re: Favorite use of raspberry pi?

I'm using a handful of them at work right now, testing a security camera system. I'm running 12 IP cameras, and for a few months I had Zoneminder running on an old core2duo machine we had. It was basically running at 100% load for about 5 months before it keeled over, so I decided to use a few RPi3's this go 'round. Zoneminder is pretty neat in that you can run it on as many machines as you want, and just make them all connect to the same storage and database on the backend so they act as one large system. I'm currently using 5 RPi3's, which when counting the power supplies and SD cards cost about $225 total. I think I would be hard-pressed to put together or buy a used machine at that price to do the same work. It's probably not the absolute best bang for the buck for what I'm doing, but the added benefit of ease of upgrading by simply adding more Pi's puts it over the top for me.


The next thing I will probably do is use one as a home automation hub. Again, it probably won't be the best value strictly on price/features, but the open nature and flexibility of it makes it worth it IMO.