Almost uniquely among consumer grade computer manufacturers, the Raspberry Pi folks still support their earliest boards. We’re guessing that’s in part due to the much more recent Pi Zero using the same 32-bit system-on-chip, but it’s still impressive that a 13-year-old single board computer still has manufacturer OS support. With so many of these early boards out there, is there much you can do with them in 2025? [Jeff Geerling] gives it a try.
His test Pi is unusual in itself, the 2013 blue special edition that RS gave away in a social media promotion. Sadly we didn’t win one back in the day and neither did he, so he picked it up in an online auction. We’re treated to some very slow desktop exploration, but it’s clear that this is not where the strengths of a Pi 1 lie. It was reckoned at the time to be roughly equivalent to a Pentium II or Pentium III in PC terms, so that shouldn’t be a surprise. Instead he concludes that it’s better as a headless machine, though he notes how projects are starting to abandon 32 bit builds. The full video is below the break.
We asked the same question not so long ago, and the Hackaday Pi 1 now quietly analyses news content on its two-watt power budget. It’s still a useful little Linux box for your script-based projects even if it will never win any speed prizes.
Did this myself just two weeks ago, pihole on a rpi 1. still running great, had it in docker but kept having issues and kids nowadays can’t function without internet access…
The USB ports and 10/100 Mbit/sec network port share the one one only USB 2.0 High Speed port on the SoC. So you are limited to 100 Mbit in theory. I guess a lot depends on your ISP, but mine offer nearly two orders of magnitude higher than that. So using a RPi1 or even a RPi5 is not an optimal solution for some.
Isn’t Pi-Hole only replacing the DNS server, so the actual data flows on faster paths?
Should be fine for a pure DNS server, not like you need a bunch of bandwidth for that.
Yeah, that’s exactly why I have a couple of Pis lying about here. Limited bandwidth.
Now, I’ve found them excellent for running Node Red for some home automation stuff, so they have their use, but being limited to <100Mb/s almost immediately rules them out for lots of things.
Oh, and the SOC having no AES decoding built in ruins a lot of low end VPN type stuff, but the bandwidth kinda kills that anyway.
I’ve had an older rPi running headless with an MQTT server. It’s been fine as a home automation server and IoT test server.
Oh yeah, all that Node Red stuff is MQTT orientated, Original Pi is more than capable of handling all that.
It actually grabs images from my CCTV cameras when someone pushes the doorbell, and this gets emailed to me, but that was pushing it quite a bit. I think I had to do a lot of FFMPEG wizardry to make that work without it taking forever.
I agree if it would be a router, but just serving DNS it should be sufficient.
I fully agree to that – PiHole (lokal DNS to block ads and trackers LAN-wide)
is one of the use cases were the limited bandwith of the old PIs is not an issue.
How many DNS queries you have at home? I believe home users won’t see the actual difference for PiHole’s DNS replying speed.
I don’t know how fast your home internet is, but mine is 10Gbps internet and Pi 1B is actually working OK, recently I changed to Pi3B just because SD card died and I am using USB stick to boot.
Yup. Pi-hole.
things don’t necessarily need current support…if you want to do 2013 tasks on a 2013 computer, just use 2013 software. for example, i recently installed debian woody under qemu just so i could build a kernel for a pc built in 2004. old computer tasks are so easy these days now that every pc is a supercomputer!
…….provided it’s not connected to the internet
yeah, I have a access point on old software so my aging mac’s with airport ppc can connect without issues.
i did have to add KexAlgorithms +diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 and Ciphers +aes256-cbc to my ssh client to connect to such an old verison of ssh. for slightly more effort, i could have built a modern dropbear for the old target, which i happen to know is easy. and that old kernel did talk NFSv3 but i found it convenient to enable NFSv2 on my server as well. could conceivably have had to dust off openvpn or vtund — which both still work — since backporting wireguard to kernel 2.4.whatever would be a pain?
apart from the browser, most internet stuff is really very simple and decently backwards-compatible.
