Raspberry Pi (NOT running HA) in local network: what else can I use it for?

Hardware
1

Hi everybody,

I have multiple raspberry pis around the house, doing different things. One in the garage, for example, is only doing two things:

  • connected to audio speakers (running mpd, already controlled via Home Assistant through snapclient and mpd)
  • running a motion server, this providing an mjpeg video feed from a connected USB webcam (fed to Home Assistant and tinyCam on my Android)

I have read through remote_rpi_gpio, but if I understand correctly, it can only work with binary_sensor and switch components. Let’s say I have a BME280 sensor, which I’d usually use with ESPHomeconnected to the raspberry pi. Can I somehow natively integrate it into Home Assistant as well?

By natively, I mean that I am aware that I could connect the sensor, write a python script to read from it every x seconds, then pipe it to another script that sends these values to Home Assistant via mqtt (or have one single script deal with it, but I like to work modular).

The only alternative that comes to mind is node-red on the raspberry pi(s) combined with the node-red companion on my Home Assistant server.

While both these solutions are fine, perhaps there is an even better way…? Connect whatever compatible device/sensor/actor to the raspberry pi and automatically have it discovered by Home Assistant / announce itself to Home Assistant and be done with it?

I don’t have any important projects planned, so I would not want to go another way (for example, my-sensors). If there is a way to do this with all the things I already have (sensors, raspberry pis), I’d love to try it.

Thanks in advance for your ideas :slight_smile:

2

i use four alternative Pi’s.

Two as Hi-Res Volumio music streamers in two separate rooms, that can also play synchronous. They work fine with HA. The sound quality (up to 384kHz/32bit) is phenomenal, using a special DAC hat on the Pi’s.
One as a adsb.fi / PiAware / FlightRadar receiver for detecting air traffic in the neighborhood. HA is able to give me a live map and a list of planes in sight. Only need a usb stick with a radio receiver and a DIY antenna.
And one as a kiosk display for the HA data on a TV screen, using it at work to display weather, Solar panels and several website scraped content.

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