What are some great use cases for a Raspberry Pi 4, if I buy the 5 to replace it?
What are some great use cases for a Raspberry Pi 4, if I buy the 5 to replace it?
Alot of us who have a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 might upgrade to the Raspberry Pi 5.
Doing so would leave us with 2 Pi's. What are some great use cases for the older Pi, that would no longer be the main machine?
Here is a controversial thought; do you need to replace the 4?
I can't speak for the OP, but in my case.... It was very much a resounding YES!!!!! If your using Pis as general home servers, like I was, you can very quickly run into resource constraints. I wound up replacing 5 Pi 4's with a pair of 4th gen Intel boxes and I'm still hit resource limitations from time to time. Though now it is more io related then ram or cpu.
Sell them used and reduce the cost of entry to other people
- Octoprint if you have a 3D printer
- Volumio (or similar) if want a device you can cast music to
- for astronomy can install astroberry for remote control of your scope and camera
- run home assistant for home automation
- pihole for use as a DNS server that blocks ads
- plug a camera in and use it as a webcam/ security camera
Thanks man!
I will try Volumio for sure! I also want to try home automation some time, but I don't think I have enough hardware to run with it yet.
I started my home assistant journey with 4 smart globes, a Google home speaker with a pi 4. I learned how to use it and started integrating things I don't need hardware for, such as shopping/Todo lists, weather, Spotify, last.fm, calendars, basically anything I can learn without hardware. Right now I'm working on getting a shopping list sent to me when I enter the shops zone.
Then I bought a bunch of NFC tags (they're cheap) for medication reminders, kitty litter reminders/tracking. I have a music poster in my house I've stuck an NFC tag to and it opens up the album on Spotify, turns on Bluetooth and connects to my speaker.
I've slowly been adding more devices as I go along due to cost constraints. Not that smart home stuff is expensive, I just can't afford to do it all at once. Which also gives me time to consider/research smart devices before I buy.
100% recommend. It's addicting actually.
Oh and you can put Adguard on home assistant too as an add on.
What do you use the Pi for now?
I had a bunch of Pi 3Bs sitting around, so I made piholes for a few friends and family, I made a dedicated MAME emulator that I never have time to play, and I gave one to each of my kids to learn about computers and linux. I also use one for work as a linux test environment for our software, but the 3 hardware doesn't really keep up.
Right now I use it for:
- PiHole
- Plex/Jellyfin
- WireGuard VPN
- Sonarr/Radarr and all that follows.
I would consider giving it away to family for the same purpose. Thanks for the suggestion!
Since none of these require a Raspberry Pi to run, I would suggest using a mini PC (with an Intel N100 or similar) instead of a Pi 5. With all the accessories needed for the Pi, a mini PC can actually be cheaper and of course a lot more powerful. Since the Pi 5 is very power-inefficient, a mini PC can even be better in that regard too if that matters to you.
Especially for Jellyfin a PC with an Intel CPU with integrated GPU is awesome, since Jellyfin supports hardware transcoding with that.
I hear rpi5 doesn't come with hardware decoding, so that is something rpi4 is better at.
Good call if true
Actually need to know this. I haven't heard about it myself, but maybe I missed it?
Apparently it only has 4k60 HEVC decode and no encoders
Yes, here the question is if you really need to upgrade to 5, and if you really need, why not buy a dedicated NUC for example that would be a lot more powerful and extensible than the 5, while also consuming not too much more power.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point DNS Domain Name Service/System NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) Plex Brand of media server package SBC Single-Board Computer VPN Virtual Private Network
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
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I’d add a 2nd Pi-hole (sounds like you have one already?) for redundancy.
I have 2 pi 4. One of them runs Vaultwarden as my self-hosted password manager. The other runs TPLink Omada SDN management software to manage my switch and WiFi APs.