The Raspberry Pi 1 is still a great device to experiment with alternative operating systems, most of which are far less resource hungry than Linux:

- 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

Let me just add 9front even though you already said Plan 9.

Do any of those operating systems have particularly good support for messing around with the GPIO ports?

That would be an interesting project for a university operating systems class.

Isn't a VM just as good and more convenient, though?

Not who you asked, but there is something amusing about fiddling with a physical system, plus you can keep it on regardless of your main computer, and doesn't take up a window/tty/otherwise clutter the host.

Maybe, but try to get into the mind of someone who installs a minimalist OS. They might think that Linux is too heavy and an RTOS is too constrained, right?

That kind of perspective probably wants to be fairly close to the metal, and virtualization is a sizable abstraction layer.

Yes, unless you want to play with peripherals too.

Like another commenter said, being able to put it on a shelf is nice. You can crack it open 5 years down the line to play with, or just give it to a friend that's interested in trying different OS's

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

Neat project! There is a small, inexpensive MP3 player board called DFPlayer that can be controlled from an Arduino and probably would work well for similar use cases, if using a full Pi isn't an option.

That’s an excellent idea. Will you be writing a blogpost about it (please please)!

I do something like this every few months, and I've never tought them worthy a blog, to be honest.

It isn't particularly complicated. Base is a strong enough cardboard box from the local supermarket. I took screenshots of the console from an episode and cleaned them up with krita.

Electronics is a matrix where some rows have leds abd others buttons.

Software low level scans the matrix and drives leds and checks buttons. High level a state machine that changes state based on button presses.

I mainly us whatecer I have lying around at the moment, and don't spend much money on components.

The thing before this was a lego based crossroad with leds and an arduino

I use one for driving a ILI9341 TFT display.

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.

In my experience NES, SNES, and Sega Masterdrive/Genesis are perfectly playable on a model B (especially when moderately overclocked).

It works great as a backup Pihole. I have the compressed ram config installed due to a large blocklist and rsync the DB over from my primary instance.

Works great in the times that I have the primary Pihole (containerized) down for maintenance/upgrades.

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

I didn't think that Time Machine servers could be run on non-macOS systems.

Time Machine just runs over SMB now (older versions used AFP). There’s some extra options you have to set in Samba to get it working, but it’s not that much. Setting up mDNS properly will also make it show up in the UI like a Time Capsule as well. Synology and TrueNAS (née FreeNAS) also support it (it took me all of 2 minutes to set up in FreeNAS a while back).

I am using mine as a DHCP, DNS, and VPN server.

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...

I’ve used them for Pihole, Home Assistant, ESPHome (a thing for getting ESP8266 and ESP32 chips semi-magically flashes for your particular needs).

Edit: somehow missed the model you have, these may not be options.

Not an RPi 1, but a v2.

- 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

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.

Pi-Hole runs great on a 256MB Pi with a 2GB SD card.

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 put u-boot on the SD card, then set the SD card R/O using the hardware switch on the SD card (i don't know if it's a standard thing, but mine have one).

Then I put the OS on USB and boot from there. SD cards stopped dying :)

fun fact: read only switch on SDcards is a dummy piece of plastic, it just flips a real switch in the card slot letting the controller know your wish.

https://www.remosoftware.com/info/wp-content/uploads/2017/06...

That's interesting. I have a Pi 1B running non-stop since 2013 with the default Raspian image and the SD card still seems to be fine. Maybe I've just been lucky till now…

It only dies when it's powered down unexpectedly. (while writing)

Oh Alpine sounds cool - I’ll have to look into that. I’ve always just kludged raspibian into running read-only, but it’s fiddly. Your solution sounds much nicer.

I did the same before discovering alpine. I am much happier now :D

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.

which router do you have?

Linksys WRT3200 ACM. My Linksys 4200E started dropping connections after 10 years of use because of overheating. Beforehand, I had a Linksys WRT54G v2.2, so I'm also emotionally attached to the design. :)