The issue is also that old packages aren’t getting security updates. So an old device can compromise the rest of your network.
Even if the OS is getting updates, it’s not necessarily getting everything it needs, and the software isn’t necessarily on the latest versions.
Not an issue if R-Pi is behind router with NAT – any $5 used Netgear will do.
yes, this odly enough is a worry i just ran into, I now know a separate network is only way forward to support the vintage system i recently setup
Yeah, but modern systems/firmware updates also introduce new security holes that old systems didn’t have.
MS-DOS and WfW 3.11 or OS/2 don’t have security holes that can be exploitated online.
It’s all relative.
heh i am halfway with Joshua on this one…my 20 year old PC has such an astonishing lack of attack surface area. in my daily use of it, i don’t really think there has been a new feature i care about in the last 20 years, but looking at an old computer really drives home the astonishing growth in the number of random services running and the integration between them that makes it hard to prune them down. most of my attack surface area on the old computer is in the kernel and i would definitely bet more on the very last 2.4 kernel than on the still-evolving 5.whatever or 6.whatever i’m using everywhere else.
but really i mean yeah… i’m not putting this on the outside of my network, and i’m not adding its private keys to my .ssh/authorized_keys on my PCs that i care about. and if i ever land in the crosshairs of an advanced persistent threat, my security posture is that i will crumple before it. because i’m not delusional.
I’ve gotten online on a pentium 1 running windows 95 within the past decade. It’s no big deal. Worrying about security wastes more time than going to the bank when someone steals my credit card info.
There is current support. Run NetBSD on it.
oldy enough where i live(africa) decided that grade 1 needs to be learning computers so i pulled out my collection of sbc’s and created a stems room at my local school , hard part was find free/cheap hdmi monitors /keyb/mouse compared to the computer itself as a cost. i already setup solar there, again the odd thing is the monitor takes most power compared to all other components as individual item. I also setup a iMac G5 PPC model with osX to last available edition plus fun software like civ 4, simcity, minecraft, but also ilife (garageband/imovie etc) and iWork and a few 2019 i7’s on win10 (slowest of the lot-even using winmini+nv970)
i have a few gfx cards so i think i will also setup a i7+gfx steam box at the school too, i have a account i have collected many free games on and it also can family share still as it was linked a long time ago.
Ubuntu is a linux designed for people in africa, you can download it for free and install on computer.
Hey Albert, this is a very strong claim, do you have any evidence to back this claim?
I think an iMac G5 might be the last thing (short of an Intel Pentium 4) that I would want to power with limited electricity provided by the sun.
I have diet pi and mopidy running on an original pi. It’s perfect since I like using the ethernet for streaming from nfs and the web, more than enough to support a web server.
Thanks for the article… I think it is also supported by Ultibo as well if you don’t need a full Linux OS. Might have to dig out one of my original pi’s up again. First, run it with the ‘lite’ version of PI OS of course and then maybe a simple Ultibo project… Hmmm.
Hmmm, Ultibo doesn’t appear to support the BCM2835 chip… At least their wiki doesn’t list it. So that option off the table.
I started with Raspberry PIs with the 2B. I have two of them, one running my weather station and one out in the backyard connected to my air quality meter and swimming pool thermometer sending MQTT data to said weather station. I’ve since bought multiple PI 3s, 4s, and zeros. As a cheap industrial computer, the old ones are just fine. The same way people ran (and possible still run?) PDP-11s as industrial controllers well into this century.
There are two types of Raspberry Pi 2, I think.
One uses the newer ARM chip that’s also used by Pi 3?
So the conclusion was exactly the same like straight after premiere. RPi never offered me the comfort of desktop, my pentiums gave me.
I like when people review old hardware and check again what is it capable of. This gives perspective:) For example Beaglebone black remained basically unchanged and yet people still do new projects with it.
Running a print server. I got an old PI used for $5. It lives in a fancy plastic case (Floppy disk box) and turns a usb-printer into a networked printer.
