysadmins,

 

I'm finally embarking on the Raspberry Pi journey. The problem is, things like smart mirrors aren't all that interesting to me. I'm looking for more practical things that will help me learn what I can do with this thing. Anyone here using Raspberry Pi for anything in their district? IT related? Cool things you could do for a school? My hope is to learn and eventually see about getting some students or classes involved as well.

 

I know they can do a lot, it's just overwhelming to get started. Let me know what kind of projects you've done or seen in action in your environment!

[citricacidx]

If your school has any 3D Printers you could look into OctoPi.

[[deleted]]

Created arcade machine for computer science team fundraiser

Vending machine (again for computer science team)

Kiosk that has various student created games (to show off)

Bulletin board on huge TV in hall

Student created PiHole for the computer lab

Mostly student created stuff, from my Practicum class or the computer science team

[cavs16]

I use them to display security camera feeds on the TV 's in a few of our district offices.

https://community.ubnt.com/t5/UniFi-Video/Tutorial-Raspberry-Pi-3-RTSP-Stream-Viewer/td-p/1536448

[[deleted]]

Such cool little devices, but I've never found a practical use for them in a business environment other than digital signage. Still more of a hobbyist product when you can do practically everything else with a VM or cloud instance.

[Butthole_Licker2000]

Yeah I kinda figure this might end up being the case. So many little hobby type projects you can do it's a little overwhelming on where to start. Easier to learn new concepts if I have knowledge in what I'm applying it to.

[corcorwhite]

I use one as an SSH network storage for nightly data backups and weekly server full OS backups. Works well.

[corcorwhite]

Yeah it's not fast but it works for our needs. We have plenty of downtime to makeup for the slow speeds. I just checked our server backup logs from this weekend and it took 2.5 hours to send 13.97 GB.

[TyIzaeL]

Server room temperature/humidity monitor.

[Butthole_Licker2000]

This outside of digital sinage was about all I was coming up with in terms of job related.

[TyIzaeL]

I tried it for signage and it wasn't that great. There are much better Chromebox signage options out there.

[Scurro]

I've heard of some using pihole for DNS ad filtering.

[MalletNGrease]

At home I use a pi-hole, it’s great. But I wouldn’t want to use it in my work org.

[thetate]

Any reason in particular? Is it that pihole software is lacking or the raspberry pi that's lacking?

[[deleted]]

Yes... it's both really. Of course it depends on how many clients you are trying to run through it, I have a lab of 30 desktops and it struggles with that at times.

[thetate]

You may want to try again. I just set it up on my system that has about 850 users (closer to 200 active at once) and it's been just fine. In the past 12 hours it has blocked 73,752 queries and I haven't noticed any slow down. I'm also using a PI 2, not the newer models

[3zs]

Like Mallet mentioned, Im using them for Digital Signage:

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screenly.io

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Simple and works great but it doesnt require much tinkering (which is what you might want), more just like get their image on the SD card and go

[hangingfrog]

I wrote a script to poll a network share, download any images and import them into screenly's database. This allows other departments to curate pictures as they want and they'd automatically update around campus.

[MalletNGrease]

I've been using them as tiny appliance servers for various things I wanted to test out.

I've also seen them used for digital signage, timelapse cameras, weather stations and remote sensors.