I finally found a use case for my Raspberry Pi Model B+

I turned my original RPi (I think it was the one that launched in 2012?) into a noise machine in my bedroom, thanks to scripts from a friend. It dutifully starts rain noises in the late evening and stops them in the morning. The original one my friend made does a better job at fading the audio over time (something is wrong with my ALSA config), and also switches to birds chirping in the morning to wake him up.<p>It&#x27;s a great use-case for it as it&#x27;s not very demanding, and essentially doesn&#x27;t require networking aside from NTP to keep the clock up to date.

Every time I&#x27;ve tried to use a pi as a long-lived server, the SD card ends up getting corrupted. Switched to a chromebox running kodi for my media server, running 24&#x2F;7, five or six years ago and haven&#x27;t had a single problem with it.

I also recently found a use for my rpi 3b as well. I bought a $30 USB SDR Receiver [0] and started collecting ADS-B [1] data and uploading to ADS-B Exchange [2]. I have been collecting flight data for aircraft flying overhead for a few weeks now and it is super interesting to see what kinds of aircraft are flying around me. There are a lot more military planes that I would&#x27;ve expected.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adafruit.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;1497" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adafruit.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;1497</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.faa.gov&#x2F;air_traffic&#x2F;technology&#x2F;adsb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.faa.gov&#x2F;air_traffic&#x2F;technology&#x2F;adsb</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adsbexchange.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adsbexchange.com&#x2F;</a>

We did this for a while in our house, but with Bittorrent&#x2F;Resilio Sync on later Pi models, and it was a pretty miserable experience. I&#x2F;O is terrible on most models (which is somewhat important for storage). IIRC there is no acceleration of crypto primitives, so AES encryption used by Resilio Sync and Syncthing is slow. Finally, we found that even with a proper power supply, the Pi does not really provide the stability you&#x27;d want from a storage node.<p>We ended up replacing the Pi(s) by an Intel NUC, which was just over 100 Euro in 2018 without memory and storage. For relatively low cost, you get SATA speeds (or NVMe if you are willing to spend a bit more) and an AES-NI capable CPU. Our current NUC has been humming along for 4 years.<p>Ps. Syncthing is not backup, even with a read-only node. You are just one Syncthing bug or sysadmin failure away from erasing your data. Having the files on btrts on a single SSD only makes it worse.<p>Just get some redundant block storage somewhere that supports object lock (to prevent accidental deletion or ransomware encrypting all your files) and do incremental backups with something like Arq or Restic. There are some good services where 100GB storage costs $1 monthly.

This single core is more than enough to be used as PIC&#x2F;EEPROM programmer, or controlling any other I2C&#x2F;SPI&#x2F;UART appliances, like switches, thermometers, particle detectors

I&#x27;m using my old Pi B+ as a pi-hole. It&#x27;s been ticking along quietly for a year now. We only remember it&#x27;s there when we use the internet out side of the house and realise ads are still a thing.

I have a P4 CM, for which I have: - Installed a 2TB NVMe m.2 SSD (with a PCI to m.2 adapter) - Configured Samba and use it as a poor man&#x27;s NAS, which is actually not so bad. - Installed Kodi and hook it to TV via HDMI 0, another poor man&#x27;s media center (as a side effect, YouTube plugin for Kodi doesn&#x27;t have ads) - Installed Syncthing, which servs as my major private backup system. (I know, Syncthing is not really a backup solution per se, but I just enjoy the dropbox-like convenience so much, and it has some basic versioning capability, good enough for my need) - Installed PiHole (actually on another Pi 3 which I have for years and reluctant to throw away as it&#x27;s still working) and my kid won&#x27;t be annoyed by the ads while playing with iPad - I&#x27;m diverging, but some app still shows a &quot;watch videos for in-game items&quot; button even after I purchased the &quot;remove-ad package&quot;, which I really hate for kid to waste time on, not to mention many App Store games&#x2F;apps are heavily ad-ridden nowadays) - Occasionally run the free Mathimatica that comes with the system for some very basic math calculation&#x2F;demo - Setup nginx and configured a DDNS with LetsEncrypt, it serves some very basic stuffs that I&#x27;d rather keep private. - Used to run some cron jobs for some minor tasks.<p>In short, it&#x27;s a low-power tiny linux server which I&#x27;m satified to tinker with, and I assume other good SBCs like BananaPi&#x2F;ODroid&#x2F;etc will serve the same perpose well also.

