Stefano Prenna

I had a Raspberry Pi2 in my car for a few years. The weather here in Barcelona is quite hot during summer, but even if it was left in the car under the sun, it always worked well.

I used it with the official Touch display, but added some physical buttons for navigation and playback as a touchscreen is never as good as real buttons, and anyway after some time, the touch function did stopped working well.

I used Kodi to play media, with a low resolution, “made for car” theme and using an addon to read the gpio buttons plus another one to make Kodi read only. The car adapter I used to supply power did not always trigger a clean shutdown, but having Kodi and most of the OS read only (i. e. no logs), I literally used the same SD card for years without any issue.

I could have used a gps as well (and launched its app from Kodi), but I got gifted a gps so used that.

Now I don’t need this as I changed car, but I still use occasionally the RPi2 with its screen as no matter what, they still work fine :)

Ultimately, I wanted to mention that more powerful boards will require even more watts and more stable power, so it might just be easier with an old board.

Less releases with more testing. I normally wait some time before upgrading (no matter the application) as I prefer stability over extra/new features that I may use or not.

That is a good point… on average it’s around 500Mb of RAM usage, between 0.5% and 1% of CPU (it’s a 2.4Mhz four cores).

Space is 5Gb, mainly media files accumulated over two years.

So overall, not bad.

I’ve been self-hosting Matrix Synapse for more than two years to chat friends and family and it has been rock-solid and it’s on a VPS that os hosting a Nextcloud and Lemmy instance as well. It is definitely not really resource hungry for small groups of people.

If you want to try again this route, just make sure that everybody saves a backup of their keys as the messages are all encrypted and while you can authenticate a new client installation from another client that the same user is logged in, some people - like my mother - only use one, on her phone, which is understandable.

So in summary, I’m very happy with it! :)

I use rss-bridge for scraping sites that don’t offer rss feeds: https://rss-bridge.github.io/rss-bridge/index.html

I think you will like: https://simone.computer/#/webdesktops

There are and have been many of these around for many years now!