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Selfhosted @lemmy.world

ceiron @lemm.ee

2w ago

What are some cool projects that I can do with a 1st gen Raspberry Pi?

39 comments

Pi-hole for ad blocking.
- Is it easy to set up SSL on a PiHole? I wanted to get Adguard home setup (similar to Pihole) but the complexity of setting up secure connections and I'm like, "yeah, nobody in my family is going to be able to fix this if something happens when I'm not around". 😂
  
  They even have a full tutorial on it here.
  However, if you're going the self-signed certificate route, consider to make your own mini-CA with root-CA + intermediate CA added in your trust store on every device and all your services behind a reverse proxy. The only thing you need to worry about is the certificates' validity !
  
  I recommend setting it up with a let's encrypt cert via tailscale, that way not only you get a proper cert for free without opening your pihole to the internet, but also you get a way to use it when you are not at home, but if you are using a raspberry pi 1 or any other pi from the SD card I recommend using Log2ram in order to preserve the SD card
  Edit: forgot to add that you should install zram-tools and run
  
  sudo dphys-swapfile unistall
  on a first gen pi since the low ram can increase the tendency to swap especially with unbound and that can also kill your SD card prematurely

Cups Print Server for usb printer
- For any printer. You never know what it's doing without a firewall solution. USB is always the safest option.
- Wait, can I share a printer on my network that does not have a network card?!
  
  Yes
- 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.

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.
  
  Do you worry about that Zero being deauthed since it uses 2.4 only still?
  I ask as I'm having somewhat of a bit of lag / delay or something I need to look further into later with a Zero/DVBHAT + between my RPi5 / router which is using as its DNS provider (AdguardHome) and because I still use a 2.4GhZ camera (which has also been playing up recently....), got me thinking about having all the cams / Pi's / SFF PC's not only hard wired, but turning off the 2.4GhZ weefee altogether on the router due to Flippers and shit.
  tldr: should I care?
- Sweeeeeet. Thanks for sharing!

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.

An IRC server would work, but I think having to deal with 32bit ARM will be too annoying.

Tor bridge/Snowflake , i2pd to help circumvent censorship on some countries

It's got enough power for a retro game emulator.

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’m just suggesting review their list of apps they support to get some ideas of what’s out there.
  Ahh my people. Another list searcher. LOL

Octoprint if you own a 3d printer

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.

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

I took an old pi and threw a flight tracker on there. Now i have premium accounts on FR24, FlightAware, and ADS-B Exchange.
I have a few other pis which run other stuff though, my favorite thing to do is install nginx proxy manager and tailscale, then use it as an entry point to my network (this was born out of my main server being a bit unstable, which i have since fixed but kept NPM off of it because the pi is pretty much set and forget)
- Is thebflighttracker like an OS designed for adding accounts to or just a orogram?
  sorry for the stupid question, it sounds cool and I have no experience.
  
  It's a program that uses an SDR to pick up the signals broadcasted by planes (ADS-B) containing their flight information. Then the data gets uploaded to an aggregator (FR24, Flight Aware, ADS-B Exchange) that gives a global view of all planes in the sky.
  You can use the aggregators for free without uploading, but you get some perks for being a contributor. I just do it because it's cool and I use the platforms for getting info on flights I'm taking (you can tell if your flight is gonna be delayed if the plane is delayed elsewhere for example).

If you have a 3D printer that can't connect to the internet, you could try Octoprint.
- Might be worth a shot but unfortunately Octoprint recommends at least a Pi 3. I tried it myself on a 2B and had nonstop issues with print quality from stutters while the Pi was sending gcode to the printer. As soon as I swapped to a 4B the problems disappeared.

Does picoreplayer work OK on the first gen boards?

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.

I am in the same situation, looking how to use my 1st pi. I am already using AdGuard, Nginx and home assistant on my pi4, so I am looking for something more niche but very cool 😀

Simple html web server. Host your own website.

39 comments