Yoicks ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Multicore 64 bit processor and 1/2 GB RAM for £15 ! ! ! ! ! !!

When I set out as an assembly software engineer on a PDP11 with 32 KB Core Store and paper tape operations, it cost about £10K whereas my annual salary as a graduate beginner was about £1350 PA, way back in 1972 and I thought that I was the bees' knees back then!

Oops, forgot the ...

I sometimes imagine what would have happened if someone had tossed a fully linux loaded laptop with C compiler at Alan Turing and the boys in the last war.

well its a zero W with a tad more oomph...another solution looking for a problem :-)

Yes, more memory would be nice, but I have an app which is a little slow on the Pi Zero, and where the multiple cores would likely speed it up noticeably. I'm looking forward to testing it.

Attach some relays and input protection, and it's perfect as the core of an HMI.

Eat your hearts out Crestron and AMX :)

Prosecuted for assault?

Well I for one would be interested in people actually listing what they did with Pis.

Mine simply sits there running a web server that drives a hifi system from music on my server or from internet radio stations. Using a web interface as the user interface.

I use mine to get my GNU/Linux command line fix. I use Mutt, SLRN, Newsbeuter, Lynx (for web and Gopher), Weechat, and access BBSes.

It also runs; web server, onion server, SFTP, and NZB downloader.

My RPi3 just bust so I got the RPi4 now.

I have two Pis.

Pi 3B+ runs Cumulus weather station software, receiving temperature, rainfall, humidity and wind readings from a weather station, logging them and updating a website of them. It also runs a Node app which monitors and graphs the power consumption over time for a couple of freezers in the garage (Beko, so rated to well below freezing, before anyone comments!) using smart plugs: this is a crude way of checking that the freezers are working properly and have not a) stopped working altogether, or b) started working continuously because of lack of coolant; ideally I'd use a remote-monitored thermometer inside the freezer, but I can't find any of those for sale.

Pi 4 runs TVHeadend PVR software to record TV programmes via DVB-S and DVB-T tuners. I save the recordings to a spinning (ie not solid-state) HDD which I SAMBA-share and then edit out commercials/continuity using VideoReDo on Windows before saving the recordings to shared folder structure on Windows which can be viewed on the TV via Plex. I also have another folder on the Pi shared as general-purpose NAS for files that I want to be accessible 24/7 without needing to turn on a Windows PC.

Both Pis run Raspberry PiOS (aka Raspbian). I am cautious about updating software the Pi 4 after I found that an update (probably to the kernel) caused a lot of glitches on recordings from the DVB-S tuner, so I regressed to an older kernel and have stopped updating this Pi. I take images of both Pis' SD cards every few months so I've got a rollback point. I've also made copious notes about installation and configuration in case I decide to reinstall from scratch - as I had to do with the 3B after it refused to boot after a tidy restart one day: I never did get to the bottom of what had gone wrong, and it was quicker to reinstall than to spend any more time investigating.

One cautionary tale. The Pi4 originally used a USB HDD plugged into a powered USB hub to power the HDD so the Pi didn't have to supply power. This had worked fine on the Pi 3B, but the Pi 4 refused to boot whilst the hub was powered; it hung indefinitely until I turned off the hub or unplugged the hub's USB from the Pi, at which point booting proceeded as normal. Some people suggested that certain hubs try to feed power back up the USB cable to the Pi, but I disproved that by making up a special lead on which I had cut the +5V line - this did not fix the problem. So I now use a SATA drive in a powered caddy, which works fine.

Oh, so its a user interfaced device with screen and keyboard?

I thought that a zero wouldn't really run a gui, but never thought of running a console non - x session

That sounds massively interesting. Smart plugs?

Ah. Your second Pi is what my x86 server does.

Plus a few earlier machines that have been passed on to a local kid who’s interested in electronics.

Regards,

I have an old-ish (about to retire) Gigabyte MB, whose BIOS swears that booting from USB is disabled, but if I ever leave a USB stick in it by accident, the next boot hangs while it tries to find a non-existent bootloader on the thing.

There is a hub permanently connected, which doesn't seem to worry it, but it will hang on any other USB device, there's apparently no timeout. Possibly there's an updated BIOS that fixes this, but in general I don't touch the BIOS unless it has a serious problem.

Personally, it’s just a small Linux box which happens to be aarch64 rather than x86. So an environment for exploring the architecture, getting tripped up by platform-specific compiler bugs, etc.

My colleagues use Pis as part of our testing infrastructure, using them to simulate human interactions with the hardware components of our product in an automatable way.

Where did you find the time!...

This was from a few years back.

My main desktop computer is a Pi 3B+, running RISC OS.

I have an old Pi running my central heating and hot water system. Home brew software, running on RISC OS. Includes web interface and voice control. Occasionally used for controlling Sonoff devices too, again including voice control.

I have a Pi 3B+ running OpenMediaVault, with two drives, acting as a NAS, mainly for backups and storing photos and videos.

There's an older Pi (I forget which model) running OpenVPN to secure web access to the heating system when away from home.

Other than the main desktop, they run headless.

I've got a couple more that I occasionally run up when I want to try something else.

David

Full fat music soft-synth on a Pi4 Sold a few to friends.