What do you use your raspberry pi’s for?

[steelo]

On 6/26/2019 at 1:56 AM, The 2009 MacBook gamer said:

I use mine for Retro pi and a desktop

1)Pi 3b running Magic mirror

2)Pi zero connected to an old web camera running MotionOS for monitoring our garage - have it set up to upload images and video to my PC as it detects movement

3)Pi zero used solely for retropi (nes, snes and genesis) in my gaming room/office

 

Last year, I created a Halloween and then a Christmas light show for work with one of the pi zero's, using 'pilightshow' (picture below) It is connected to a 8 channel relay which control each of the 8 outlets and a cheap USB sound card for the sound output. For Christmas, we all decorated our cubicles with LED lights and the lights 'danced' to the Christmas songs being played - It was a difficult (for me at least) but fun little project!

 

I'm still a pi novice (very little Linux or python experience) and struggle to find useful projects for them but they are fun to tinker around with!

 

 

[Salacious B Crum]

I have 1 Pi 3 B+ running openvpn to access my network when not at home and pihole which I placed in my router for entire network ad blocking and a second one will run hass.io when I get around to setting it up

[SomeLinuxPerson]

One runs open VPN (To get through my schools content filtering, they filter out Reddit and this forum so thus why I need it) the other is hooked up to my TV as a chromecast / emulation box.

[BrinkGG]

On 7/26/2019 at 8:27 AM, steelo said:

1)Pi 3b running Magic mirror

2)Pi zero connected to an old web camera running MotionOS for monitoring our garage - have it set up to upload images and video to my PC as it detects movement

3)Pi zero used solely for retropi (nes, snes and genesis) in my gaming room/office

 

Last year, I created a Halloween and then a Christmas light show for work with one of the pi zero's, using 'pilightshow' (picture below) It is connected to a 8 channel relay which control each of the 8 outlets and a cheap USB sound card for the sound output. For Christmas, we all decorated our cubicles with LED lights and the lights 'danced' to the Christmas songs being played - It was a difficult (for me at least) but fun little project!

 

I'm still a pi novice (very little Linux or python experience) and struggle to find useful projects for them but they are fun to tinker around with!

 

 

-image-

What quality are you running the motionOS pi zero at? I can't get my rPi3b to run decent framerates at all and it's bewildering to me. Local recording or Fast network mode (or whatever the streaming mode got renamed to) both can't hold 1280x1024@15FPS. Framerate drops to less then one frame per second for large segments of video.

[steelo]

1 hour ago, BrinkGG said:

What quality are you running the motionOS pi zero at? I can't get my rPi3b to run decent framerates at all and it's bewildering to me. Local recording or Fast network mode (or whatever the streaming mode got renamed to) both can't hold 1280x1024@15FPS. Framerate drops to less then one frame per second for large segments of video.

'm getting 4-5 fps with pretty low resolution video settings @ 176x144 or something similar. One thing I noticed with MotionOS (at least with the pi zero) is that I had to play with the overclock settings to get the CPU to run at 1ghz...otherwise, it ran at 700 mhz by default and was recording at maybe 1-2 fps. I have used motionOS with a pi3 and don't recall having frame rate issues. You could try dialing back the resolution settings a little bit just to see if that helps. Right now, It's set to take photos at 100% but record videos at 50% quality

 

I have used motionOS with a pi3 awhile back and don't recall having frame rate issues, I wasn't expecting movie quality recording though but it wasn't bad for surveillance purposes. You could try dialing back the resolution settings a little bit at a time just to see if that helps. IMO, 1280x1024 @ 100% quality may just be too much for the ARM CPU to handle.

 

Have you enabled system monitoring on yours? It lets you see the CPU load, temperature and streaming rate. It should give you an idea of whether the CPU is just too overloaded to maintain a decent frame rate with your current settings. 

[BrinkGG]

3 minutes ago, steelo said:

I'm getting 4-5 fps with pretty low resolution video settings @ 176x144 or something similar. One thing I noticed with MotionOS (at least with the pi zero) is that I had to play with the overclock settings to get the CPU to run at 1ghz...otherwise, it ran at 700 mhz by default and was recording at maybe 1-2 fps. I have used motionOS with a pi3 and don't recall having frame rate issues. You could try dialing back the resolution settings a little bit just to see if that helps. Right now, It's set to take photos at 100% but record videos at 50% quality

That seems like a uselessly low resolution to me but good information to have nonetheless. Yea the Rpi3 was running at the stock 1.4Ghz, but get's very hot at that speed and I assumed that would be plenty for just video streaming... 

Gonna try some rPi4b boards and see what the quality looks like later today. My goal is to replace an Arlo Pro system with these, so 720p15hz is the minimum I want from them. And from the video LTT made on it, they had an rPi ZeroW recording at 720p10 without stuttering and I still can't get mine to replicate that. 

