I think this guy would enjoy seeing some of the very low end of the used computer market in places like Pakistan - where they receive 20' container loads full of 5 year old Dell, HP office PCs and mix/match pieces into fully working systems that people can enjoy for more years to come. There's a whole street with at least ten different retail vendors/repair shops in Rawalpindi.
This was essentially my first job. As a 17-year-old I was hired for the summer by a large office to see how many working PCs I could get out of a large walk-in closet full of broken ones. Great work for a 17-year-old computer nerd: figure out what was wrong with each one (typically RAM or hard drive), decide which ones to keep as hosts and which ones to strip for donor parts, then mix and match and set them all up. Didn’t get paid much but I enjoyed it and learned a lot, and it was a great deal for the office, who ended up with about 20 extra working computers.
And I must say that working with business PCs from vendors like HP is a joy, because they are optimized for quick and tool-less maintenance. I can open the PC and swap out power supply, HDD/SSD, 5.25 inch devices and expansion cards without any tools. Only the motherboard, CPU (depending on heat sink design) and cooling fans are screwed in. And there are even spare screws inside the case for unused slots/devices. And while somewhat unpopular, they use custom connectors that reduce the number of cables (modern PCs don't really need the fat ATX bundle), and cables are cut to length, and the case has holders for each cable - virtually no cable management needed.
I wish consumer devices were that easy to maintain and upgrade.
We have a nonprofit here in Slovenia that does exactly that, but puts Linux on them and gives them away to those who can't afford a computer. They've been invaluable during the pandemic when everyone was suddenly sent home and many households didn't have enough (or any) computers to support online schooling.
I never understood why anyone would want a Raspberry Pi as a low cost replacement for a computer. You still have to get potentially expensive peripherals and the overall experience is worse. Especially when you consider the risk of corrupting the SD card. That's negative value right there.
If you are desperate you just get an old Thinkpad on ebay for $200.
Beyond a certain point you lose more in value than you save in money.
So you should embrace that and choose a completely different computing experience for sub $200. At that point you are better off with a cheap tablet. They do not cost significantly more than a Raspberry Pi 4.
I did exactly this as a job about three years ago in Nothern Kentucky.
We would get semi trailers full of pallets of 5-10 year old laptops and PCs. Mostly from businesses upgrading. Then we would wipe them, fix anything that needed fixing (always with repaired/recycled parts), and sell them.
Not the most reliable machines for the end users, but super cheap!
It was kind of interesting, we would use RAM that had been sent back through a solder reflow oven to fix bad solder joints, figure out ways to repair dented and broken machines, etc.
I hated the job since it was super monotonous, but it paid.
Haha, on our country we get things like this from japan. It's FUN mixing and matching parts that work. Some are hard to find drivers (LOOKING AT YOU NEC) but a good positive is most parts are durable / quality parts.
10th grade computer engineering involved doing this. So much fun. So educational. And the computers were all a write off so there was plenty of learning to be done.
I'm all in for re-using, re-purposing old computer hardware but I'm weary of the power consumption at the same time. So if there is a choice of SBC(ARM) vs old x86 computer, I would definitely recommended a SBC especially since it consumes fraction of the power and matches or sometimes even exceeds the performance of a 5 year old x86 computer depending upon the task.
Pretty neat. Definitely recycles a lot of electronics in a good way. On the GPIO pins I would definitely replace the connector! I can tell you from experience that even if the pins straighten out, some random plugging/unplugging later and the pin will break off and the next person will end up replacing the connector. This is much easier if you have a setup already for doing the work.
This is also a really great way to "pay yourself" to learn to do rework. Buying 200 at £61 and selling the fully restored ones (which appears to > 100) at £9 is at least £900 revenue from the experience. Granted, since you are "learning" that would be slow work at first, but later it would become fairly routine. So something someone in high school could easily do.
> I’m doing it for the blog content and the experience and to hopefully provide you guys with some very cheap Raspberry Pi’s for your projects!
One other thing here that makes me happy is that these repaired Pis will not end up in a landfill, which I bet would have otherwise been the end result. Yes, there are electronics recycling services, but who knows if the original owner would have gone that route, and I imagine there still ends up being quite a bit of unrecycleable waste, not to mention the energy required to do the recycling itself.
Meanwhile, I have a thermoelectric wine fridge that died recently. Looks like it's the logic board, but the manufacturer doesn't make them anymore (couldn't find anything on ebay etc. either). I feel really awful that I'll likely have to have to toss the thing due to what is probably a really cheap and easy-to-replace dead part. (I need to take another look at it to see if there's something obvious like a blown capacitor that I can replace.)
> Instead I will be donating the proceeds of the sales to the Raspberry Pi Foundation and they can decide what to do with the Money!
