FreeGeek is one of more popular organizations for doing things like this. They have a few locations around North America: Portland, Vancouver, NYC, Seattle, Fayetteville (AR).
I would do the same thing in grades 8-11 and do this for the local school district as well.
I remember putting together a bunch of IBM PC systems, loaded up with all kinds of things they didn't need like SDLC (Synchronous Data Link Communicator) cards "just in case."
I wish consumer devices were that easy to maintain and upgrade.
If you have just one unit and a failed power supply, instead of swapping in an ATX power supply you can buy in any local PC repair shop, you have to order the custom weird power supply online and wait for it to arrive. Or if you have a failed fan, maybe it's a standard 60mm or 80mm 12VDC fan, but it has a weird connector on it for how it plugs into the motherboard, so you'll have to take the 'ordinary' PC heatsink or case fans you have on hand and splice the old connector onto it.
Or if you have a failed motherboard (maybe a blown MOSFET?), but you're fairly certain all the other parts are good, instead of getting an ATX motherboard that will work with your CPU and RAM, you need a motherboard for that specific model of Lenovo M78, to match the weird shape and size of the case and rear I/O panel, and to match the specific DC power connections unique to that series and model of SFF desktop PC.
At least hard drives and RAM are common between whitebox PCs and enterprise type semi-proprietary PCs.
I'm preaching to the choir how being able to repair your own stuff is a great thing. I wonder if there are lists of consumer purchasable hardware that follow this same philosophy to a degree. Would make future tech purchases much better for me personally.
If you are desperate you just get an old Thinkpad on ebay for $200.
Beyond a certain point you lose more in value than you save in money.
So you should embrace that and choose a completely different computing experience for sub $200. At that point you are better off with a cheap tablet. They do not cost significantly more than a Raspberry Pi 4.
Let's compare to used laptop:
It has uart and i2c which require a ftdiH dongle or arduino to use on a PC.
Plenty of pwm and motor controller shields not available for PC.
Up to date wifi and Bluetooth on the model 4, which you won't get on a 5 year old laptop.
You can try a couple different OS setups by merely swapping the sd card, or start from scratch in a couple minutes
There are no proprietary batteries that might die; instead you can run off a usb supply or battery brick which you can get anywhere.
Dual HDMI on the 4
Different form factor; can clip on your belt for some sort of wearable Frankenstein project
But yeah, I'd be sure to have a working conventional system first
Edit: forgot i2s digital audio and camera ribbon port
The size and I/O capabilities are desirable for anything from a plug-and-play media centre to building electronics projects. While there are disadvantages with respect to the latter, being able to write code on the Pi vastly simplifies things compared to microcontrollers.
It is also worth noting that a fully equipped Pi can cost significantly less than $200. Everything that you need to add to it can be salvaged e-waste: discarded USB power adapter, old keyboards and mice, lower capacity SD cards, as well as televisions are things that are often discarded in working order.
Edit: for clarification.
I set up some to stream media from my home server and gave them to friends and family.
I have a couple at relative's houses for remote monitoring. I have the Pi set up to make a reverse SSH tunnel back to my house. I can then tunnel VNC / RDP and help debug any issues they are having with their own home computers.
One Pi is used to wake up my remote file server with a Wake On LAN packet. The Pi idles at under 2W while the file server uses about 80W when on. I run my backups and then put the file server back to sleep.
Walking down the aisles it filled you with both fascination and melancholy.
They would sell exotic yet thoroughly obsolete $10,000 SGI systems, and also semi-obsolete $20 add-in cards for $1.
It was sort of like a cross between the great pyramids and the star wars trash compactor.
We would get semi trailers full of pallets of 5-10 year old laptops and PCs. Mostly from businesses upgrading. Then we would wipe them, fix anything that needed fixing (always with repaired/recycled parts), and sell them.
Not the most reliable machines for the end users, but super cheap!
It was kind of interesting, we would use RAM that had been sent back through a solder reflow oven to fix bad solder joints, figure out ways to repair dented and broken machines, etc.
I hated the job since it was super monotonous, but it paid.
Exactly. Surviving parts are often high quality, due to that process of "natural" selection, and are just in the middle of their bathub curve.
On the other side, you also do get a lot of parts with idiosyncratic or hard to diagnose deficiencies (like, RAM with a few bad bytes that you need to ignore, harddisks with bad sectors (same), CPUs and GPUs that randomly lock up, parts that work only in a certain temperature range, etc).
There's a whole street approximately here, if you were going there in a taxi you would ask for "bank road, saddar, rawalpindi" and then look around for the computer store.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bank+Rd,+Saddar,+Rawalpind...
or this side-street which is perpendicular to bank road, centered on approximately this latitude/longitude
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bank+Rd,+Saddar,+Rawalpind...
at those google maps URLs, if you turn on satellite view so you can see the shape/size of the narrow side streets, scroll around a bit within a 500 metre radius and you should find at least a dozen things that are some variety of computer store.
I used to volunteer there, it's a great place!
If you have it running still, what do you use it for?
- 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
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.
Works great in the times that I have the primary Pihole (containerized) down for maintenance/upgrades.
* 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
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...