[steelo]

1 hour ago, BrinkGG said:

That seems like a uselessly low resolution to me but good information to have nonetheless. Yea the Rpi3 was running at the stock 1.4Ghz, but get's very hot at that speed and I assumed that would be plenty for just video streaming... 

Gonna try some rPi4b boards and see what the quality looks like later today. My goal is to replace an Arlo Pro system with these, so 720p15hz is the minimum I want from them. And from the video LTT made on it, they had an rPi ZeroW recording at 720p10 without stuttering and I still can't get mine to replicate that. 

Oh, I didn't know LTT had a pi zero video...I'll definitely have to check that out!

 

Surprisingly, the video looks better than 99% of the 'security camera' footage you see on the news...LOL. Should we ever encounter a break-in, I would rely on the multitude of pictures it snaps

 

I would try enabling system monitoring, if you haven't already to monitor your CPU load and streaming rate. I know wifi on the pi zero and pi 3 isn't that great (I assume you're doing this wirelessly)...it could be as simple as a poor connection.

 

I'll play with my set up a little tonight to see how 720p streaming looks and get back to you. I set it up last weekend and really was more concerned with how it recorded than how it streamed live video. You also have 3 more cores than I do...If LTT was able to do it on a single core rpi zero, I don't see why you wouldn't be able to achieve at least 10 fps with a quad core rpi3

 

 

[steelo]

After playing around with streaming settings, I was able to achieve between 8-10 fps @ 720p with my rpi zero.

[BrinkGG]

1 minute ago, steelo said:

FYI...I found this on another thread: 

 

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1062217-which-rasberry-pi-to-buy/?tab=comments#comment-12550934

 

"3 runs hot, 3b is not as bad. Especially with the new heat spreader, but I still buy it since mine are usually running overclocked. (Using them for MotionEyeOS, 720p48fps)"

 

 

Yes I did indeed say that. That was when I first set it up and the preview window was running at 720p48.

After it ran for about 2 weeks I checked recordings and the framerate was fluctuating wildly and was not usable. First 1.5 seconds or so would run at 48, then it would drop to 1 or 2 frames per second. I've posted on the Gihub for MotionEyeOS before about low framerate when streaming video to a server, and I thought I'd resolved it when I had it streaming to a windows system running BlueIris. Turns out that wasn't true.  

 

1 hour ago, steelo said:

Oh, I didn't know LTT had a pi zero video...I'll definitely have to check that out!

 

Surprisingly, the video looks better than 99% of the 'security camera' footage you see on the news...LOL. Should we ever encounter a break-in, I would rely on the multitude of pictures it snaps

I would try enabling system monitoring, if you haven't already to monitor your CPU load and streaming rate. I know wifi on the pi zero and pi 3 isn't that great (I assume you're doing this wirelessly)...it could be as simple as a poor connection.

I'll play with my set up a little tonight to see how 720p streaming looks and get back to you. I set it up last weekend and really was more concerned with how it recorded than how it streamed live video. You also have 3 more cores than I do...If LTT was able to do it on a single core rpi zero, I don't see why you wouldn't be able to achieve at least 10 fps with a quad core rpi3

Here's a link to linus' video: 

 And fair enough for the quality, I'm trying to use this to send notifications to my google home when packages are delivered on our front porch (We have a lot of porch thieves around here). 

 

Not trying to share misinformation, I honestly forgot about that thread and would have posted an update. 

[steelo]

35 minutes ago, BrinkGG said:

Yes I did indeed say that. That was when I first set it up and the preview window was running at 720p48.

After it ran for about 2 weeks I checked recordings and the framerate was fluctuating wildly and was not usable. First 1.5 seconds or so would run at 48, then it would drop to 1 or 2 frames per second. I've posted on the Gihub for MotionEyeOS before about low framerate when streaming video to a server, and I thought I'd resolved it when I had it streaming to a windows system running BlueIris. Turns out that wasn't true.  

 

Here's a link to linus' video: 

 And fair enough for the quality, I'm trying to use this to send notifications to my google home when packages are delivered on our front porch (We have a lot of porch thieves around here). 

 

Not trying to share misinformation, I honestly forgot about that thread and would have posted an update. 

LOL. Honestly, I didn't realize it was you until I posted that and then I attempted to remove it (and apparently failed before you saw it)

 

I wasn't trying to call you out.

[BrinkGG]

9 minutes ago, steelo said:

LOL. Honestly, I didn't realize it was you until I posted that and then I attempted to remove it (and apparently failed)

 

Wasn't trying to call you out.

No worries. We all make mistakes (as I did with that post)  

[genxha]

Game emulation (RetroPie) and I have a Pi Zero in an half-made google home clone.