Project Ideas for Christmas

[coach]

Dear PH collective…

I have a spare Raspberry Pi 4B and a redundant 10 year old iPad. I’m reasonably IT and tech literate having spent life in IT, AV and video businesses.

What interesting, fun projects can I get up to with these two bits of spare hardware over the Christmas and New Year break?

[595Heaven]

You can use the Pi to make a flight tracker and feed into global trackers. You do need a DVB-T USB stick, but these are cheap enough.

[dundarach]

coach said:

Dear PH collective

I have a spare Raspberry Pi 4B and a redundant 10 year old iPad. I m reasonably IT and tech literate having spent life in IT, AV and video businesses.

What interesting, fun projects can I get up to with these two bits of spare hardware over the Christmas and New Year break?

Two of my pi's are running an old school BBS and a pi hole

The BBS is fun, https://www.mysticbbs.com/ it's a right techy set up and messing around you'll love it

If you wanted to play with mine, you'll need to telnet to dundarach.tplinkdns.com:23 using something like netrunner https://www.mysticbbs.com/downloads.html

That would be my vote, as for the ipad, comic book reader or play Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead on it,

That should be enough geeking for you!

[coach]

Excellent suggestions so far!

[biggiles]

Home Assistant on the Pi, and fix the ipad to the wall as a monitor?

(HA is incredibly easy to set up).

[mikef]

Given your background

Someone on another thread recently recommended Volumio to build a streaming unit on a RaspPi

[RizzoTheRat]

If you like old games, RetroPie
https://retropie.org.uk/



This suggestion does involve buying additional hardware but do you have any interest in home automation?
A Pi is perfectly capable of running Home Assistant (better with a hard drive than an SD card though), and the iPad can be used as a Dashboard. You'd need to buy a Zigbee/Thread dongle (£30 or so) but then you have lots of options. Ikea do a decent range of pretty cheap bulbs and smart plugs (£6 for their Trekakt smart plug), and you can then start programming the Christmas tree lights, having lights come on when you walk in the room (<£10 motion sensors). Personally I prefer smart switches to smart bulbs, because everything still works normally, but they're more expensive and a couple of smart bulbs will get you started for <£10 each.

[BORNXenon]

RizzoTheRat said:

If you like old games, RetroPie
https://retropie.org.uk/



This suggestion does involve buying additional hardware but do you have any interest in home automation?
A Pi is perfectly capable of running Home Assistant (better with a hard drive than an SD card though), and the iPad can be used as a Dashboard. You'd need to buy a Zigbee/Thread dongle (£30 or so) but then you have lots of options. Ikea do a decent range of pretty cheap bulbs and smart plugs (£6 for their Trekakt smart plug), and you can then start programming the Christmas tree lights, having lights come on when you walk in the room (<£10 motion sensors). Personally I prefer smart switches to smart bulbs, because everything still works normally, but they're more expensive and a couple of smart bulbs will get you started for <£10 each.

I've been running HA on a Pi for about the last 4 years and I've never needed a Zigbee dongle, all mine runs over WiFi and works well.
I upgraded mine to a Pi5 last Xmas which allowed me to ditch the dedicated Plex server I had and I now run the Plex Server add-on on HA, expected it to not work very well, but it actually works like a champ.

[geeks]

HA is well tried and tested, you can use the iPad as an LCARS interface if you are a fan of Star Trek.

Couple of cheap sensors and a picam and you could build an all sky camera.
Pihole is a good shout too
Octopi or Kilpper if you do 3D printing
Retropi for gaming

[BORNXenon]

geeks said:

HA is well tried and tested, you can use the iPad as an LCARS interface if you are a fan of Star Trek.

I have two wall tablets, one in the living room which can control everything in the house, and another in my daughters bedroom that controls her rooms heating/heating schedule, and each individual TPLink smart downlight bulb.

They run on the lighting circuit via 2 channel Shelly relay, 1 channel is the light switch, the other goes to a 12v transformer/buck convertor that the tablet is then plugged into. An automation in Home Assistant then keeps an eye on the battery level, if it drops below 20%, it flips the switch on channel 2 of the relay which starts the tablet charging, once it reaches 80%, it flips it off again, this way the battery's should stay in optimum condition for as long as possible.

