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?
It might be too outdated to do major services, but it’s still fine for its original use - interfacing with electronic components.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.
nice, it wasn’t where you could do that with the PlayStation 2
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
Mine is my DNS. Pi-hole with unbound.
Hmmm unbound does work with AGH too… Might have to look at trying this
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/o is shit on that thing. Syncing any reasonable amount of data is out of question.
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.
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.
That’s great. Thankfully my parents have steered well clear of that mess. But would help to not click on the more “convincing” ads.
We can’t be far from the first wave of uniquely targeted scam ads with faked photos/audio/video of the user’s friends, family, boss, etc.
My mother-in-law sent thousands of dollars for years to a fake UN official.
ADS-B receiver that uploads to ADSBExchange, Flightaware, and FlightRadar24. Start tracking the skys
I use mine as kitchen radio with https://moodeaudio.org/
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
Mine is still going strong and runs my irrigation system with the gpio interfacing with a relay board.
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.
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.
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.
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.
