projects for an OLD raspberry pi!

[fairyrune]

hello melonland!

once upon a time, young rune got given a raspberry pi (1.0) by their father. it was loaded with raspbian. i spent countless hours playing with scratch and learning htmlcss from a book called "raspberry pi for dummies", which was also part of my present. it was a lot of fun!

nowadays, i have a much more robust and capable desktop PC, which i use for gaming. the old raspberry pi doesn't have a lot of processing power - 256MB in RAM only - and so i am likely unable to use it for much of my daily activities at all. but i still want to use it. the board is still functional and has been kept in good condition, and i'm not in the habit of throwing out perfectly good tech! it probably wouldn't fetch a good price either, and to be honest, i'm interested in this sort of thing.

the most obvious project? pi-hole, a DNS sinkhole ad blocker. however - for several reasons - i'm looking for other suggestions! preferably, things that don't require many/any additional parts, or parts that are very cheap and easy to find. i'm not looking for something crazy niche... just something to make use of this little piece of tech i've been holding onto! most projects i've found that are small and easy for beginners are also using a lot of newer raspberry pi models. which sort of defeats the point...!

[TheFrugalGamer]

I, too, have a Raspberry Pi 1! They are incredibly slow and don't have wifi, unfortunately. I've been searching for a project for mine for a while, but haven't found anything that appeals to me. Basically anything that is text-heavy would be ideal, since anything with video is too much for this thing. That said, I did manage to set it up ages ago with RetroPie, and found that it can emulate NES, Gameboy and older games, while SNES games are too much for it.

With that in mind, I've considered hosting a Calibre server, basically a book server, but haven't taken the plunge yet. A few other ideas I've had are a GUI-less programing computer/hacking device, music player, or eReader. Offpunk is a command-line web browser that can handle several protocols and pulls sites down for archiving. It would probably be fairly simple to put together a PC for archived websites and texts. You could grab Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg (provided you have enough space), and sort of make an end-of-the-world offline reference device. Similar to those vape-powered webservers, you could also probably serve up a simple website (nothing too fancy or heavy on the scripts!)

I'd be interested to see what other ideas there are out there. I'm sure someone's come up with better ones than me.

[MediocreMetastasis]

I heard you can use raspberry pies as a slave device and is also HID compatible. So maybe try and emulate a mouse or keyboard using it.
People have also used raspberry pis as a music player.
you can also use raspberry pis to emulate video games.

[Melooon]

I once setup an old rasberry pi with 10GB of nightcore, plus a small javascript that ran at startup and automatically shuffled the nightcore and started playing it. So you could just plug it into any stereo and it was an instant nightcore jukebox 

Admittedly the sound quality out of a Pi is pretty bad  But if you have any old USB DACs around, you can run it through one of those and get proper sound quality!

You could also totally make it a lot better by creating some sort of UI for the music; like connecting a cheap barcode scanner and making barcodes that trigger your script to play different albums when you scan them 

[fairyrune]

so, here's what i've got so far on my part:

• pi-hole - but might not be feasible, as i don't believe my IP is static!
• games console - limited selection, but still fun
• electronic picture frame - might be a little bulky, but nice to display photos or even my favourite artwork i found online
• web host - for my personal site or for digital materials that i want to access on my private network only

there's a lot to consider with all these options... i suppose the question is, what do i want to try and what would be the most practical? i've always been a little interested in robotics, but i left that off as i thought it would be more expensive.

You could also totally make it a lot better by creating some sort of UI for the music; like connecting a cheap barcode scanner and making barcodes that trigger your script to play different albums when you scan them 

this is such a cute idea actually!

i did have an idea recently where i would make fake albums for things i like - characters, games, books, etc. - and burn a disc for them. however, i don't have a disc slot on anything i could use to play music... perhaps instead, i could create fake tapes/discs and put the barcodes on. pure novelty, but it'd be interesting! and sometimes novelty is necessary