The older Raspberry Pi boards have had a long life, serving faithfully since 2012. Frankly, their continued support is a rarity these days — it’s truly incredible that an up-to-date OS image can still be downloaded for them in 2025. All good things must eventually come to an end though, and perhaps one of the first signs of that moment for the BCM2385 could be evident in Phoronix’s report on Debian dropping support for MIPS64EL & ARMEL architectures. Both are now long in the tooth and other than ARMEL in the Pi, rarely encountered now, so were it not for the little board from Cambridge this might hardly be news. But what does it mean for the older Pi?
It’s first important to remind readers that there’s no need to panic just yet, as the support is going not for the mainstream Debian releases, but the unstable and experimental ones. The mainstream Debian support period for the current releases presumably including the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS extends until 2030, which tallies well with Raspberry Pi’s own end-of-life date for their earlier boards. But it’s a salutary reminder that that the clock’s ticking, should (like some of us) you be running an older Pi. You’ve got about five years.
still got mine, never really used it for much of anything. i did a micro tablet with a lego case and an lcd and ran some games on it. ive since built 2 other pi tablets with 3d printed parts. i realized i wasn’t using them beyond getting them running and simply stopped buying them. but they can still be useful in a pinch.
You can use it to control a 3D printer
Can a Pi-1 handle streaming a camera view of the printer AND running the printer at the same time without any slowdowns? I notice that even with my Pi-2 it’s a little faster to print directly from SD than to use Octoprint. Or at least it was. I still prefer Octoprint so I haven’t really tried that way since before I upgraded from RAMPS to a 32-bit board.
Running openvpn server on this board is perfect :)
If you don’t need it you should donate it to your local school so that children can learn STEM in classes…
Gather around class… we are going to take turns watching one kid at a time hack on one Pi.
Mmmmm… nah!
A lot of schools already have tablets or laptops for the kids now. I think I’d rather buy a box of cheap Arduino clones, sensors, lights and other accessories for the class. Then I’d pick an easy beginner, kid-friendly dev environment for it and ask IT to make it standard on all the kids devices.
But hey, I’m not a teacher. Maybe there is something I don’t know.
Just when I found a use for most of my old Pi1s.
They’re a perfect snapcast client for synchronous audio playback on a network.
I mean, you say “you’ve got 5 years…” but in reality if you’re running something on this, and it’s so reliable you half forgot about it, it’s unlikely to have been updated in the last 5 years, which means it can run until something fails.
Depends on what you are doing with it – for a long time I ran a few simple web facing servers on my old Pi 1 for that low power 100% uptime, and that would be something you have only 5 years on if you kept it running. As web facing and not updated is just a bad bad idea.
I have since moved on to something with more networking speed and compute so I can do a bit more on the one 100% uptime system, but that only Pi could have just kept on ticking ‘forever’ doing the old job.
agreed! My central heating runs on a raspberry pi – 100% uptime required there :)
For a few years it didn’t see very many updates, although there was only one port exposed, and some minimal security on it – enough to keep the baddies out.
I’ve gotten better about updating now
Soon running something on RPi will be called retrocomputing:)