Since it sits there idle I also put a MQTT server on it. I would also add some fancier HA server, but some of them need Java that is too new, some want huge resources or even Docker. Not going to happen.
I’ve been wanting to find a way to repurpose my old Pi 1.
I’m not interested in making it a Pihole, I plan to get a zero for that.
Maybe I’ll just use the PI1 for playing around with bash and python in a way that won’t matter if I break the system. Thanks for reminding me that I have a neglected board!
I still remember the email they sent out after I ordered mine – they were going to upgrade my order from 256 to 512MB for free!
I still have it, and it still works, although the SD holder is cracked and the composite video is burned out.
I use mine as a digital clock that automatically sets itself via NTP and a wireless dongle. I connected it to an old Dell monitor I had lying around. Nice use for obsolete equipment I’m too OCD to part with.
http://www.nerdworld.org/Content/Raspberry%20Pi%20Clock/Raspberry%20Pi%20Clock.html
Actually, it’s an odroid not a pi
Not bad for a dropped iPod Video SoC
An original pi? Mostly bragging rights. Although if you have it you may as well run something on it
I have 5 of them, they still rocking !
I don’t see why this article had to be written. If you compare the Pi 1 in terms of speed to the average computer now or the average computer when it came out, there’s no meaningful difference. It was slow then and it’s still slow now. And yet, it was hailed as a massive success. It can still be used for all of the same things it was when it came out.
Want software support? Run NetBSD on it. you have access to virtuall all the onboard hardware and the entire pkgsrc repository. They’ll probably provide support for this board the next 10 years at least, maybe 20. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/
given its goals sure it did it, but its mostly useless for both MCU applications AND CPU applications, I avoided it for multiple reasons and still do
its a shit computer, its expensive for what it does, its a somewhat limited ecosystem and its community support depends on a infinite list of garbage
ok sure it consumes less power than an alarm clock, but 99% of the time your not using it for that and even today it is quite lacking from 10 year old micro PC’s… theres this distinct impression that the PI using a full PC, HAS to report data back as a compiled structure as quick as possible, meanwhile most of the time a raw stream can be compiled at a local server 10x faster
Offsite backup.
At my moms lies a RPI1, there are 2 USB disks connected to it.
Every night an rsync task runs on it and pulls current data from my home server.
“mostly useless”
Mine served for years as a media server. I’m sure it still could.
Sounds like KDawg has forgotten that it was a big hit when
it came to market. No…it’s not fast or powerful, it was the
support that made it what it is. Not the hardware.
I still have a couple first gen Pis, one 256MB model and one 512MB. These still have their uses, eg. a print server, DNS filter or a media player. Basically anything that does not require a lot of CPU grunt.
Main problem with these Pis is lack of PMIC on them. You need a good quality PSU for these things to run stably.
I used to use mine as remote NAS and for SD media playback.
When I was starting to use Linux and X11 in a Pentium II 300 MHz machine, I don’t remember any “very slow desktop exploration”…
To tell the truth, the desktop seems slower in my 8 cores/16 Threads 4.5GHz Ryzen.
I use them to mine coin, little miners with Heatsinks and fan. They will mine via xmrig and by means of unMineable.com I can mine any coin. About 300-500 hash/s , and I have them on either net cables bs WiFi for faster speeds. Little miners farm that earns doge every day at low power.
An original Raspberry Pi works great as a high-def webcam. In 2019, I attached a Raspberry Pi camera to a kid’s telescope and streamed beautiful video of a mother woodpecker feeding her babies to myself at work, capturing clips I thought were amazing, such as:
https://studio.youtube.com/video/-tlwwIZ3VZM/edit
Duh i meant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tlwwIZ3VZM
Mine pi 1b works as a data logger from huawei solar inverter, it is using usb wifi to connect to the inverter and ethernet to push the data to my zabbix server. Works great, on old 8gb sd card with overlayfs. It is rock solid!