I think i could find a lot of use cases, unfortunately what I cannot find, is a Raspberry Pi itself... :(

I use an old EeePC901 with a broken screen with two 4TB USB drives plugged into it for my remote backups. Built-in UPS. Though I measured it last night and was slightly surprised to find it using 19W while idle.

Could it be that it is slow because of thermal throttling? This foam is certainly catching heat.

I know performance is very much off the table, but wouldn&#x27;t it be better to face the CPU side of the board out so you have less thermal throttling?

Got a similar setup with the same board: 3 disks, one with important stuff (photos, documents), one is a backup with rsync, the third is for downloaded media (not backed up, I don&#x27;t care if it gets corrupted).<p>Services: syncthing to sync photos and videos on my phone, SMB, nfs, FTP (accessible from internet), a web file explorer (on docker, exposed to the internet with basic auth), a torrent client (on docker, exposed with basic auth), caddy (for reverse proxy with https).<p>It&#x27;s not the fastest you can have, but it works ok for what I need.<p>I have a separate pi4 box with Kodi from which I can view photos and films on the telly.

&gt; let’s build the slowest damn Syncthing backup endpoint imaginable<p>I used to run syncthing on B+ for a few years, it was quite ok.

My beloved B+ is living out it&#x27;s retirement as my backup local DNS server. It&#x27;s not the fastest but it&#x27;s cheap insurance for when the primary one goes offline for some reason.

I would prefer to have 1GB of quality flash memory and a slow CPU rather than use SD cards.<p>Why can&#x27;t they even add 64MB of flash memory to store a bit of user data? That can&#x27;t be expensive, or maybe I don&#x27;t know how electronics work?<p>I can disable writing on a SD card to improve its lifespan, but honestly the RPi is pointless if there is no durable way to store data on it.<p>I love the concept of the RPi, but this is a major flaw and it&#x27;s still not fixed.

Syncthing isn&#x27;t a real backup, it&#x27;s a live copy with delayed synchronisation.

That sponge between RPi and backup is going to take alot of heat. It may catch fire.

Slightly OT because not &quot;Pi&quot;, but same use case and similar power.<p>Once upon a time, Summer 2019 I got this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.friendlyelec.com&#x2F;index.php?route=product&#x2F;product&amp;path=85&amp;product_id=222" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.friendlyelec.com&#x2F;index.php?route=product&#x2F;product...</a><p>and something between their NanoPi Neo2, but with 1GB Ram,<p>and NanoPi Neo2 Black, but without the EMMC the Black has.<p>I&#x27;ve put Armbian on it, and it works since then, slow but stable.<p>It even &quot;speaks&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;USB_Attached_SCSI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;USB_Attached_SCSI</a> so not even <i>that</i> slow :-)<p>2TB internal, 4TB 3,5&quot; external with own powersupply, attached only for Backups.<p>Runs between 400Mhz and 1Ghz on demand. Does only storage.<p>No firewalling, routing, adblocking. I&#x27;ve got other gadgets for those.<p>I can saturate about half of my feeble 45Mbit&#x2F;s uplink with it, which is enough for my needs. So far...

Is there any encrypted peer backup system that could be used? Aka sharing rpi&#x27;s among friends and relatives for p2p backup?