I just retired my Raspberry Pi 1 B (2011) last week. I had OpenVPN installed on it for accessing my home network, but since my new router has OpenVPN integrated, I don't need it anymore. I played with installing RetroPie on it, but it is far too slow to be usable.
If you have it running still, what do you use it for?
- Interim Lisp OS (http://interim-os.com - this runs on Raspi 2 only, so porting to the ARM v6 in the Raspi 1 would be a nice project) - btw., this is a project by Lukas Hartmann, who is also the creator of the open MNT Reform ARM laptop (https://mntre.com)
I'm using one right now to build a Fireman Sam dispatch console for my son. Lots of leds and buttons. An arduino would be better, except I want it to play MP3s so the computer voice can tell where the fire is, beep the right beeps, etc
It uses a 433mhz receiver and picks up temperatures from a couple of commercial temperature sensors, uses pygame to display them to the screen, plus a few bits of other info.
Pretty basic, but it works. It struggles with timings though, which I've discovered is pretty important when receiving and decoding 433 signals. Looking to use a Rasberry Pico instead shortly.
I have 2 original Raspberry Pi model B. I used it for a short time as a Synergy server (keyboard/mice). My future plans for these are:
* PiHole (original model should be enough)
* Home automation, ie Garage door opener / automation
* CCTV monitoring using old webcam (not fast though, perhaps less than 5 fps but that's good enough for what I need)
* CCTV recorder (not video, but just capturing photo every second, which is good enough for me)
* file server for low throughput device (or TimeMachine server)
* Server/PC status display (displays server status) on TV
* Prometheus, htop, GoAccess, etc...
* Lo-fi player
* pivpn
Something I've noticed is that the SD card corrupts easily, though that may be simply because I'm using a phone charger as the power supply.
I discovered that although the Model B does not support natively booting off USB, you can still put an updated bootcode.bin [1] on the SD card which will enable this functionality. Hopefully my flash drive will not corrupt as easily.
I'm still running the 512mb model with kodi. I don't really watch movies or shows that often and don't even have a TV capable of 4k, so it's still doing well.
I use one of the first batches to control a few sensors around my front door. Movement detection, reed switch door opening sensor and it controls the siren and the light at the front door.
I burnt through sooo many SD cards until I started using Alpine Linux which runs perfectly on the Pi and runs from a RAM disk. No more dead SD cards for me
I have 3 Pi running, including the original Pi 1. Unfortunately, the Pi 1 is just sucking up electricity. It used to be my main OSMC (Kodi), but that is my Pi 3's job now, and my older Pi (2014) is running PiHole.
I have a first gen Pi running miniDLNA and an FTP server plugged into a cheap 1TB USB drive. I threw it together on a lark, but my wife gets a ton of use out of it watching content that isn’t available on Netflix.
Kudos for bringing back to life dead electronics. This is an example for the world. Hold on - back in 1996 the world was still spinning and doing business with simpler devices. So many uses that these can be put to. No matter whether selling or donating, that’s not the point here really.
When I was just a young (and poor) kid in high school I was looking for ways to make some side money and help my family out over long summer breaks.
I learned the IPhone 3G and 3GS were both (1) Super cheap when ‘broken’ on eBay and (2) *very* easily repairable phones. No need to solder stuff or tear apart a whole phone just to replace a screen for example.
At the time, I’d buy them from anywhere between $15-$30/phone depending on damage, swap out parts from unrepairable ones, or buy new(ie Battery replacements) and sell for around double the price.
I miss the days where you didn’t need a license and special training to repair these things.
I wish there would be more of this offerings for broken single board computers out there. They are ideal learning projects for getting used to hot air stations, microsoldering and debugging circuits.
So I was hoping to see some actual repairs, but author is just going to be bending pins and re-soldering connectors? I'd like to see a repair of traces or even a chip replacement.
200+ for just ~$84 (current rate is 1/1.34), that's 42 cents each. This is worth if only to get out the parts, not to mention once you repair 10 of them you're already turning a profit. Where can I get such a deal? eBay doesn't anymore, I looked.
Still I am using Pi B for pihole + openvpn at home.
The other one Pi B works like public wifi to ethernet. Public wifi goes to wifi dongle + Pi and ethernet wire from Pi to ddwrt router. That one creates access point and is not a public wifi anymore lol. Thats for tor network or researching purposes. Boots from an old flash stick I found on the street.
I thought at the time Pi B was broken, turning off in 1 min while booting without any reason. LCD was going crazy on off.
I booted without an lcd and pluged in. Yes time to type in usr+psw lcd on of went crazy but I managed to measure temperature it was 56°C in seconds +70°C and Pi went down.
Then I went to the basement and attached huge fan from old gpu card and temperature of cpu is always +34°C works like a bee.
