How I Use My Raspberry Pi

Productivity Sauce

Inspired by the Things I Do With My Raspberry Pi article, I thought I'd share with you how I use my Raspberry Pi. Actually, I use at least two Raspberry Pis on a regular basis: one serves as a hacking and prototyping platform, while the other one acts as a server on the local network. The latter performs a variety of tasks.

File Server

I connected two external USB hard disks to Raspberry Pi via a powered USB hub. The usbmount utility takes care of automatically detecting and mounting the connected disks at the /media/usbX mount points. One disk is used for storing all files and documents, while the other one is reserved for rotating backup. I don't use any dedicated file server software to serve files on the network. Instead, I simply mount the first disk via SSH using the sshfs tool.

Backup Server

Nothing fancy there: Raspberry Pi uses two rsync-based scripts for local rotating backup and off-site backup. A cron job performs the off-site backup hourly and runs rotating backup action daily.

Email Backup

Storing email in the cloud is good, but having a local copy of all emails is even better. So I installed and configured the excellent OfflineImap tool on my Raspberry Pi to pull emails from my IMAP account on a regular basis.

Photo Gallery

Although I use a variety of photo sharing services, I also host a tiny photo gallery on my Raspberry Pi using the Pygmyfoto application which I cobbled together in my spare time.

RSS Aggregator

While NewBlur is my web-based RSS aggregator of choice, I installed Miniflux on Raspberry Pi as a fallback option. This lightweight RSS reader is easy to deploy and maintain, and it's perfectly suited for keeping track of a handful of favorite RSS feeds.

Bookmark and File Sharing

My Raspberry Pi also runs the excellent Shaarli application for storing and sharing bookmarks. When I occasionally need to upload and share a file, I use the file hosting PHP script running on Raspberry Pi for that.

Photo Station

Finally, my Raspberry Pi acts as a photo station. Using an Eye-Fi SD card and Eye-Fi app for Android, I push photos from my camera to Raspberry Pi. It then organizes photos using the fotobasher script and backs up the photos.

This is how I use my Raspberry Pi, and I'm eager to hear what you do with your tiny machine. Hit the comments to share your Rasberry Pi projects.