this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2026
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Everyone here talking about raspberry pi and I still to this day have no idea what I can do with one.
I have mine running several virtual tabletops and caddy reverse proxy
I have one setup as an ad blocker (pihole)
I was going to make a bookshelf with one to control the lights.
It's just a computer. You can do whatever you need a computer for. Browse Lemmy on it. Play video games on it. Use it as a server. Make it run an ad video on the TV in your store window.
Whatever you need a PC for. If you don't need a PC for something, you don't need a Raspberry Pi.
The entire point of the Raspberry Pi was that it was a very very cheap PC, and it's no longer cheap, so nowadays there is definitely less reason to buy one.
That is just one of the possible uses and not the most important one. Pi's have two things that regular PCs don't have. They have a direct integration of an GPIO port where you can easily connect individual wires as needed and they have a huge community and a lot of tutorials and also software support for all kinds of tinker jobs that can make use of that GPIO port.
These two reasons have not gone away and for many of those, you don't need the most expensive PI with 16GB of RAM. A Pi Zero for 14 EUR or a Pi Zero 2 for 22 EUR are perfectly fine for that. The platform has plenty of life left but those high end Pi are increasingly crazily priced, mainly because of insane RAM prices.
It's also a very small and low powered computer. That's valuable in some cases.
And most of them have a GPIO (general-purpose input/output) header for whatever shenanigans people might be up to.
I use them to run Kodi for streaming media to my TV from my file server. I also would like to run retropie but I can't figure out how to get the scaling to work on my TV.