1y ago

Raspberry Pi 1 B projects?

I have an old Pi hanging around doing nothing. When I originally got it it had the latest Pi OS with desktop loaded and ran like garbage, not surprisingly. So I messed with it headless for a bit, then found RISCOS as an option in Pi imager utility and that is just a neat OS. Fun to play around with for sure. But now I'm wondering what else I could use the old thing for. I see folks run Pihole on it, but I've already got 2 instances of Adguard Home running.

Could this handle Syncthing? Or would the data transfer be so bad it's not worth it? Wouldn't mind having an off-site backup device at my parents house if it would work.

Anyone else got one in their homelab?

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It might be too outdated to do major services, but it's still fine for its original use - interfacing with electronic components.
You could build a weather station, monitor temperature and humidity in your attic and crawlspace, automatically water plants, etc. You don't need much electronics knowledge for that sort of thing.

I had a really important role of my Pi 1 B+ for a long time; it was a network storage for my PlayStation 2 to play ISOs from the network with Free McBoot and Open PS2 Loader.
grabbed a big HDD, and old CD drive case and put everything inside. The Pi could be powered from the PS2s USB, hooked up a short network cable and it was ready to go.
Tho I still have that PS2, it's not in use anymore, so neither the Pi.
- That's great. I wonder if the same could be done on the original Xbox. I believe it had the ability to play over network connection from ISOs on a PC if modded. I have one kicking around that I have yet to put a bigger HDD in.
  
  the PS2 needed only just a Windows Network share (SMB). I guess the XBOX too should have an option for that, so I don't see any problem with it
- nice, it wasn't where you could do that with the PlayStation 2

Mine is my DNS. Pi-hole with unbound.
- Hmmm unbound does work with AGH too.... Might have to look at trying this
  
  Using it for Pihole + Unbound also, but running on DietPI OS. I recommend trying DietPI, since it is is basically Pi OS on a diet, which is very important on such an old device. It has a lot of software preconfigured to make them lighter, using less resources etc. You should really try it.

This would be perfect for a BBS.
- Interesting. I guess this is one of those technologies I knew about but didn't have a name for it! I will look into this .

Mine is still going strong and runs my irrigation system with the gpio interfacing with a relay board.

The original Pi B had a single core 700mhz ARMv6 processor and 512mb of memory. It's fine for embedded projects using GPIO or a mini LCD screen, but that's about it. You'd be lucky to even decode 720p video on it as a streaming box.
It might work neat as a monitoring device to keep tabs on the rest of your homelab machines and display a status output or something.
- No, the original Pi B can play 1080p video just fine. The video is not decoded by the CPU. H264 and older codecs play just fine. It cannot handle h265 videos as it doesn't have a hardware decoder for those. Kodi works just fine in fact. The interface is a little bit slow, but actual video playback is fine.
- I did overclock it a bit. I think it's at 900mhz now, reliably. Probably not enough in the grand scheme of things. But hey, it's something!

I was wishing I had one just recently. I'm not smart enough to get my ancient APC UPS to interface to Debian with the USB cable, so I need a device I can ping that's plugged into the mains (ie not through the UPC) so I can run a script that shuts the server down when the Pi stops responding to the pings.
So that's all it'd need to do - respond to pings when it's powered on. I've ordered a B+ for exactly this job.
- Have you tried using NUT? https://networkupstools.org/
  
  No. That looks very promising. Thanks, I'll check it out!
- That's a clever idea. My UPS does already have the smart pants features like that, but I love the simplicity of that as a concept.
- Probably cheaper to just use an ESP8266 or the like
  
  ESP8266
  Thanks - I sort of had that Idea and looked at the ESP32 with an Ethernet port, but it was looking complex to flash because of no UART etc. Looks like the ESP8266 would need an add on for Ethernet? Plus I might still be out of my depth figuring out how to flash it?
  I also considered an Ethernet hat for the Uno since I have a couple of them floating around somewhere, but in the end the B+ was cheaper. Those little boards would probably be better for power consumption as well though
- Does it have the weird rj50 (yes 50) endpoint ?
  
