RasPi - what are you using it for?

[dharmabm]

i've seen a few scattered posts recently mentioning the use of these neat little devices, and having just acquired one myself recently i am curious what uses they are being put to. mine is running as a media player (as i suspect most are) but using an external NFS server (zbox mini) for storage. i almost abandoned that purpose after running openelec and having multiple difficulties, but have been running xbian successfully for a few weeks now with only a few minor issues (mostly due to tweaking around with the media storage, not really problems with the Pi itself). i haven't tried raspbmc yet as most reviews i read seemed to favor both openelec and xbian, and it seems a bit bloated for what i want. any thoughts? i have a few sd cards to test out other uses, but i can only play at night after my 6 year old finishes his cartoons! ;>}

k

[Cloggie]

I installed OpenElec on it: http://openelec.tv/ to access my movies on my NAS.

[CMSteve]

I use mine to take up that extra space in the bottom drawer of my desk. Works with any flavor of linux, and almost zero power consumption....

[johng]

Raspbmc on one connected to 50 inch plasma screen for movies.

and wheezy-raspbian on another that I run ( experiment with ) SAMBA, MySQL, Transmission diy NAS

and Motion for time lapse video.

[Vo Nguyen Giap]

I use mine to take up that extra space in the bottom drawer of my desk. Works with any flavor of linux, and almost zero power consumption....

funny, thats what i do with my arduino mega that i searched for months to obtain. other than 1 brief session of blinking LED i just cant find the time to play with it.

[dave_boo]

Raspbian with Transmission.

It makes a HUGE difference to put your /root directory on a thumbdrive. It shouldn't if you use a class 10 card, but it does. I reckon an old SSD in a USB dock would be even better.

Fun little tidbit of information; if you plug the Pi into a powered USB hub and then plug the USB hub into the Pi you don't need a separate wall charger.

[dharmabm]

hmmm, so it seems from the overwhelming response </sarcasm> that you are all (2 out of 4) pretty happy with the raspbmc performance? i never even tested that one, as i prefer a community development model over an individual developer. i did move my openelec build to a usb drive, but i had so many problems with sdcard corruption that i gave up on that in favor of xbian. i've been pretty happy with xbian for a few weeks now although the menus aren't quite as responsive as i'd like (coming from xbmc on a pretty powerful but power-hungry laptop), but i haven't tried moving / to usb yet as it seems a bit tricky because of xbian using btrfs, although i admit i haven't researched it thoroughly.

i am curious about what skins you all are using - i have settled on amber, as it is highly configurable and pretty lightweight. i like to make my main menu very simple, with wife-tv, son-tv and my-tv as main menu items, and remove anything that my son (or wife) can accidentally screw things up with. i thought about using profiles for each of us, but a custom main menu seems to do the trick so far.

regarding power, i like your suggestion d_boo, but i am actually powering directly off my tv's usb port, and have not had any issues with allowing the pi to power up and down with tv power (although i know that may be risky) and i am not plugging anything else into the pi via usb.

actually, that reminds me of another issue, and a reason i chose xbian over openelec - when i ran xbmc on a 'real' computer, i used a remote with a usb receiver which used lirc for configuration. openelec worked (to an extent) with that setup, but i could not get lirc working on xbian. however i discovered (by accident) that xbian supported my sony tv remote natively, the only thing i had to configure manually was mapping a button to use for the context menu, otherwise it worked pretty much out-of-the-box.

looking forward to further discussion about this (and those of you with an unused pi or ardiuno in the bottom drawer should PM me if you want to be relieved of your excess baggage, i would love to have a few more of these devices at the right price)

[justsumhelp]

Using it to run apache for when ever i need to throw up a temporary website

[Crushdepth]

Got one used as an SSH box to get into a remote network. Got another one sitting on my desk.

I'd like to try and adapt one for some kind of home automation stuff (also tinkering with some Arduino), but that's just a pipe dream at this stage.

Edited October 31, 2013 by Crushdepth

[dave_boo]

hmmm, so it seems from the overwhelming response </sarcasm> that you are all (2 out of 4) pretty happy with the raspbmc performance? i never even tested that one, as i prefer a community development model over an individual developer. i did move my openelec build to a usb drive, but i had so many problems with sdcard corruption that i gave up on that in favor of xbian. i've been pretty happy with xbian for a few weeks now although the menus aren't quite as responsive as i'd like (coming from xbmc on a pretty powerful but power-hungry laptop), but i haven't tried moving / to usb yet as it seems a bit tricky because of xbian using btrfs, although i admit i haven't researched it thoroughly.

i am curious about what skins you all are using - i have settled on amber, as it is highly configurable and pretty lightweight. i like to make my main menu very simple, with wife-tv, son-tv and my-tv as main menu items, and remove anything that my son (or wife) can accidentally screw things up with. i thought about using profiles for each of us, but a custom main menu seems to do the trick so far.

regarding power, i like your suggestion d_boo, but i am actually powering directly off my tv's usb port, and have not had any issues with allowing the pi to power up and down with tv power (although i know that may be risky) and i am not plugging anything else into the pi via usb.

actually, that reminds me of another issue, and a reason i chose xbian over openelec - when i ran xbmc on a 'real' computer, i used a remote with a usb receiver which used lirc for configuration. openelec worked (to an extent) with that setup, but i could not get lirc working on xbian. however i discovered (by accident) that xbian supported my sony tv remote natively, the only thing i had to configure manually was mapping a button to use for the context menu, otherwise it worked pretty much out-of-the-box.

looking forward to further discussion about this (and those of you with an unused pi or ardiuno in the bottom drawer should PM me if you want to be relieved of your excess baggage, i would love to have a few more of these devices at the right price)

I'm using the default skin; it's what I'm used to and the little bit of lag when in menus isn't bothersome enough when compared to the fact it plays ALL my rips (from ~900 kb/s to some 5 mb/s I've farted around with) with no issues. I take that back; it chokes on DTS True-audio (correct name? whatever it is that the Blu-rays have) but transcoding that to AC-3 let's the Raspberry do its job.

I'm coming from a T9500 with 8GB of RAM; the overall snappiness is of course down, but so is power consumption. Some time in the middle of the month I'll try and slap it onto my 8400mAh portable power pack and loop a video to see how long it lasts; I bet it's way better than the old machine's draw.

I do like transmission-web installed; I've yet to see transmission-gtk work for a decent amount of time without crashing. It is a bit sparse as far as "Move completed transfers to..." but an rsync cron job takes care of that; only issue that arises is that without checking the transmission-web page you can attempt to play a file that is only partially downloaded if the cron job snyched it before completion; you either then have to manually cp it over or wait until the next time the job runs.