Some people just really enjoy solving problems in a convoluted way for the learning experience. I don't have that kind of drive personally--I feel like I learn enough programming during work hours.
I just did this with great fun. Was suspicious that my house CO2 was getting too high in my bedroom at night -- one Raspberry Pi connected CO2 sensor streaming metrics over WireGuard to a cloud server running Prometheus, Grafana, and sending alerts with Alertmanager and Pushover I now have a very reliable system to tell me to open a window.
Next thing will be auto-provisioning the Pi so I can just flash my image to the SD card and plug it in.
The SD card contains everything for the RPi, right? I set up a home media server for my parents with RaspBMC and an IR receiver about five years ago. They live in a poor power region so the SD cards can go wrong easily on power failure. I just `dd`'d a bunch of identical SD cards and left it to them to swap.
Ideally, keeping the SD cards read-only would have been better but I was visiting only a few days and I needed to support subtitle download so I settled for this.
Outside of work, the only project ideas I have are weird convoluted ones just like this, where I spend 40 hours getting a proof of concept working, then never touch it again.
