Comment by verginer
13 hours ago
I finally found a job for my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B from 2012. It’s been sitting in a drawer for years, but about a 2 years ago added it to my Tailscale network as an exit node.
It’s a single-core 700MHz ARMv6 chip with 512MB of RAM. It's a fossil—a Pi 5 is 600x faster (according to the video). But for the 'low-bandwidth' task of routing some banking traffic or running a few changedetection watches via a Hetzner VPS (where the actual docker image runs), it’s rock solid. There’s something deeply satisfying about giving 'e-waste' a second life as a weekend project.
As a fun weekend project in 2013, I stood up a weather station using Weewx and my RPI 2 with 1 GB RAM. I told myself if it ever crashes or the SD card gets corrupted, I'll just tear everything down.
Well, it's still running today on the original SD card. At noon today it processed its 1,055,425th record in the database.
Still, if it ever crashes, I'll just tear it down. :)
Sounds like you want it to crash really badly :)
They'll run CUPS too! My B modernized some old, commercial Brother laser printers I was running.
That's a great idea - if I understood you right, you mean you used it to make a printer "wireless / wifi enabled" with it, right? Is there any guide you can recommend for that?
I've done the same thing - making a USB-only printer available on my LAN - following this guide: https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-print-server/
One nice thing is I can print to the CUPS server even if the printer is off
I did the same with an rpi3, not sure if I used this guide but it seems good:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/printing-at-home-from-your-...
I have a few older models lying around too, there's some other minor benefits as well:
I mean in theory and practice a Pentium 2 300 could do full 1gpbs routing with Vyatta and I used that and other distros to do that for years
Well on the other hand, at which point does it become wasteful to run something when it gets less and less power efficient compared to newer devices? According to OP's benchmarks, the Pi 1 burns 2W constant to do essentially zero work and running that on a more modern device that's already running would use almost no extra power.
Then again we use a kW or two to microwave things for minutes on a daily basis so who really gives a shit.
Yeah... 2W is just not that much energy.
Enough energy to run that thing for an entire year in under 1/2 a gallon of gasoline.
When you can pretty easily offset the entire yearly energy use by skipping a mow of your yard once, or even just driving slightly more conservatively for a few days... I'm not so worried about the power use.
In my region - it's about $3.50 in yearly power costs.
I did unplug my GPU to save 30 watts, but... 2 watts is equivalent to driving a Prius Prime 0.155 miles per day on battery power. So there's that
That seems an impossible range.
This site[0] claims a Prius Prime XSE gets 1.42 miles/kWh. Or (1.42 miles /1000Wh)*2 = 0.0028 miles. Which is ~14 feet, which is significantly more in line with my expectations (though still high)
[0] https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2024-toyota-prius-prime-x...
2 replies →
> I finally found a job for my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B from 2012.
Nice! Even though I've got a Proxmox serve at home running on a real PC (but it's not on 24/7), I do run my DNS, unbound, on a Pi 2. It's on 24/7 and it's been doing its job just fine since years.