Me — I’m curious.
I knew it would take about 15 seconds with the shutter open to get a picture of the Milky Way. In 15″ I should be able to ride a bike through the fame, even if I had to make a 180 in the pitch black , then another after a strobe in the face. The trick was being at the right place in the frame at the end of the exposure when the flash went off as the shutter closed. It took more than one try to get it right.
What is the Pi Shop?
The Pi shop currently consists of 3 Pi 5s sitting on the corner of a desk in my home office; serving this website, my DVD & CD collection as well as my pictures, videos and other services.
Raspberry Pi 5s are inexpensive , single board computers (SBC), that punch way above their weight while sipping on electricity. It costs about $5 a year, per Pi, to operate 24x7x365. The Pi shop is running free, open source software, from the OS to this WordPress website and everything in-between.
Why?
There are many reasons I started this project, but the Pi shop or website were not at all considerations. My main motivation was to recover years of memories buried on off-line hard drives. To do so I needed a place to put them where they would be available, a low powered Pi seemed a good starting point.
Then there was the annoyance from all the ads loading on pages I was reading, causing the articles to move all over to accommodate the ads. The continual news stories in those bouncing articles were often of another data breach and security losses . As people’s private data losses were listed my MacGyver & DIY genes started firing up my curiosity for other possibilities.
How?
The University of YouTube is a great place to start just about anything from entertainment to education. For my home Pi journey it really opened the floodgates; I learned where to get software to do the things I wanted to accomplish and how to install & configure that software.
Along the way I started seeing things about being able to access my Pi and its software/services from outside my home. Some of these used words like port forwarding, proxies & reverse-proxy, dynamic DNS, dynamic IPs; it was enough to make your head spin. Then I started hearing about other access avenues that were more secure and easier to set-up; that got me into Tailscale, which I use, but find it can be clunky and temperamental. What I’m now using is a Cloudflare Tunnel. This is free, but does require having a domain name, which isn’t; I got 3 years for $46, won’t break the bank.
For the price of a domain name I got easy and secure access to all the services on my Pis from anywhere I can get internet. Cloudflare, a big player on the internet with lots of servers, does all the heavy security for the Pi shop, providing a secure tunnel from your browser to my Pi, note the lock icon in the URL above.
With a secure tunnel to the internet, an always on Pi, a domain name, and the use of good security practices, all the pieces were in place to safely & securely (we’ll find out) run a self-hosted website.
WordPress is just another open source software that will run on a tiny Raspberry Pi 5. I don’t know how much traffic it will support, but I have a feeling I’ll find out.
The blog is where I will document the details on the journey of my Pi shop so the fellow curious can follow along. The gallery allows me to share images that caught my eye, maybe yours too.
From knowing almost nothing to having a working Pi shop and web site — zero to hero — has taken 6 months of part-time, a few hours a day, mostly watching YouTube and reading websites. If I can do it, so can you.