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

Gordon Henderson <gordon+usenet@drogon.net> wrote:

In article <kKm*zLLeA@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>,
Theo  <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

Gordon Henderson <gordon+usenet@drogon.net> wrote:

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.

>
If you're going non-Linux, RISC OS runs well on the Pi1.  It was designed

 
I know what it is and what it was designed for. I was there in the early
days, owned an Arc, have followed it's development over the years, etc.
I'm just not interested in it right now, thanks.

That was aimed at the OP who was asking the question, not you :-)
If you've written your own OS I'm sure it works exactly how you want so no
reason to use something else.

for an 0.5MB 8MHz ARM2, so a 512MB 700MHz Pi1 is ample.  It can't use
multiple cores so the Pi1 being single core is no problem.

 
I have a scheme for multiple cores in my own system, (it's capable of
pre-emptive multi-tasking) but not got the energy to implement it over
multiple cores for now.

As long as you don't need synchronisation, there's not a lot to running
multiple cores - you just set them going with different PCs.  It's when they
need to talk to each other, or you need them to work on the same data, then
things get more complicated.

(in the case of RISC OS, a whole load of legacy APIs are not thread safe.
In a custom OS you control everything so you can avoid such problems)

This is it in it's original incarnation on a 16Mhz 65C816 CPU demonstrating
multi-tasking:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL1VI8ezgYc
 
The graphics is via a 115K serial link to a "smart" terminal running on
a Linux desktop. It uses Acorn VDU style commands for graphics, etc.

Looks neat.  I see a certain Acorn heritage there too :)

(does that serial protocol have any similarity to the Tube, by any chance?)

Over recent years I've ported it from the 816 to RISC-V and now to ARM32.
 
The Pi version has native graphics and works well on the Pi 7" screen
thing (or external HDMI). It boots to Basic or BCPL in under 2 seconds.

That's the nice thing about not having to boot Linux or systemd...

Theo