Pi-Hole always tops my list as a cool project that has definite benefits and will still be in service after the new wears off. It’s been quite a while ago, but I built an Alexa with an RPI. That was kind of cool. Home Assistant on an RPI is pretty cool. In fact, there is a whole list of cool stuff to do with an RPI: https://pimylifeup.com/category/projects/ . There’s also an Awesome list for the RPI: https://github.com/thibmaek/awesome-raspberry-pi.
PiHole is becoming a bit heavy for my Zero W (uses the same chip as the original Pi series), and it’s the only thing the Pi runs. It’s a bit worrying.
Sweeeeeet. Thanks for sharing!
Octoprint if you own a 3d printer
Cups Print Server for usb printer
Wait, can I share a printer on my network that does not have a network card?!
Yes
For any printer. You never know what it’s doing without a firewall solution. USB is always the safest option.
that is so fucking cool and epic wtf how is this not more well known??
It’s very well-known, Apple of all companies is the developer. It’s just used more by companies than consumers.
This is common in the IT world. Printers are such painful devices and installing drivers on every Windows desktop just adds to the pain, but by doing this you don’t need to install drivers, as Linux can serve something that doesn’t need drivers to print to.
Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.
You didn’t miss a whole lot. LOL Those first UI’s were clunky.
Tons of typical self-hosted services, like vault warden, actual budget, etc.
But for something that old, I’m thinking more along the lines of RC cars and other projects involving the GPIO. I’ll reserve my newer ones for self-hosting stuff, older stuff for things that don’t benefit much from extra processing power.
It’s got enough power for a retro game emulator.
Tor bridge/Snowflake , i2pd to help circumvent censorship on some countries
An IRC server would work, but I think having to deal with 32bit ARM will be too annoying.
Does picoreplayer work OK on the first gen boards?
Take a look at the Linuxserver Docker images. They curate a huge list of self hosted apps that is great to browse and look for ideas. You don’t need to run Docker and use their images - I’m just suggesting review their list of apps they support to get some ideas of what’s out there.
That Pi is too old to handle any media tasks (like running a Jellyfin server), but for any low intensity duties it’s still perfectly usable.
Hey! That was my taco! It’s been just like a taco to me!
I was poking around the Raspberry imager utility and they had RISC OS, which is and old operating system that was apparently fairly popular in the UK, but I’d never heard of it in the US. I loaded it up on my Pi 1 and had fun exploring it. Not exactly useful, but cool to mess with: RISC OS
Web based torrent box with a VPN configured.
I wonder how well that would run on a 700MHz ARM CPU with a maximum of 512 MB RAM…
The VPN speeds will be throttled pretty substantially, and low ram will result in some instability seeding, but it should run. Good thing about torrents is they’re built for unreliable.
I’ve run a torrent box like described on pretty much every pi generation, and the pi4 was the first one where VPN speed was no longer the bottleneck.
Every bit helps