After some time I found third Pi B, SD card slot was broken I have soldered that one, works. But I have no use from it. Still thats an old hardware.
I was using an original Pi as an ssh client to talk the the serial ports of a couple of systems at work. They're fine for any non-graphical that runs tmux and serial software. It could probably run VNC server with TWM or some other retro WM.
I think it would be nice exercise to go through a couple hundred failed units and repair them just to learn what exactly happened. If I was somebody who created a product like that I would probably want to do this.
This is pretty neat. I have a trading bot running on my raspberry pi, it also waters my plans every other day. It's pretty awesome to see such tiny devices be so incredibly powerful.
To the author of the post, in case you're here: I almost went to follow you on Twitter as suggested at the end of the post, bu then I scrolled through your timeline a bit and saw loads of "Hey @{username}, Thank you for the follow!", and promptly decided against it.
No offense, it's just extra noise and I figured I'd share in case you do want to grow your Twitter following as that's the kind of thing that I'd wager puts a lot of people off of following you.
My macbook pro 2015 is getting slower. Its already SSD. I wonder why. Is it the OS? Maybe its the fan that I need to clean? If it is both I’m going to just make this into a Linux laptop.
I’m sure my pc experience would be different and block everything, but that site has way too many ads, subscription, cookie notification stuff on mobile
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaonwarb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mopsi|5 years ago|reply
I wish consumer devices were that easy to maintain and upgrade.
[+] [-] franga2000|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|5 years ago|reply
If you are desperate you just get an old Thinkpad on ebay for $200.
Beyond a certain point you lose more in value than you save in money.
So you should embrace that and choose a completely different computing experience for sub $200. At that point you are better off with a cheap tablet. They do not cost significantly more than a Raspberry Pi 4.
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
Walking down the aisles it filled you with both fascination and melancholy.
They would sell exotic yet thoroughly obsolete $10,000 SGI systems, and also semi-obsolete $20 add-in cards for $1.
It was sort of like a cross between the great pyramids and the star wars trash compactor.
[+] [-] reportingsjr|5 years ago|reply
We would get semi trailers full of pallets of 5-10 year old laptops and PCs. Mostly from businesses upgrading. Then we would wipe them, fix anything that needed fixing (always with repaired/recycled parts), and sell them.
Not the most reliable machines for the end users, but super cheap!
It was kind of interesting, we would use RAM that had been sent back through a solder reflow oven to fix bad solder joints, figure out ways to repair dented and broken machines, etc.
I hated the job since it was super monotonous, but it paid.
[+] [-] joshxyz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grinich|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ficklepickle|5 years ago|reply
I used to volunteer there, it's a great place!
[+] [-] Waterluvian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selimthegrim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LockAndLol|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesmd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|5 years ago|reply
This is also a really great way to "pay yourself" to learn to do rework. Buying 200 at £61 and selling the fully restored ones (which appears to > 100) at £9 is at least £900 revenue from the experience. Granted, since you are "learning" that would be slow work at first, but later it would become fairly routine. So something someone in high school could easily do.
[+] [-] kelnos|5 years ago|reply
One other thing here that makes me happy is that these repaired Pis will not end up in a landfill, which I bet would have otherwise been the end result. Yes, there are electronics recycling services, but who knows if the original owner would have gone that route, and I imagine there still ends up being quite a bit of unrecycleable waste, not to mention the energy required to do the recycling itself.
Meanwhile, I have a thermoelectric wine fridge that died recently. Looks like it's the logic board, but the manufacturer doesn't make them anymore (couldn't find anything on ebay etc. either). I feel really awful that I'll likely have to have to toss the thing due to what is probably a really cheap and easy-to-replace dead part. (I need to take another look at it to see if there's something obvious like a blown capacitor that I can replace.)
> Instead I will be donating the proceeds of the sales to the Raspberry Pi Foundation and they can decide what to do with the Money!
This is just really awesome. Kudos to the author.
[+] [-] gorgoiler|5 years ago|reply
When it was made they found something wrong with it
They threw it away like a piece of rubbish into an old dark storeroom
Then, from outer space, a Clever Man brought it to life with his cosmic dust!
—
...adapted from an ancient piece of welsh folklore: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ouLJ-dP1Wps
[+] [-] shimonabi|5 years ago|reply
If you have it running still, what do you use it for?
[+] [-] johndoe0815|5 years ago|reply
- Plan 9 (http://9p.io/sources/contrib/miller/)
- Inferno (http://lynxline.com/projects/labs-portintg-inferno-os-to-ras...)
- RISC OS (https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi)
- NetBSD (https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/)
- FreeBSD (https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Raspberry%20Pi)
- Interim Lisp OS (http://interim-os.com - this runs on Raspi 2 only, so porting to the ARM v6 in the Raspi 1 would be a nice project) - btw., this is a project by Lukas Hartmann, who is also the creator of the open MNT Reform ARM laptop (https://mntre.com)
- (shameless plug) my bare metal "crosstalk" Smalltalk-80 (https://github.com/michaelengel/crosstalk)
I'm pretty sure this list isn't complete...
