My RPi projects - surprise, there are no projects!

Published 2024-08-22

tag(s): #failures #rpi

Simpsons episode screenshot, lawyer Lionel Hutz shows an empty pizza box.

I keep seeing people building cool things with their Raspberry Pi...Pis? Pies?
I did something nice with mine, which was a voice assistant called Serena[1]. It would email or SMS, you could ask it about the weather, and it would build groceries shopping lists. It also had a memory leak somewhere - I suspect in the listening portion. The thing is I never got around to fixing it, and a year later my wife and I used a regular smartphone "shared lists" app. No more need for Serena.

And since then, I have toyed around with the RPi here and there. The last thing was set it up with PiHole, but since the internet setup in the place we are is very fragmented, it cannot cover all our devices in a simple way.

I felt like sharing this for two reasons:

  1. Because I guess someone can relate and feel less terrible about keeping their RPi in a drawer. Mine was boxed for like, three years.
  2. There is always the hope I get to hear about a project I will actually build.
Since moving to NYC (technically, New Jersey), those projects to have a screen to display train times make a little more sense. On the other hand, I don't feel they are really "necessary", you can check your phone before leaving?

I guess being so utilitarian is getting in the way of doing anything cool just for the sake of it. I noticed the same trend in my open source code: if it solves some annoyance I have, I will build it. If I think it would be nice to do it, but I have no specific need, it just won't happen.

Footnotes
  1. Serena is the name of Sailor Moon's Usagi Tsukino in the Latin America dub.

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