alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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They'll run CUPS too! My B modernized some old, commercial Brother laser printers I was running.
I have a few older models lying around too, there's some other minor benefits as well:
* They have full sized HDMI ports
* They will happily run using any random old USB charger and not overheat.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.
> 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.
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. :)