My piece of Pi
RaspberryPi 5 is finally out. People are going nuts about it and I'm almost part of the craziness, sort of. It's powerful, it's still tiny and I'll probably get one as soon as stock will allow, anyway, I still have a RaspberryPi model B Rev 2. Yep, you read it right, a gorgeous 2014 model B. If I stop for one second and think about the fact it's almost a 10 years old model, a sense of "feeling old" runs through my spine.
I remember at that time this was incredibly powerful as a single board computer. Looking at its specs now anyway, it doesn't look that great (poor thing). Just to say one: it doesn't even have wifi connectivity so you need a USB adapter, which eats up a tremendous 50% of available USB ports: that was quite annoying when I had to type something with a keyboard while staying connected and ethernet cable wasn't an option, cause I had to give up on using a mouse...
Its very first duty was to run as a media streaming server, I installed OpenELEC (which I'm realizing right now it doesn't exist anymore and has been replaced by LibreELEC) and by the magic of Kodi I was able to see on my old 40" not-smart TV my movies, tv series and also playing music
That's my Raspberry blasting some good Iron Maiden on my TV in 2015
While time was passing by it became very slow with all system updates and everything else, so I had to give up and switch to Chromecast first and then to a simple Fire Stick TV, which was way better for my average use. That was the time I just thought "well, dear Pi, it's time for you to take some dust...". I didn't have the will to think about a way to re-use it, until a couple of years ago, when I decided to repurpose it as a server to host and run on a schedule a Python script I wrote to track a couple of item prices on a well-known music instruments german e-store.
my Raspberry Pi Model B specs courtesy of neofetch
I didn't think about it immediately, as I thought a cloud solution could have been way easier. To my surprise it was quite easy but not for free (well, maybe that's not a real surprise), so in a couple of hours, I got my Pi back working with a clean installation of Raspbian, where I set up my script to run every morning at 7:00 am and saving data on a local MySQL installation. I soon realized that a MySQL server installed locally was a very bad idea because of my Pi poor specs, it almost ate up all the available memory and it was clear I needed to rely on a remote MySQL server. Anyway, I'm wandering off, that's not the main point.
The actual main point is that even after 10 years, I'm more than happy with my good old Raspberry Pi Model B. It's running regularly 2 scheduled scripts every day, it's always on and my bills are not concerned at all. I can connect to it via ssh on my local network and it's more than enough for my needs.
Look at it (the Pi not the LEGO policeman): tiny, old, slow but still standing!
Do I need another brand new and powerful Rapsberry Pi 5? No. Will I get one anyway? I think so, but not for the purpose perfectly fulfilled by my old Pi. Which is a good boy, and it knows that.
See ya in the next one!
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[//]: # (meta image by Harrison Broadbent https://unsplash.com/it/@harrisonbroadbent)