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

2 points by penguinlinux ↗ HN
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?

5 comments

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davismwfl
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.

penguinlinux
Thanks for your suggestion. I was trying to run docker but docker does not run on the Raspberry pi zero w. I wanted to run etcd as a docker container but the zero w is not powerful enough or a good docker distribution does not exit. I can install etc using Ansible :) so I might try that.
vs4vijay
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

penguinlinux
thank you these are awesome suggestions. Specially I think I will use 3 pies for the foldingathome.org. seems like this is a great use of these mini computers. Also the swissArmyPi looks great as a hacker pen testing device . Thank you so much
catacombs
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.