Some operating systems are not supported at the moment:
- OpenBSD only seems to support the Aarch64-based models 3 and 4
- Haiku seems to be looking for a maintainer for the Raspberry port
[+] [-] hyperman1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptrincr|5 years ago|reply
It uses a 433mhz receiver and picks up temperatures from a couple of commercial temperature sensors, uses pygame to display them to the screen, plus a few bits of other info.
Pretty basic, but it works. It struggles with timings though, which I've discovered is pretty important when receiving and decoding 433 signals. Looking to use a Rasberry Pico instead shortly.
[+] [-] kkielhofner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newman314|5 years ago|reply
Works great in the times that I have the primary Pihole (containerized) down for maintenance/upgrades.
[+] [-] otterpro|5 years ago|reply
* PiHole (original model should be enough) * Home automation, ie Garage door opener / automation * CCTV monitoring using old webcam (not fast though, perhaps less than 5 fps but that's good enough for what I need) * CCTV recorder (not video, but just capturing photo every second, which is good enough for me) * file server for low throughput device (or TimeMachine server) * Server/PC status display (displays server status) on TV * Prometheus, htop, GoAccess, etc... * Lo-fi player * pivpn
[+] [-] happythomist|5 years ago|reply
Something I've noticed is that the SD card corrupts easily, though that may be simply because I'm using a phone charger as the power supply.
I discovered that although the Model B does not support natively booting off USB, you can still put an updated bootcode.bin [1] on the SD card which will enable this functionality. Hopefully my flash drive will not corrupt as easily.
[1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/documentation/blob/master/har...
[+] [-] lostlogin|5 years ago|reply
Edit: somehow missed the model you have, these may not be options.
[+] [-] dgellow|5 years ago|reply
- pihole
- custom media player based on VLC, with a web UI
- a weather service that aggregates and displays info of small weather stations around the house (ESP8266 + a bunch of sensors)
We are thinking about moving to a v4 to have more RAM
[+] [-] iforgotpassword|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tepix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geek_at|5 years ago|reply
I burnt through sooo many SD cards until I started using Alpine Linux which runs perfectly on the Pi and runs from a RAM disk. No more dead SD cards for me
[+] [-] unfocused|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 542458|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perfmode|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stelf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrose|5 years ago|reply
I learned the IPhone 3G and 3GS were both (1) Super cheap when ‘broken’ on eBay and (2) *very* easily repairable phones. No need to solder stuff or tear apart a whole phone just to replace a screen for example.
At the time, I’d buy them from anywhere between $15-$30/phone depending on damage, swap out parts from unrepairable ones, or buy new(ie Battery replacements) and sell for around double the price.
I miss the days where you didn’t need a license and special training to repair these things.
[+] [-] simplecto|5 years ago|reply
Very niche, but hey -- this is HN.
[+] [-] umvi|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/Tronicsfix/featured
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Tronicsfix/videos?view=0&sort=p&fl...
[+] [-] rmoriz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intricatedetail|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unnouinceput|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xxel|5 years ago|reply
Still I am using Pi B for pihole + openvpn at home.
The other one Pi B works like public wifi to ethernet. Public wifi goes to wifi dongle + Pi and ethernet wire from Pi to ddwrt router. That one creates access point and is not a public wifi anymore lol. Thats for tor network or researching purposes. Boots from an old flash stick I found on the street.
I thought at the time Pi B was broken, turning off in 1 min while booting without any reason. LCD was going crazy on off. I booted without an lcd and pluged in. Yes time to type in usr+psw lcd on of went crazy but I managed to measure temperature it was 56°C in seconds +70°C and Pi went down. Then I went to the basement and attached huge fan from old gpu card and temperature of cpu is always +34°C works like a bee.
After some time I found third Pi B, SD card slot was broken I have soldered that one, works. But I have no use from it. Still thats an old hardware.
[+] [-] tapland|5 years ago|reply
Ethernet
> These will not be fixed
HDMI
> I will not be fixing these
USB/Power (Power is a separate connector)
> I will revisit these in the near future.
I know that even fixing pins and easier problems is also valauble, but now I'm just afraid I'll miss the follow-up I want to see D:
[+] [-] sys_64738|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmilcin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soheil|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tnorthcutt|5 years ago|reply
No offense, it's just extra noise and I figured I'd share in case you do want to grow your Twitter following as that's the kind of thing that I'd wager puts a lot of people off of following you.
Neat project, I enjoyed the posts on it!
[+] [-] christiansakai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|5 years ago|reply