  rj50
  Yes

I use mine as kitchen radio with https://moodeaudio.org/

ADS-B receiver that uploads to ADSBExchange, Flightaware, and FlightRadar24. Start tracking the skys

I was thinking about hooking one up to a GPS module to run a local NTP server
https://blog.networkprofile.org/gps-backed-local-ntp-server/

I don't see why it wouldn't handle SyncThing, as long as you're not syncing a lot of clients.
You could also get a cheap screen and use it for a news/weather/social feed.
- I think the Pi 4 was the first Pi with gigabit ethernet. All the Pi's before that were limited to 100Mbit. For that reason, syncthing is probably a bad idea since it will be very slow in terms of syncing speed
  
  Eh, maybe. Depends on how much they're backup up and how often. They said the backups are off-site, so unless BOTH locations have a very fast connection, I'd bet that 100Mbit networking wouldn't be the huge bottleneck that you're thinking.
- i/o is shit on that thing. Syncing any reasonable amount of data is out of question.

I was using it for Pi-hole all the way up until I got a 4b and then put Pi-hole in a docker. Solid dude, will be hanging on my wall like those disassembled iPhones

Make a Pi-hole for friends/family, unless you want to build discrete hardware projects that don’t need a fast CPU. My 17-year-old niece is doing breadboard projects on this gen of Pi.
- That's an idea. Might have to do it for my parents. Using their internet is darn near impossible without ad blocking :)
  
  It’s a mitzvah indeed!
  Have also heard of adult children installing Pi-holes in their parents’ houses to stop them from visiting Qanon hotbeds.

I have the exact same model sending me birthday reminders daily. Scraped all my facebook friends’ birthdays years ago and made a very basic telegram bot. Saved me more than one embarrassing moments, including today, as I completely forgot about my brother’s birthday.
- That's a fun idea.

i use an old pi1b to run rtl433 with some even older dvb-t stick to grab weather data from my neighbors (who can afford a brand new bresser weather station with wind speeds and everything etc..) and send that to mosquitto for use with home assistant. but can track even more...i figured out car tire air pressure sensors and other stuff give me a good insight on wether the neighbors are home or not.

I had a pi 1b running my hvac/humidifier/HRV unit at home for years. Only removed it when we moved out.

I know you have an adguard, but have you thought about ditching those and using pinhole+unbound?
- I used Pihole for years, but have found AGH an overall better UI from a management perspective. And a quick searchs shows that unbound can work with AGH as well so I may give that a try.

Related to OP's question: is it possible to have the 1B boot from something other than an SD card?
I ran it as a PiHole for awhile, until it chewed through two SD cards. I'd like to use it for the GPIO functionality but I don't want have it randomly crap out again.
- Yes you have the kernel in the SD card and the root on usb
- You may want to try sd cards designed for security cameras. They are meant to be recorded to 24/7 and have higher write endurance.
- I don't believe so - the docs mention several ways to boot a pi but most only work for newer models.
  An option might be to boot an SD card read-only and run everything over NFS. It's trivial to do that sort of thing with some UNIX clones (OpenBSD, for instance), but I don't know about a modern Linux.

Since its GPU has composite out, why not a cool arcane cabinate?
- Funny thing, I bought this one used off eBay to interface with my CRT TV for retro games (NES/SNES) because it had analog out. I didn't realize at the time that most, if not all pi models can do it too. It's just combined with the 3.5mm headphone jack. It's an AV port! Oh well, got this one for a song so I'm not too mad about it.

Realistically the best bang-for-the-buck is maybe to sell it to some collector and get a new one ;-)
Mostly tongue-in-cheek, though. I don't know if anyone is actually willing to pay for it, but I know some people are quite happy when they find their old Pi 1.
- Yeah, I have a pi 3 and 4 in the "fleet" already. Was mostly just looking some something to use it for aside from wall decor.

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