I bought my first two RPis from Little Bird, the company whose tweet is linked (albeit through one of their web stores, not via ebay). Those were an original RPi model B, now sadly retired (it still works, just is very slow even for running basic services), and a 3B+, now faithfully serving as a PiHole and HomeBridge machine.

I have a surprising number of RPis around the apartment now; a PiZero with the HQ camera module is serving as a webcam for my desktop machine, and another one is acting as an “on air” indicator to let folks know when a microphone is hot in the room (typically working-from-home zoom meetings). And another zero is controlling a set of “presence” indicator lights, watching bluetooth to determine who is in the apartment at any given time. That makes it so that if one of us is leaving the apartment, we can easily tell whether we need to lock the door on our way out, without needing to go searching through the apartment to check whether another flatmate is home or not. (I found that for us, testing bluetooth was far faster and more reliable than testing arp, wifi, bonjour, geofencing, or etc)

... and I’ve just ordered a moderately large e-paper display which is destined to be mounted with a zero inside a picture frame and hung from the wall like a photo. Haven’t decided exactly what to show on it yet; probably will show a weather forecast and how long until the next tram will arrive at the stop outside our building. That kind of thing.

Plus, of course, the pi 4 that I just use as a generic linux box for my own amusement. These little projects have been such fun little creative outlets; I’ve very much enjoyed coming up with and implementing them over the past few years!