Raspberry Pis have been popular for small self-hosting jobs and tinkerers for years, and it is pretty common to have a few old ones forgotten in a drawer somewhere. Here are a few great ways to put those old Raspberry Pis to use.
A note-taking app server
Everyone uses a note-taking app of some kind, be that Google Keep or Apple Notes for personal notes, or something more sophisticated like Obsidian or Evernote for keeping track of ideas or projects at work.
Unfortunately, you can't really guarantee most of those options are private or secure out of the box.
Both as a privacy measure and a bit of curiosity, I started hosting my own Joplin server—which is my preferred note-taking app—on a Raspberry Pi Zero W just to see how it would perform.
As it turns out, the server requires almost no computational power at all. It runs just fine, even on old, low-power hardware.
Plenty of great note-taking apps can be self-hosted if you want, and as long as you're careful, you can be sure that your notes—whether they're personal, a to-do list, or for work—remain private.
A PiHole
Most of the adblockers you encounter run as an extension on your browser. However, if you want to control ads across your entire network, whether they're able to run adblock individually or not, a PiHole is a great option.
All you need to do is install the PiHole on your Raspberry Pi, point your router's DNS server at the PiHole, and you're set—network-wide adblocking.
PiHoles use a series of lists to block ads, and occasionally, one that is a bit too overzealous can cause websites to malfunction.
Because PiHoles can be used to filter your entire network's traffic, you can also use them to prevent things like Smart TVs or Smart Fridges from phoning home if you don't want them to.
Home Assistant
Adam Davidson/How-To Geek
Home Assistant is a bit like a self-hosted central brain for all of your smart devices. It won't run well on a Pi Zero or a Pi Zero 2, but a Raspberry Pi 3B or Raspberry Pi 4 can both do an admirable job with it.
Home Assistant lets you monitor what smart devices in your home are doing, create routines and automations that turn things on and off when you want them to, and even program your home to respond automatically to input from sensors.
You can control the entire thing from one convenient app. In many ways, Home Assistant is what smart devices should have been from the beginning.
Best of all, because it all runs on your local network, you can improve your privacy while you're at it.
A retro gaming device
Giuseppe Cammino/Shutterstock.com
One of the most popular uses for Raspberry Pis is retro gaming consoles. Because they're small, low-power, and have tons of GPIO pins, they're great all-in-one devices.
You buy specialized controllers so that you can play your retro games with game-appropriate joysticks and buttons, rather than using a mouse and keyboard or an Xbox controller.
Whether you just want a small dedicated computer sitting on your desktop to play legacy games, or you're going all out and building a full-sized arcade cabinet, a Raspberry Pi is an excellent choice.
There is even a project, RetroPie, dedicated to converting your Raspberry Pi into a retro gaming console without manually needing to set everything up.
A WireGuard VPN server
VPNs are extremely popular for bypassing regionally locked content or trying to up your privacy by encrypting all of your traffic.
A VPN you run at home is usually used a bit differently. Typically, a self-hosted VPN is used so that you can connect to your home network and access any services on your home network as if you were physically there, even if you're on the other side of the planet.
Since I have a static IP address, I now use a WireGuard server as my primary way to access my home network when I'm out and about, rather than messing with reverse proxies and the security implications of opening my services up to the internet.
Accessing my self-host services directly via IP through WireGuard meant I was totally unaffected by the recent CloudFlare outage too.
With the price of RAM spiraling out of control and no end in sight, it makes sense to get the most out of the hardware you already have on hand. Those old Raspberry Pis are a great way to host some lightweight services instead of paying for a subscription service.
