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I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix them
- simplecto 6y agoI like the idea of doing something a little nutty just so you have something interesting to write about. Very niche, but hey -- this is HN.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jamesmd 6y agoThanks for the share!
- walrus01 6y agoI think this guy would enjoy seeing some of the very low end of the used computer market in places like Pakistan - where they receive 20' container loads full of 5 year old Dell, HP office PCs and mix/match pieces into fully working systems that people can enjoy for more years to come. There's a whole street with at least ten different retail vendors/repair shops in Rawalpindi.
- grinich 6y agoHow can I learn more about this? Anything you can point me to online?
- walrus01 6y agoYou'd have to go there in person, they don't care much about having an internet or social media presence in my experience. Or know one of the electronics recyclers in the US/Canada that collect and ship the products overseas. 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,+Rawalpindi,+Punjab+46000,+Pakistan/@33.5954089,73.0537563,140m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x38df94832ccab747:0x74589ca084923381!8m2!3d33.5956645!4d73.0527029 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,+Rawalpindi,+Punjab+46000,+Pakistan/@33.5946258,73.0531716,113m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x38df94832ccab747:0x74589ca084923381!8m2!3d33.5956645!4d73.0527029 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.
- reportingsjr 6y agoLook up R2 or RIOS recyclers on youtube to get an idea of what it looks like in the US. Same concept, doing basically the same thing.
- jamesmd 6y agoI’d love too! Maybe one day once the pandemic is over.
- kaonwarb 6y agoThis was essentially my first job. As a 17-year-old I was hired for the summer by a large office to see how many working PCs I could get out of a large walk-in closet full of broken ones. Great work for a 17-year-old computer nerd: figure out what was wrong with each one (typically RAM or hard drive), decide which ones to keep as hosts and which ones to strip for donor parts, then mix and match and set them all up. Didn’t get paid much but I enjoyed it and learned a lot, and it was a great deal for the office, who ended up with about 20 extra working computers.
- reaperducer 6y agoFunny, I did that, too. This was right about when the IBM XT came out, and the company's spares room was a mixture of original IBM PC's, IBM minicomputers of various vintages, dumb terminals, and teletype machines. 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."
- drannex 6y agoThis one was one of my first "jobs" as well, I would mix and match parts from donated broken computers and tech and splice them all together (again, usually ram, hard drives, or fan related issues) and then we would donate them to families or organizations in need (we would also sell some of them to keep the non-profit afloat). It was mainly volunteer work, but we were paid in parts. I would spend hours after school tearing things down, scouting through rooms full of old tech graveyards and just build. 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.
- derwiki 6y agoThis was close to my Eagle Scout project. Around y2k companies were throwing out machines, so we collected them, made Frankenstein machines, and distributed them to local schools.
- 6y ago
- joshxyz 6y agoHaha, on our country we get things like this from japan. It's FUN mixing and matching parts that work. Some are hard to find drivers (LOOKING AT YOU NEC) but a good positive is most parts are durable / quality parts.
- MayeulC 6y ago> a good positive is most parts are durable / quality parts 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).
- ficklepickle 6y agoFree Geek is Vancouver does similar, minus the containers. They do a very thorough QA of every part. I used to volunteer there, it's a great place!
- franga2000 6y agoWe have a nonprofit here in Slovenia that does exactly that, but puts Linux on them and gives them away to those who can't afford a computer. They've been invaluable during the pandemic when everyone was suddenly sent home and many households didn't have enough (or any) computers to support online schooling.
- jarv 6y agoThis sounds interesting, do you have any more information about the nonprofit you can pass along? I would love to learn more about it.
- franga2000 6y agoHere's their website [0], but they don't have an English version. Basically, they have a handful of workshops around the country where people can drop off computers and other related hardware, but they also work with companies who donate write-off hardware (there's a tax incentive). Anything they can piece together into working systems gets sent out to people who request it (these days a lot also went to schools who distributed it further) and anything that's unfixable or too old gets sold to a recycling company and partially funds the operation. They usually ship the computers with their own Linux distro [1] and they also provide free tech support to people that receive their computers. I think they've given away over 4000 computers since 2011 (keep in mind the population of Slovenia is 2M, so that's pretty significant) and provided at least half of the estimated required computers for schoolchildren when the first lockdown went into effect. P.S.: if anyone is interested in starting something similar in their own country, the software they use to manage everything is open-source [2] and they've said in the past that they'd love to help people set up similar projects in other countries, so do get in touch [0] https://racunalniki.duh-casa.si https://racunalniki.duh-casa.si [1] https://sites.google.com/site/chaletoslinux/home https://sites.google.com/site/chaletoslinux/home [2] https://gitlab.com/franga2000/erso https://gitlab.com/franga2000/erso
- jarv 6y agothanks for the info, I've been hearing a lot of horror stories about kids lacking computers since the lockdown. I'm also in Slovenia (LJ), living here as an expat.
