Does anyone run one of the above on a Pi 4 and can share their experience how good or bad they run?
If course, transcoding won’t be any good and OCR probably cannot run in parallel, but aside from that - is it okay?
Currently running everything on a mini ITX with a i5-6600 which handles this easily for my small use cases, but also draws 20-30W idling most of the day… I’m eyeing a Pi 4b with 8gb RAM but don’t want to spend the money and then realizing that it doesn’t run smooth enough
A Pi as a travel server sounds like an awesome idea!
What are the use cases for taking it with you instead of just connecting to your homelab?
Edit: Your username made me thirsty, too bad I have to wait some hundred years to get one on earth…
Thanks!
I built it just to see how much I could cram onto a Pi Zero clone/how many self-hosted services I could have on something I can fit on my keychain, and the answer was “a lot”. It’s something of a travel server, travel router, emergency backup server, etc.
I mainly just wanted a subset of my homelab services available in something I could take with me anywhere. Home lab could go down while away, power could go out, something to use while glamping, can take it with me if there’s ever an emergency where I have to evacuate, etc.
What started out as a single unit has become a three unit portable stack lol. Yay feature creep!
Services
Networking
File Services
I’ve got a second unit that connects as a client to the main one with some additional backup services:
The second one is basically a backup to my main stack in case of disaster/power outage/etc. Those all tunnel to a cloud VPS + load balancer and only need an internet connection to setup the tunnels to receive traffic from the VPS (and route back out to it). Those services are stopped and a cron task keeps them in sync with the main ones in my homelab. If I need to fail over, I just SSH into the VPS and re-route traffic to them instead of my homelab endpoints.
I self-host my own email and chat and phone services, so those have become critical services I want to always have online. Essentially these little Pi clones are a backup stack for my most used services and one that is both extremely low power and portable should I ever need to host them on the go (house burns down, have to evacuate due to emergency, etc).
Third Unit (Still on the bench)
I have a third unit that’s built on a PiZero2W but it’s still on the workbench (but functional!). Just haven’t gotten any kind of case at all built for it.
It’s got two RTL-SDR units attached. One is tuned to the NOAA weather radio station and feeds into Snapserver on the main unit (so you can listen to the weather radio anywhere on the network) as well as piped into Meshtastic EAS-SANE alerter in order to forward emergency alerts to Meshtastic. There’s a USB-connected Meshtastic node attached as well for that.
The second RTL-SDR is setup as a generic FM radio tuned to the local variety station. It’s just piped to Snapserver on the main unit to make it available on the network.
I may convert the second SDR into a ADS-B listener, but for now, I like having the FM radio available.
Photo
I still don’t have a “full” case for it, but here is the core unit attached to a UPS circuit which gives it up to about 14 hours of runtime. I’m also planning to add a small USB hub with ethernet into that, but I’m still learning FreeCAD so I’m not quite ready to put it all together yet. The USB power cord is wrapped in aluminum foil and electrical tape due to RF from the Wifi adapter causing random glitches. I need to add some ferrite beads and route them away from that when I build it into an integrated case. For now it looks janky but works lol.
Main Unit:
Secondary Unit: This is an older photo and is also connected to my Bose radio acting as a Snapcast client to the server on the main unit.
Wow, that’s a crazy and impressive setup! Pretty amazing what’s possible with something so low power that it could run off of battery and possibly solar alone…
Having such a setup for travel and emergencies is a cool idea, I’ll have to put it onto my “possibly some day” list :)
Thanks, and yeah, it’s been fun putting that all together. Unfortunately I’m still learning FreeCAD so they’re not as integrated as I’d like yet, but as soon as I have time to hammer out a design, I hope to have all 3 of these and the UPS/power supply in a nice case.
Yep, running/charging it from solar is why I ended up getting that chonky 18650-based UPS board. It’s the only one I could find that could combine 5V input and battery without dropping out (battery kicks in immediately if solar insufficient and draws the difference between input and output and charges and powers simultaneously otherwise).