&gt; It’s a nice little affordable single-board computer with a huge community using it for all sorts of projects.<p>I always wished they would offer a less affordable, substantially more powerful (sufficiently to handle the YouTube and similarly heavy websites without so much pain, also having more PCIe&#x2F;USB3 lanes perhaps) model. I wouldn&#x27;t even mind if it was overpriced i.e. extra premium billed to subsidize the budget version or other charitable projects. Unfortunately 3-rd party clones are not a perfect solution because they don&#x27;t have the said community and are not perfectly compatible. Or is there already a clone capable of running the original Raspberry PI OS?

I have an SDR (software defined radio) running on one that is dedicated to ADS-B for the FlightRadar24 network. You can order hardware to do it, or if you have stuff lying around you can DIY it. They have pre-assembled images, too. It&#x27;s pretty awesome and ends up giving you a free business plan.<p>- diy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flightradar24.com&#x2F;build-your-own" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flightradar24.com&#x2F;build-your-own</a><p>- preassembled receiver: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flightradar24.com&#x2F;apply-for-receiver&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flightradar24.com&#x2F;apply-for-receiver&#x2F;</a>

I just set up one to run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dmunozv04&#x2F;iSponsorBlockTV" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dmunozv04&#x2F;iSponsorBlockTV</a>, which is my new favorite thing ever! All the youtube videos playing out of my Apple TV automatically skip the sponsored segments now!<p>It also runs HomeBridge which also runs rock solid. I can now control my mini-split and pool equipment straight from Apple Home, which is way faster and easier than the crappy apps that they came with.

I did something similar to this 9 years ago using BTSync, it&#x27;s a great use case!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reustle.org&#x2F;btsync-pi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reustle.org&#x2F;btsync-pi</a>

Is &#x27;btrfs&#x27; used only for &#x27;btrbk&#x27;? Does it prevent data loss due to SSD failure, or just user errors?<p>What are the recommended data storage file systems nowadays?

I use mine for network latency tests <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smokeping.dabase.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smokeping.dabase.com&#x2F;</a>

<p><pre><code> The fact that Pi is so underpowered that it cannot even make full use of the SSD is probably a contributing factor to the overall stability.</code></pre>

I have been running my model B as a VJ tool. It runs glsl shaders in SD resolution quite nicely. Has composite output straight in the board.

I got an OLED and programmed a digital clock which is dark with slowly changing colors the night (reddish the evening, purple before midnight, blue after midnight, greenish in the wee hours and yellow in the fifteen minutes before getting up) and bright orange the day.<p>It&#x27;s absolutely mine and that&#x27;s what I love.

Did you build in any detection&#x2F;reset for wifi hardware issues? I&#x27;m jaded and assume this will be a thing with everything prior to the rpi4. (Mostly my experience here is specifically the rpi3b)<p>Of course, could be the USB wifi more reliable.

i am one of the three people in the comments that own the original RPi. for me, it is the only RPi i own.<p>like most people, i ended up using it as a &quot;server&quot; because i stopped using its GPIO ports. currently using it for sync and exit node.<p>most people should just get an old pc or repurpose existing old pc&#x2F;phones for most of their needs than to contribute to the RPi supply issues. linux works everywhere*, remember?

I wouldn&#x27;t try to make a server out of a raspberry, they are not reliable at all. Unreliable power, overheating.

Is that foam and those straps ESD-safe?

Works great as a cups AirPrint server or as a Homebridge server! Or both.

a pi can make a good standalone NTP server, and the older ones use less energy and can probably use a battery backup to continue during power glitches.

Still using mine as a SSH jump host

&gt; The 1TB SSD is formatted as a btrfs file system and mounted to &#x2F;storage.<p>That makes me cringe. If a server&#x27;s purpose involves serving files, those files should go in &#x2F;srv.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tldp.org&#x2F;LDP&#x2F;Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy&#x2F;html&#x2F;srv.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tldp.org&#x2F;LDP&#x2F;Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy&#x2F;html&#x2F;srv.htm...</a>