- imtringued 6y agoI never understood why anyone would want a Raspberry Pi as a low cost replacement for a computer. You still have to get potentially expensive peripherals and the overall experience is worse. Especially when you consider the risk of corrupting the SD card. That's negative value right there. 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.
- teh_klev 6y agoI kinda think you're missing the point of the Pi. It wasn't marketed as a low cost replacement for a computer, it was marketed as a low cost computer to learn and experiment with. In particular, having a raft of IO that you can hang cheap sensors, motors and all sorts of things off of and play with. Attempting that with a ThinkPad or any regular computer isn't quite as straight forward, and is a bit of a non-starter because out of the box they don't have these IO ports unless you go and find some external "box", which adds to your $200 cost, and is likely not inexpensive.
- dehrmann 6y agoThis is a weird niche, though. It's basically "I want a microcontroller, but don't want to program a microcontroller."
- thebigman433 6y agoIts a maker niche mostly. Its definitely not a microcontroller since it runs a full OS. It is a good tool for any project that needs a full computer OS and what comes with that, along with IO ports. Plus its tiny and relatively cheap
- saagarjha 6y agoThat niche is basically “education and hobby”.
- Waterluvian 6y ago10th grade computer engineering involved doing this. So much fun. So educational. And the computers were all a write off so there was plenty of learning to be done.
- mopsi 6y agoAnd I must say that working with business PCs from vendors like HP is a joy, because they are optimized for quick and tool-less maintenance. I can open the PC and swap out power supply, HDD/SSD, 5.25 inch devices and expansion cards without any tools. Only the motherboard, CPU (depending on heat sink design) and cooling fans are screwed in. And there are even spare screws inside the case for unused slots/devices. And while somewhat unpopular, they use custom connectors that reduce the number of cables (modern PCs don't really need the fat ATX bundle), and cables are cut to length, and the case has holders for each cable - virtually no cable management needed. I wish consumer devices were that easy to maintain and upgrade.
- spicybright 6y agoDamn, now that you say that I never thought of business PCs to be easy to fix like that, but it makes complete sense! 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.
- walrus01 6y agoThis is both a good and a bad thing in my opinion. If you have, for instance, a big pile of near identical Lenovo M78 small form factor desktops (https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/desktops/thinkcentre/m-series-towers/m78/ https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/desktops/thinkcentre/m-series-t...), it's easy to swap parts between them. 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.
- reportingsjr 6y agoI did exactly this as a job about three years ago in Nothern Kentucky. 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.
- mvh 6y agoI once saw Kali Linux CD-ROMs for sale at a market in Kathmandu. Blew my mind.
- selimthegrim 6y agoHave you ever been to Rainbow Centre in KHI? (although that might be more software)
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoI'm all in for re-using, re-purposing old computer hardware but I'm weary of the power consumption at the same time. So if there is a choice of SBC(ARM) vs old x86 computer, I would definitely recommended a SBC especially since it consumes fraction of the power and matches or sometimes even exceeds the performance of a 5 year old x86 computer depending upon the task.
- m463 6y agoThere used to be a place in Mountain View called Weird Stuff Warehouse full of systems of all eras. 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.
- fwipsy 6y agoThat place was awesome and I got some good stuff there, but I always wondered how they made rent for a huge place like that. My hypothesis was that they actually got paid by companies to haul away stuff for recycling, but then instead of recycling it they let it pile up.
- LockAndLol 6y agoThe horror of Apple: not just one repairshop, but a whole street full of them.
- xmichael99 6y agoso dumb... "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!"
- aphrax 6y agoSeems reasonable to me...
- 14u2c 6y agoThe odd part is this: > £9 for a fully boxed un-repaired Model B. Why is he selling them un-repaired if the whole point is repairing them?
- pottertheotter 6y agoI think that he means there was nothing broken so it didn't require repairs.
- jamesmd 6y agoExactly that!
- imtringued 6y agoHe only has to sell 7 units to break even.
- stopChanging 6y ago"not doing this to make a quick buck" yet its a blog site absolutely new-years-eve-plastered with ads and user hostile content
- 6y ago
- shimonabi 6y agoI just retired my Raspberry Pi 1 B (2011) last week. I had OpenVPN installed on it for accessing my home network, but since my new router has OpenVPN integrated, I don't need it anymore. I played with installing RetroPie on it, but it is far too slow to be usable. If you have it running still, what do you use it for?
- perfmode 6y agowhich router do you have?
- shimonabi 6y agoLinksys 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. :)
- hyperman1 6y agoI'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
- dividedbyzero 6y agoNeat 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.
- solution-finder 6y agoThat’s an excellent idea. Will you be writing a blogpost about it (please please)!
