12 mo. ago • 83%

What are some great use cases for a Raspberry Pi 4, if I buy the 5 to replace it?

Alot of us who have a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 might upgrade to the Raspberry Pi 5.

Doing so would leave us with 2 Pi's. What are some great use cases for the older Pi, that would no longer be the main machine?

31 comments

Here is a controversial thought; do you need to replace the 4?

63
- I can't speak for the OP, but in my case.... It was very much a resounding YES!!!!! If your using Pis as general home servers, like I was, you can very quickly run into resource constraints. I wound up replacing 5 Pi 4's with a pair of 4th gen Intel boxes and I'm still hit resource limitations from time to time. Though now it is more io related then ram or cpu.
  
  -4
  
  You didn't blindly upgrade to the next Pi. Not upgrading or upgrading to something you know meets your demands are the right things to do. I assume upgrading to a Pi 5 is not that for most people
  
  17
  
  You probably don't need pis then you need a real server
  
  7
Sell them used and reduce the cost of entry to other people

49
Octoprint if you have a 3D printer

Volumio (or similar) if want a device you can cast music to

for astronomy can install astroberry for remote control of your scope and camera

run home assistant for home automation

pihole for use as a DNS server that blocks ads

plug a camera in and use it as a webcam/ security camera
16
- Thanks man!
  
  I will try Volumio for sure! I also want to try home automation some time, but I don't think I have enough hardware to run with it yet.
  
  2
  
  I started my home assistant journey with 4 smart globes, a Google home speaker with a pi 4. I learned how to use it and started integrating things I don't need hardware for, such as shopping/Todo lists, weather, Spotify, last.fm, calendars, basically anything I can learn without hardware. Right now I'm working on getting a shopping list sent to me when I enter the shops zone.
  
  Then I bought a bunch of NFC tags (they're cheap) for medication reminders, kitty litter reminders/tracking. I have a music poster in my house I've stuck an NFC tag to and it opens up the album on Spotify, turns on Bluetooth and connects to my speaker.
  
  I've slowly been adding more devices as I go along due to cost constraints. Not that smart home stuff is expensive, I just can't afford to do it all at once. Which also gives me time to consider/research smart devices before I buy.
  
  100% recommend. It's addicting actually.
  
  2
  
  Oh and you can put Adguard on home assistant too as an add on.
  
  1
What do you use the Pi for now?

I had a bunch of Pi 3Bs sitting around, so I made piholes for a few friends and family, I made a dedicated MAME emulator that I never have time to play, and I gave one to each of my kids to learn about computers and linux. I also use one for work as a linux test environment for our software, but the 3 hardware doesn't really keep up.

10
- Right now I use it for:
  
  PiHole
  
  Plex/Jellyfin
  
  WireGuard VPN
  
  Sonarr/Radarr and all that follows.
  
  I would consider giving it away to family for the same purpose. Thanks for the suggestion!
  
  3
  
  Since none of these require a Raspberry Pi to run, I would suggest using a mini PC (with an Intel N100 or similar) instead of a Pi 5. With all the accessories needed for the Pi, a mini PC can actually be cheaper and of course a lot more powerful. Since the Pi 5 is very power-inefficient, a mini PC can even be better in that regard too if that matters to you.
  
  Especially for Jellyfin a PC with an Intel CPU with integrated GPU is awesome, since Jellyfin supports hardware transcoding with that.
  
  8
I hear rpi5 doesn't come with hardware decoding, so that is something rpi4 is better at.

8
- Good call if true
  
  3
  
  Actually need to know this. I haven't heard about it myself, but maybe I missed it?
  
  2
  
  Apparently it only has 4k60 HEVC decode and no encoders
  
  1
Yes, here the question is if you really need to upgrade to 5, and if you really need, why not buy a dedicated NUC for example that would be a lot more powerful and extensible than the 5, while also consuming not too much more power.

6
- Pretty sure I just saw a decent specd one on sale for Black Friday. I almost bought it but realized I have 3 mini PCs already.
  
  IDK what's happening... Pretty soon my toaster will somehow be run by these things... They just multiply.
  
  3
https://www.picoreplayer.org/

5

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
AP	WiFi Access Point
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
NUC	Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
PCIe	Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
PiHole	Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
Plex	Brand of media server package
SBC	Single-Board Computer
VPN	Virtual Private Network

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

[Thread #278 for this sub, first seen 12th Nov 2023, 16:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I’d add a 2nd Pi-hole (sounds like you have one already?) for redundancy.

3
I have 2 pi 4. One of them runs Vaultwarden as my self-hosted password manager. The other runs TPLink Omada SDN management software to manage my switch and WiFi APs.

2

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