Re: Just got a Pi1B. What can you actually do with it these days?

On 2025-06-06, TronNerd82 <tronnerd82@aol.com> wrote:

As the subject header would imply, this morning I got a Raspberry Pi 1
model B from eBay. ...
>
If you can think of any productive use-cases for an original Pi model B
(not even the B+) let me know, and I'll consider it :-)

It should be able to run an OSS home thermostat with plenty of
CPU time left over.

A couple of things I used to use my Pi 1 for (same unit doing
both functions but not at the same time):

1. The Pi 1 captured off-the-air TV from a PVR-USB2 device and
directed the stream to a named pipe.  A netcat session read from
the named pipe.  The other end of the netcat session was a Linux
machine with plenty of disk storage.  SSH on the larger Linux
machine set up and tore down the stuff when activated by cron.
If interested in that, I have the command options and so forth.
The PVR-USB2 hardware and/or driver would sometimes lock up and
require a reboot, and it was easier for me to reboot the Pi 1
than the bigger machine.

2. Had an HP 6300c scanner that would work with an old (roughly
2010-era) OS and libraries but not with current libraries.
Connnected the scanner to the Pi 1 running the old OS (on a
private LAN so no internet exposure) and used SSH to stream the
scanner output to a newer/larger Linux machine.

--
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)