The only issue I've had is down to me using Kindle Fire tablets. They are both debloated but every time they download an update from Amazon, they re-bloat. To stop this, I have blocked internet access for the two tablets but they will only update their clocks from Amazons NTP service, not the local source so the clock's do run out by several minutes sometimes.

[geeks]

BORNXenon said:

geeks said:

HA is well tried and tested, you can use the iPad as an LCARS interface if you are a fan of Star Trek.

I have two wall tablets, one in the living room which can control everything in the house, and another in my daughters bedroom that controls her rooms heating/heating schedule, and each individual TPLink smart downlight bulb.

They run on the lighting circuit via 2 channel Shelly relay, 1 channel is the light switch, the other goes to a 12v transformer/buck convertor that the tablet is then plugged into. An automation in Home Assistant then keeps an eye on the battery level, if it drops below 20%, it flips the switch on channel 2 of the relay which starts the tablet charging, once it reaches 80%, it flips it off again, this way the battery's should stay in optimum condition for as long as possible.

The only issue I've had is down to me using Kindle Fire tablets. They are both debloated but every time they download an update from Amazon, they re-bloat. To stop this, I have blocked internet access for the two tablets but they will only update their clocks from Amazons NTP service, not the local source so the clock's do run out by several minutes sometimes.

I like the wall mount there good job. I haven't finished all my HA sensor installs yet but am about halfway through. Need to get the TRVs sorted as well but that will have to wait until the summer now so I can drain everything down as only one room has a regular TRV let alone a smart one.

Have some aqara buttons and switches too so one press and it turns on all of the Christmas lights etc.

[ARH]

biggiles said:

Home Assistant on the Pi, and fix the ipad to the wall as a monitor?

(HA is incredibly easy to set up).

It's finding your way out of the massive rabbit hole you will create that is the difficult bit.

[RizzoTheRat]

BORNXenon said:

I've been running HA on a Pi for about the last 4 years and I've never needed a Zigbee dongle, all mine runs over WiFi and works well.
I upgraded mine to a Pi5 last Xmas which allowed me to ditch the dedicated Plex server I had and I now run the Plex Server add-on on HA, expected it to not work very well, but it actually works like a champ.

I think there's positives and negatives of both. Zigbee is lower power, so things like my motion sensors and door sensors can run for well over a year on a battery, I'm not clogging up my wifi with loads of extra devices, and it's more secure without needing to mess about with additional VLANS etc. On the other hand I need the dongle to communicate with them, and Zigbee uses the same spectrum as Wifi so can get some interference occasionally, so isn't always quite as stable as Wifi based systems.

After initially using it on a Pi and then my Synology NAS, I bought a mini PC a while ago and moved HA, Plex, PiHole, etc to that instead, so I would warn that any of this stuff is kind of a gateway drug...

[BORNXenon]

geeks said:

I like the wall mount there good job. I haven't finished all my HA sensor installs yet but am about halfway through. Need to get the TRVs sorted as well but that will have to wait until the summer now so I can drain everything down as only one room has a regular TRV let alone a smart one.

Have some aqara buttons and switches too so one press and it turns on all of the Christmas lights etc.

I'm not actually running any sensors, all of the lights are on Shelly relays and the heating is on Drayton Wiser. Had the same issue as you with the TRVs, only the bedroom radiators had TRVs, so had to drain the system to swap the rest over, then just fitted the Wiser Smart TRVs gradually over the next 6 months or so. The only radiators I didn't swap over was the towel rail in the en suite and the one in the hall but I wish I'd done the towel rail so that I can dry towels while the rest of the system is off during summer. I'm going to have to do it at some point, but draining the system again isn't appealing.

[RizzoTheRat]

BORNXenon said:

I'm going to have to do it at some point, but draining the system again isn't appealing.

I've changed radiator valves before by using a freeze spray on the pipes. They work really well for something quick like just swapping a valve.

