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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It might be too outdated to do major services, but it’s still fine for its original use - interfacing with electronic components.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.
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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.
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.
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.
Yes you have the kernel in the SD card and the root on usb
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/
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.
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.
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.
Does it have the weird rj50 (yes 50) endpoint ?
Yes
i have made a stl of that if you need the cable, it is janky but it works
Aww. Thanks. I’ve got the cable, I just need to invest some time into a couple of suggestions from here.
it should just work with KDE
ADS-B receiver that uploads to ADSBExchange, Flightaware, and FlightRadar24. Start tracking the skys
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.
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.
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 use mine as kitchen radio with https://moodeaudio.org/
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 still going strong and runs my irrigation system with the gpio interfacing with a relay board.