Edit: somehow missed the model you have, these may not be options.
- 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 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
Then I put the OS on USB and boot from there. SD cards stopped dying :)
For my 2010 MBP, I'm running Linux on it and it's really brought it back to life. Especially with the 5.4 LTS kernel and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, both with support until 2025. I say go for it, you'll have a ton of fun on it.
And if making it look like macOS is your thing, here's how I got mine looking: https://i.imgur.com/QgyRvrD.png
(Unfortunately the dGPU on the machine appears to have developed a fault which might put it into retirement for good)
IIRC 2015 was the last MBP with good Linux support (my 2016 MBP didn't have audio or suspend/resume until recently, after I gave up and ditched it), so that might work out well for you.
"I’m sorry to disappoint but I won’t be building a cluster or decorating my walls with them! In fact I don’t have a project planned for these instead they will be sold on starting at £4 for a “Model A” and up to £9 for a fully boxed un-repaired Model B. I’m not doing this to make a quick buck I’m doing it for the blog content and the experience and to hopefully provide you guys with some very cheap Raspberry Pi’s for your projects!"
> £9 for a fully boxed un-repaired Model B.
Why is he selling them un-repaired if the whole point is repairing them?
It reduces e-waste.
yet its a blog site absolutely new-years-eve-plastered with ads and user hostile content
If you don’t like ads feel free to use an Adblock - I use https://adblockplus.org/
If you want to buy a Pi for a very low price you could even setup pihole: https://pi-hole.net/
There’s nothing misleading when I say I’m not doing this to make a quick buck. I’m really not it’s just a lockdown project as there really isn’t much else to do in my spare time.
One other thing here that makes me happy is that these repaired Pis will not end up in a landfill, which I bet would have otherwise been the end result. Yes, there are electronics recycling services, but who knows if the original owner would have gone that route, and I imagine there still ends up being quite a bit of unrecycleable waste, not to mention the energy required to do the recycling itself.
Meanwhile, I have a thermoelectric wine fridge that died recently. Looks like it's the logic board, but the manufacturer doesn't make them anymore (couldn't find anything on ebay etc. either). I feel really awful that I'll likely have to have to toss the thing due to what is probably a really cheap and easy-to-replace dead part. (I need to take another look at it to see if there's something obvious like a blown capacitor that I can replace.)
> Instead I will be donating the proceeds of the sales to the Raspberry Pi Foundation and they can decide what to do with the Money!
This is just really awesome. Kudos to the author.
When it was made they found something wrong with it
They threw it away like a piece of rubbish into an old dark storeroom
Then, from outer space, a Clever Man brought it to life with his cosmic dust!
—
...adapted from an ancient piece of welsh folklore: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ouLJ-dP1Wps
[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/Tronicsfix/featured
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Tronicsfix/videos?view=0&sort=p&fl...
There's probably other better channels. Anyone?
This is also a really great way to "pay yourself" to learn to do rework. Buying 200 at £61 and selling the fully restored ones (which appears to > 100) at £9 is at least £900 revenue from the experience. Granted, since you are "learning" that would be slow work at first, but later it would become fairly routine. So something someone in high school could easily do.
Author will be donating the money to the Raspberry Pi Foundation. I agree - it is a fantastic way of turning £61 into a ~ £1200 donation!
I learned the IPhone 3G and 3GS were both (1) Super cheap when ‘broken’ on eBay and (2) *very* easily repairable phones. No need to solder stuff or tear apart a whole phone just to replace a screen for example.
At the time, I’d buy them from anywhere between $15-$30/phone depending on damage, swap out parts from unrepairable ones, or buy new(ie Battery replacements) and sell for around double the price.
I miss the days where you didn’t need a license and special training to repair these things.
Ethernet
> These will not be fixed
HDMI
> I will not be fixing these
USB/Power (Power is a separate connector)
> I will revisit these in the near future.
I know that even fixing pins and easier problems is also valauble, but now I'm just afraid I'll miss the follow-up I want to see D:
how did he source them? and what is the script to diagnose each PI?
it says right in the first sentence: > the 200+ Raspberry Pi Model B’s I purchased on ebay
Very niche, but hey -- this is HN.
Still I am using Pi B for pihole + openvpn at home.
The other one Pi B works like public wifi to ethernet. Public wifi goes to wifi dongle + Pi and ethernet wire from Pi to ddwrt router. That one creates access point and is not a public wifi anymore lol. Thats for tor network or researching purposes. Boots from an old flash stick I found on the street.
I thought at the time Pi B was broken, turning off in 1 min while booting without any reason. LCD was going crazy on off. I booted without an lcd and pluged in. Yes time to type in usr+psw lcd on of went crazy but I managed to measure temperature it was 56°C in seconds +70°C and Pi went down. Then I went to the basement and attached huge fan from old gpu card and temperature of cpu is always +34°C works like a bee.
After some time I found third Pi B, SD card slot was broken I have soldered that one, works. But I have no use from it. Still thats an old hardware.
No offense, it's just extra noise and I figured I'd share in case you do want to grow your Twitter following as that's the kind of thing that I'd wager puts a lot of people off of following you.
Neat project, I enjoyed the posts on it!
