I have a pihole set up with pivpn. Octoprint and a cluster of 4 pi zeros on a pi 4 to experiment with cluster computing.
After my NAS suddenly stopped booting, I bought a cheap USB hard drive enclosure, plugged it into the Pi and now my Pi is a poor man’s NAS.
My Pi 1 sits in my drawer. My Pi 2 sits in a retro game emulator all in one controller thing at my friends house. my old old Pi 3 sitting in semi retirement as a dedicated pihole. One Pi 4 as my NAS, qbittorrent box, and generally anything storage or multimedia related. And finally my other Pi 4 is a local web and minecraft server.
One for pihole. One for Home Assistant. One for an office dashboard.
Do you really need three pis for that?
Pihole is on an old Pi 2 or 3. HA is in my network hub and attached to external storage. Office is in another building.
I mostly use my 3B+ as a development and sysadmin sandbox. Lately I’ve been using it to test out a few IoT-type projects.
I’d love to get my hands on a Pi Zero W at some point, but chip shortage.
pihole is basically it at this point. Got eonugh spare machines sitting around to do the rest anyway
Over the last few years with the raspberry pi people selling their inventory to enterprise customers instead of the hobbyists that have using them for 10+(?) Years ive found that x86 thin clients are actually a much better option in terms of price and upgradability. Most modern thin clients (wyse, HP, etc) have m.2 storage expansion, sodimm sockets, and sometimes even pcie expansion. If you get lucky you can get a decent current-ish gen thin client for ~100$ depending on the specs. What are pi 4s going for these days?