[geeks]

RizzoTheRat said:

After initially using it on a Pi and then my Synology NAS, I bought a mini PC a while ago and moved HA, Plex, PiHole, etc to that instead, so I would warn that any of this stuff is kind of a gateway drug...

Yeah I migrated from a Pi to a VM running in UNRAID a little while ago to repurpose my Pi into a controller for my Christmas light show. Also migrated Pihole into Docker as well. You can put HA into Docker but I found it didn't feel like that particular juice was worth the squeeze, HAOS is really quite good.

BORNXenon said:

I'm not actually running any sensors, all of the lights are on Shelly relays and the heating is on Drayton Wiser. Had the same issue as you with the TRVs, only the bedroom radiators had TRVs, so had to drain the system to swap the rest over, then just fitted the Wiser Smart TRVs gradually over the next 6 months or so. The only radiators I didn't swap over was the towel rail in the en suite and the one in the hall but I wish I'd done the towel rail so that I can dry towels while the rest of the system is off during summer. I'm going to have to do it at some point, but draining the system again isn't appealing.

So far I have some bluetooth temp and humidity sensors. I need to setup some presence sensors for automating the living room lights and heating etc. Most everything else is on smart plugs, I will be dropping some shelly relays into the light circuit next year as well. Weather station API is next up as well so I can feed that into a display etc. As someone else said, it's a gateway drug/rabbit hole. I have some WLED instances in there as well. Endless really.

[coach]

Holy crap! Many cunning ideas here! Thank you!

[geeks]

RizzoTheRat said:

BORNXenon said:

I'm going to have to do it at some point, but draining the system again isn't appealing.

I've changed radiator valves before by using a freeze spray on the pipes. They work really well for something quick like just swapping a valve.

If I were doing one or two then I would do this as well. But I have five to do so it can wait until the Summer and I will drain the system.

[paulrockliffe]

geeks said:

UnRaid

It's almost not worth bothering with the RPi because once you go down that rabbit hole you end up having to transfer everything over to the proper server you end up with. UnRaid is awesome, I would definitely just start with the hardware to run that, even if it's not very good. You can very easily move everything over to new better hardware when you realise you need twin xenons and 200Gb of RAM and 30Tb of storage....

Home Assistant running as a VM on UnRaid, then ESP32 chips if you want bespoke sensors - RPI is wasted on most things you end up wanting to talk to HA and ESP32 chips rare buttons.

I have a couple of RPis, one is built into an Ender 3V2 and runs Octoprint, I'm trying to get that to the point where it needs one plug and Home Assistant can turn on both the RPi and the printer with a Shelley, so it can sit turned off and then if I open Cura on any of my PCs it powers up and preheats the filament ready to go. At the moment the Pi back-feeds the printer's motherboard enough that it runs the printer's fans 24-7 so it's quite annoying unless the USB cable is unplugged.

The second Pi I have running Tailscale in another property, combined with different DNS ranges and some trickery I side-stepped Plex's insistence that I need to pay to stream content between the two houses by putting the stream through my tailnet and have it appear from the Pi with what is a local IP address.

The best thing I've done with Home Assistant is integrate Tado at both houses and then setup automations so that I can put the 4 zones on my Stream Deck. I have a dial for each which sets the temperature, then pressing the dial in sets the zone back to its auto mode. The buttons display both the set temperature and the actual temperature. Means I can run the Tado app on my phone and then still control the temperature at the other house without having to log in and out of the app all the time. The possibilities are endless with Home Assistant, every home should have one!

[paulrockliffe]

I should also say, you can do loads in Home Assistant without any hardware or sensors.

If you just hook up to external data sources and your phone you can do some cool stuff - I have a map that shows where I am when I'm cycling and have the Google Maps API telling me how long it takes to get to work every 5 minutes between 5 am and 10 am, so you can see the traffic ramp up and calm down again. I know it takes 30 minutes to get up and out the door, so HA can set an alarm to go off when the time to work gets up to suitable value and I get to stay in bed as long as possible without getting stuck in traffic.

I also have a widget on my phone that is counting down to my retirement date.