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.

▲ zikduruqe 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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. :)

	▲	varispeed an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sounds like you want it to crash really badly :)

▲ bevr1337 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They'll run CUPS too! My B modernized some old, commercial Brother laser printers I was running.

▲

thisislife2 7 hours ago | parent [-]

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?

	▲	jffry 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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
	▲	zbendefy 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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-...

▲ justinsaccount 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲ hypercube33 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲ moffkalast 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲

horsawlarway 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲

3eb7988a1663 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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...

	▲	tzs 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You are missing a factor of 24, which comes in because they said "0.155 miles per day on battery power". The easiest way to do the calculation would be, assuming a Prius Prime can do M mi/kWh on battery power, is to calculate 0.155 mi/day x 1/M kWh/mi x 1 day/24h = 0.0065 kW = 6.5/M W. That gives us W which can directly be compared with the 2 W he gave. Also, 1.42 mi/kWh seems way low for battery power operation. I'm pretty sure that is for mixed gas/electric operation, expressed in MPG-e (47.9) and mi/kWh for convenient comparison to pure EVs. (You can convert between MPG-e and mi/kWh used the conversion factor for 33.7 kWh/gal. It has a 13.6 kWh battery and a 39 mile all electric range, which suggests M = 2.9 mi/kWh. Plugging that into 6.5/M W gives 2.2 W. M is probably actually a little higher because the car probably doesn't let the battery actually use 100% of its capacity. Most sites I see seem to say 3.1-3.5 mi/kWh. On the other hand there are some losses when charging. On my EV during times I've the year when I do not need to use the heating or AC the car is reporting 4.1 or higher mi/kWh, but it is measuring what is coming out of the battery. When calculated based on what is coming out of my charger it works out to 3.9 mi/kWh. This is with level 2 charging (240 V, 48 A). Level 1 charging is not as efficient as level 2. If we go with 3.1-3.5 mi/kWh, and assume that is measured on the battery output side and that the loses during charging are about 8%, we get 2.9-3.2 mi/kWh on the "this is what I've getting billed for" side. If we use the average of that and plug into 6.5/M W we get 2.1 W.

▲

6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

▲ TacticalCoder 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.