from Hacker News

Ask HN: What can I do with 15 raspberry pi zero w's

by penguinlinux on 8/26/19, 3:56 PM with 5 comments

I happen to live close to a Microcenter. They happen to have the Raspberry Pi zero w for 5 dollars , so every weekend I walk to the store and buy a Raspberry pi zero w. I have around 15 raspberry pi's and I am looking for an interesting project to do with them. So far I have a few project running. 1.- Raspberry Pi zero W VPN server which I use to vpn from work into my home. 2.- I am hosting a full copy of wikipedia on a Raspberry Pi zero w and an external ssd drive. http://wikipenguin.onthewifi.com , but I still have 13 more raspberry pi's that I can use for other projects. Any ideas or suggestion on what I can do with them?

by vs4vijay on 8/26/19, 5:59 PM
You could make PiHole VPN: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole https://github.com/pivpn/pivpn
For Movies: https://github.com/Radarr/Radarr https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett
For Scientific Research: https://foldingathome.org https://boinc.bakerlab.org/
PS: I did create some project : https://github.com/vs4vijay/SwissArmyPi
by davismwfl on 8/26/19, 4:55 PM
If you are interested in distributed systems/programming problems they are fun for that. I have setup 5-6 Pi's before and written different leader election methods and play with pulling their network cables etc. I also wrote a partially custom service discovery using etcd and tested it on them, again mostly for learning but it led to some production code later on. I've played with data consistency problems using them too. Also worked good for testing system recovery when I was writing code that did graceful recovery from failures, lot less at risk if you pull power from a Pi then a server to test the code. :)
Outside of that, you could connect them to some relays and do some electrical switching via the network etc. Or setup a few of them with the camera and do image classifications or just motion detection.
by catacombs on 8/26/19, 10:44 PM
Run one as a home server, another as a media player, another as a Pi-Hole. Then, when you can't think of any, give them to coworkers, especially those with children, who can benefit from learning about the machines.