The Pi shop is 3 Raspberry Pi 5s, the first model with PCIe so they can take real storage media, like NVMe M.2 drives found in modern computers.
The Pi devoted to public facing traffic, like this website only has 1 TB, so there is a limit to how much I can say or the number of pictures I can post, But not to worry, that is still more than I can fill.
The other two Pis have 2 TB each for my media server, private cloud and home file storage.
One thing I’ve learned in learning how to build every part of the Pi shop is to ask for help. I am not a trailblazer, someone has done this before, and most likely made a YouTube video about it, certainly a blog post. So, there is no reason to feel stuck or get frustrated, watch a video, read a blog post. Still stuck, ask Google, which will probably point you to a subreddit post on your exact predicament & solution, or ask the new young turks, Copilot & Gemini, they have each been very helpful on a wide range of topics from philosophy to software configuration scripts.
The Pi shop is built from free Open Source software; that’s free as in air & beer. It does come with a cost and that is born by teams of dedicated people with vision about the success of a piece of software; there are ways to provide support. Those teams may be a small handful to hundreds of individuals, typically geographically dispersed, checking in changes to a common repository.
Git is the de facto standard repository for source code control, a way to track changes to a body of code to accomplish a task. Source code control is a requirement for a multi-programmer project to eliminate bugs or identify when and where they were introduced.
Github is a repository of source code repositories. In days of old you would go to the soda fountain or mall to hang out and be cool. Today, one way to show your creds and be cool is to have, or be involved with, one or more code projects on github. Anyone and everyone is free to look at the code in open source, so bugs get caught and little chance of malicious code being inserted, when downloaded from a reputable source. If others like what you are doing they can join the effort.
Think of it as a form of digital busking (playing for change$) or a digital jam session.
With that out of the way, here are the apps/services currently on the Pi shop:
Jellyfin, the media server currently holds 128 movies ripped from my DVD collection, they take 113GB of space, about 1GB per. The music collection has 500+ artists performing more than 2,000 songs. Family photos span the past 75 years, with more being added. Home videos and time lapses get there own space.
There are several plugins available for Jellyfin, from adding closed captions to scouring the web for more content.
Immich is the replacement for Google Photos. With a 2TB sandbox for my cellphone images to automatically upload to I no longer hit a 15GB ceiling that Google imposes before the meter starts running on paid storage. A very powerful image program that now with a domain name it’s easy to share albums selectively with anyone anywhere
Nextcloud is the private cloud space for the Pi shop. Here, notes, files, images, video, links and all the other digital debris & cyber dust balls of the modern connected life can be kept safely and securely. This is also touted as a collaborative environment for working with others on projects. I haven’t looked into that aspect of it yet, been just a bit busy on related endeavors.
Nextcloud also has plugins to extend the functionality, white boards, Talk (an in the app Zoom), image galleries, and many many more.
Pi hole was my very first Pi app. I got it to address my desire for add free browsing. For print/display media this works great across my entire Lan. Not so much for YouTube, but there may be solutions there too, stay tuned.
The Pi shop is running three different image gallery/album apps for evaluation, Pi Gallery2, Piwigo & Photoprism. Each are strong contenders with some great features. However, now with the website, Jellyfin & Immich I’m not sure where or how they might fit in the solution, but that’s where I thought I was going when I started, a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious digital memory display thingamabob. (when was the last time you fit that into your discussion correctly)
To maintain the Pi shop there are a handful of services running on each Pi. The Docker framework to host the containers providing the various services. Portainer to administer Docker and the Containers. Grafana with its supporting cast to provide a graphical look into the inner workings of each Pi. Then Homer as the dashboard for each Pi and Homarr as the dashboard for the network services mentioned.
I had the above in place and working, mostly, when I started realizing using Tailscale, while working, didn’t have the ease or elegance I hoped for. The Immich and Nextcloud apps didn’t like using the internal IP. Getting a domain name (Dec. 1) and Cloudflare tunnel (Dec. 2) were the next steps taken. This made the apps happy when at home and away.
The domain name also meant, for the price of learning WordPress (oh Joy, another learning opportunity), copying a few image files and trying my hand at writing content to inform and entertain. I too could be a publishing mogul. Or was that midget?
WordPress is the publishing app of choice for nearly half the web. It’s sort of a ménage à trois between a word processor, a spreadsheet (range selections & grid matrix) and a publishing program, except that’s what it is. (this is slated for one or more upcoming posts)
Over the course of a week, in my spare time, I became productive enough to create a basic no frill website. In the two weeks since then I’ve been correcting beginner mistakes and creating some content for visitors, i.e. is this page and site.
Leave a Reply