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

In article <101teqs$1rt4d$2@dont-email.me>,
TronNerd82  <tronnerd82@aol.com> wrote:

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 :-)

I have a few (dozen) of these - 1B and 1B+ (40 pin GPIO header). I run an
older Debian Jessie on them for Linux and am experimenting with Devuan,
but I also have my own bare-metal framework under which I run either my
own RTB Basic (a modern basic where line numbers are optional) which
supports high resolution graphics but not (yet) sound. I can also run
my own OS under the same framework which is written in BCPL which allows
local editing and compiling of BCPL programs.

What I don't have is good USB support, so no USB serial,
Ethernet/Wi-Fi. Keyboard and mouse is the limit. The filing system is
VFAT but the SD card driver is somewhat creative and really needs more
work, but it's all a matter of time & energy.

I'm using the BCPL OS as the front-end to my campervan sensors and
monitoring project but that's just a personal thing so I can have nice
graphics, but again things I can't do (yet) is read the touchscreen in
a nice way, so I'm looking at actually running the BCPL OS under a Linux
that does support nice USB things. (The core of it all is really just a
big (well, about 12KB) ARM32 assembler program that creates a VM for
the compiled BCPL code)

So that's something that the old Pi's are good for I guess.

-Gordon