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Boards and maker kit · Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 1

7owners with an opinion
80%of verdicts positive
2/1positive/negative since 2024
5 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and value; criticized for performance.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 2 yearsStill going
I finally found a job for my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B from 2012. It’s been sitting in a drawer for years, but about a 2 years ago added it to my Tailscale network as an exit node. It’s a single-core 700MHz ARMv6 chip with 512MB of RAM. It's a fossil—a Pi 5 is 600x faster (according to the video). But for the 'low-bandwidth' task of routing some banking traffic or running a few changedetection watches via a Hetzner VPS (where the actual docker image runs), it’s rock solid. There’s something deeply satisfying about giving 'e-waste' a second life as a weekend project.
Doesn’t like it
A little while ago when I had a free weekend. I decided I would pre-compute some musings of an LLM trapped in a computer, I had a raspberry pi 1 (or maybe b) lieing around that I had a framebuffer screen for. I think it was a non-standard TFT_ILI9325 from Aliexpress. The idea is it would display some helplessness comment on the screen like "Help I'm trapped in a computer" etc etc. Eventually I got the thing booted with it's original OS image and it was running a custom kernel and had the hardware still attached and worked, but it was very outdated so I decided backup and update it, more of a technical challenge than something practical. I gave it a few tries but eventually the screen would stop working, not helped by the thing being quite slow. Updating in place was probably harder than a brand new OS. Eventually I determined that I'd need to build a custom kernel image using a newer version, something I've never done before and for me it was quite difficult and a little before AI had agents and such to help you along. I managed to build a custom kernel but the driver for it had been patched out and moved to an optional thing that I had to enable, I was able to build the custom kernel but for some reason the screen wouldn't display anything like it did on the original OS. I spent a further few weekends on it working really hard to get this thing to work. Eventually I calmly picked up the screen and intentionally pushed down hard with my thumb breaking the screen irreparably.…
Likes it
As someone who kept my Pi 1 in a drawer for years and then bought a Pi 4 after they became available again but after building out a bit of a home lab, the internet consensus seems to be you're lucky. The Pis are energy efficient and worth running apps where catastrophic data loss aren't a concern. I use my Pi 1 with DietPi to run AdGuard and my Pi 4 for simple web apps, like dashboards. But the world has moved forward and there are options like the ODroid that are almost as cheap and energy efficient, without the relying on an SD card. I run my Home Assistant off my ODroid with nvme. They are all backed up to a couple different places, but my failure expectations are completely different. I fully expect my Pis to just have completely ruined cards one day, whereas I am more worried about a bad update to my Home Assistant server.
Likes it
Maybe I'm remember incorrectly but I was in middleschool when the RPI 1 came out and my dad got me one. There was tons of guides, tutorials, etc. when I got it, which I think was close to launch? The os image was already made, tutorials on how to set it up, use ssh, setup a basic webserver, etc were all there at or very near launch. --- Software support is almost never an issue for sbc's, and because they run linux, there's a significant amount of resources of how to use them. Usually they fall apart because they don't have on-going software/firmware support the way RPI has always had a very well supported, and up-to-date linux image ready to flash. --- Although I will admit I think far more packages were compiled for arm back then compared to riscv packages today.
Neutral
>RISC-V is not going to be offered in any commercial grade product anytime soon. That sentence isn't gonna age well. >That was my point. It is slower than a RPI4, which is already too slow to use for anything serious. I am still using my RPi1, but I guess my uses would not meet this arbitrary "something serious" tablet requirement. Joking aside, the RPi4 is actually very fast, and its shortcomings are elsewhere than the CPU. E.g. its GPU is grossly inadequate. Its video codec block can't encode. It lacks cryptography acceleration, so LUKS and SSL need to be done in the cpu with non-specialized instructions. These are issues JH7110 does not have. The experience is much better with JH7110. >The point I was trying to make, it that the other alternative, ARM, is also not suitable for StarLite's mission due to the closed blobs. Ah. They buy the FSF nonsense where closed blobs need to be burned into a ROM for the machine to quality as "open". Unfortunate, but I understand. RISC-V is inevitable.
Likes it
Ah good memories! Even though I knew nothing about VoIP I installed, years ago, one at my wife's little SME using "RasPBX" (a distro made of Raspbian + FreePBX + Asterisk) running on a... Raspberry Pi 1 (maybe a Pi 2 but I'm pretty sure it was a 1). The Pi was booting from the SD card but everything was running on an external HDD. I did put six Cisco VoIP phones and all was working fine as long as no more than four phones were used simultaneously (which never happened). It worked for years like that and wife ended up selling her SME with these VoIP phones still hooked to the RPi 1. We warned them that that thing was kinda a hack ; ) For anyone hesitating: it's not hard to set up. Find a provider to get a SIP trunk, configure the thing, backup the config (I just imaged the entire drive), and you're good to go for a very long time. It's simple, reliable, stuff that usually won't move under your feet.
Likes itStill going
> Especially since the setup requires a Raspberry Pi to run permanently. Which they'll gladly do no? If (poor quality) SD card corruption is a concern, you can have the RPi mount the SD card read-only or just keep a full backup of the SD card. I've had a RPi 1 power 4 VoIP Cisco phones for years. Zero issue. I've got another one constantly establishing a remote SSH-tunnel so that I can easily troubleshoot my brother, who lives in another country, 's LAN. The uptime is more than a year. One is routing (well, doing SNAT really) and firewalling between two non routable LANs. I set up the thing once and it's so reliable there's neither a screen nor a monitor hooked to it: just the power adapter and two ethernet cables (including one in a USB-to-ethernet adapter). Another one is running unbound . Same: no monitor, no keyboard, no nothing. The power adapter and one ethernet cable. Simple. Not much can go wrong. No moving parts. It's happily null routing hundreds of thousands of crappy domain names 24/7. I've got another one in a vintage arcade cab with a Pi2JAMMA adapter. In years it never failed to boot once. As we the others, just in case, I still have a "dd" of the entire SD card. Should something happen I'd just dd the image to a new SD card. The shortage of RPi is apparently due to companies snapping them all for industrial uses. I haven't heard of many people complaining "my RPi died overnight" (unlike, say, the Apple M1 laptop's screens). They're incredibly rel…