Cups Print Server for usb printer
For any printer. You never know what it’s doing without a firewall solution. USB is always the safest option.
Wait, can I share a printer on my network that does not have a network card?!
Yes
that is so fucking cool and epic wtf how is this not more well known??
This is common in the IT world. Printers are such painful devices and installing drivers on every Windows desktop just adds to the pain, but by doing this you don’t need to install drivers, as Linux can serve something that doesn’t need drivers to print to.
Pi-Hole always tops my list as a cool project that has definite benefits and will still be in service after the new wears off. It’s been quite a while ago, but I built an Alexa with an RPI. That was kind of cool. Home Assistant on an RPI is pretty cool. In fact, there is a whole list of cool stuff to do with an RPI: https://pimylifeup.com/category/projects/ . There’s also an Awesome list for the RPI: https://github.com/thibmaek/awesome-raspberry-pi.
Sweeeeeet. Thanks for sharing!
Tons of typical self-hosted services, like vault warden, actual budget, etc.
But for something that old, I’m thinking more along the lines of RC cars and other projects involving the GPIO. I’ll reserve my newer ones for self-hosting stuff, older stuff for things that don’t benefit much from extra processing power.
Take a look at the Linuxserver Docker images. They curate a huge list of self hosted apps that is great to browse and look for ideas. You don’t need to run Docker and use their images - I’m just suggesting review their list of apps they support to get some ideas of what’s out there.
That Pi is too old to handle any media tasks (like running a Jellyfin server), but for any low intensity duties it’s still perfectly usable.
I’m just suggesting review their list of apps they support to get some ideas of what’s out there.
Ahh my people. Another list searcher. LOL
Hey! That was my taco! It’s been just like a taco to me!
If you have a 3D printer that can’t connect to the internet, you could try Octoprint.
Might be worth a shot but unfortunately Octoprint recommends at least a Pi 3. I tried it myself on a 2B and had nonstop issues with print quality from stutters while the Pi was sending gcode to the printer. As soon as I swapped to a 4B the problems disappeared.
Web based torrent box with a VPN configured.
I wonder how well that would run on a 700MHz ARM CPU with a maximum of 512 MB RAM…
The VPN speeds will be throttled pretty substantially, and low ram will result in some instability seeding, but it should run. Good thing about torrents is they’re built for unreliable.
I’ve run a torrent box like described on pretty much every pi generation, and the pi4 was the first one where VPN speed was no longer the bottleneck.
Every bit helps
Octoprint if you own a 3d printer
Simple html web server. Host your own website.
I was poking around the Raspberry imager utility and they had RISC OS, which is and old operating system that was apparently fairly popular in the UK, but I’d never heard of it in the US. I loaded it up on my Pi 1 and had fun exploring it. Not exactly useful, but cool to mess with: RISC OS