- hyperman1 6y agoI 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
- sys_64738 6y agoI was using an original Pi as an ssh client to talk the the serial ports of a couple of systems at work. They're fine for any non-graphical that runs tmux and serial software. It could probably run VNC server with TWM or some other retro WM.
- stelf 6y agoKudos for bringing back to life dead electronics. This is an example for the world. Hold on - back in 1996 the world was still spinning and doing business with simpler devices. So many uses that these can be put to. No matter whether selling or donating, that’s not the point here really.
- avipars 6y agoMine some bitcoin with them :)
- avipars 6y agoThis would make a great vlog... how did he source them? and what is the script to diagnose each PI?
- buryat 6y ago> how did he source them? it says right in the first sentence: > the 200+ Raspberry Pi Model B’s I purchased on ebay
- christiansakai 6y agoMy macbook pro 2015 is getting slower. Its already SSD. I wonder why. Is it the OS? Maybe its the fan that I need to clean? If it is both I’m going to just make this into a Linux laptop.
- mrweasel 6y agoI have the same issue with a 2013 model. It was perfectly fine until earlier this year. Running Xcode was a bit sluggish, but otherwise it was fine. Now ever webbrowsing is slow. The OS hasn’t been upgrade in that period though, so I’m unsure what might be the cause.
- beezechurger 6y agoDo a clean reinstall of the OS and give it a week to cache files from regular use. I have a 2015 mbp too
- mcbridematt 6y agoI cleaned out a MBP of similar age while replacing the battery. There was quite a bit of dust trapped in the CPU fan, as well dried out thermal paste. Between new battery + cleaned fan + new paste it runs 'like new'. (Unfortunately the dGPU on the machine appears to have developed a fault which might put it into retirement for good)
- _arvin 6y ago+1 for turning it into a Linux laptop. Although I'd understand if you kept it Mac (probably best if it's still supported). 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 https://i.imgur.com/QgyRvrD.png
- rmoriz 6y agoI wish there would be more of this offerings for broken single board computers out there. They are ideal learning projects for getting used to hot air stations, microsoldering and debugging circuits.
- unnouinceput 6y ago200+ for just ~$84 (current rate is 1/1.34), that's 42 cents each. This is worth if only to get out the parts, not to mention once you repair 10 of them you're already turning a profit. Where can I get such a deal? eBay doesn't anymore, I looked.
- umvi 6y agoIf you like this type of stuff, I highly recommend the YouTube channel "TronicsFix"[0][1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/c/Tronicsfix/featured https://www.youtube.com/c/Tronicsfix/featured [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Tronicsfix/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid https://www.youtube.com/c/Tronicsfix/videos?view=0&sort=p&fl...
- djmips 6y agoI prefer my mate Vince. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChY9Cgv-iyPDvf1Bkyx20OQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChY9Cgv-iyPDvf1Bkyx20OQ There's probably other better channels. Anyone?
- jamesmd 6y agoLouis Rossman is a good one although it’s pretty focused on MacBook repairs.
- hddherman 6y agoHe does share a lot of pointers that do apply for any other component level repair: * you can never have too much flux * do not clean the board before fixing it (corrosion can help point towards the actual cause of the issue) * importance of the availability of schematics
- gorgoiler 6y agoThis is a story about an ordinary computer 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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ouLJ-dP1Wps
- laumars 6y agoI used to love that show as a kid. But what surprised me was that despite not watching that show in more than 30 years, I still recognised that quote.
- zem 6y agoi have forgotten mostly everything else about the show, but i can still quote the entire intro :) not sure what made it so much more memorable than other cartoon intros of its day, but memorable it was.
- teodorlu 6y agoInteresting that the video uses space alien technology as a name for magic. Just look at that magic, cosmic powder, as it's sprinkled on the teddybear. Is it a coincidence that in Land of Lisp, space aliens help humans, and in SICM, the programmer is a wizard?
- ChuckMcM 6y agoPretty neat. Definitely recycles a lot of electronics in a good way. On the GPIO pins I would definitely replace the connector! I can tell you from experience that even if the pins straighten out, some random plugging/unplugging later and the pin will break off and the next person will end up replacing the connector. This is much easier if you have a setup already for doing the work. 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.
- sangnoir 6y ago> This is also a really great way to "pay yourself" to learn to do rework. 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!
- vmception 6y agoI’m sure my pc experience would be different and block everything, but that site has way too many ads, subscription, cookie notification stuff on mobile
- lmilcin 6y agoI think it would be nice exercise to go through a couple hundred failed units and repair them just to learn what exactly happened. If I was somebody who created a product like that I would probably want to do this.
- tapland 6y agoThe tinkerer in me is a bit sad that he has 3 categories of faults: 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:
- Kwpolska 6y agoYeah, this post was very disappointing. I was expecting the author to at least attempt to fix everything, but they only did pretty much the low-hanging-fruit repairs over two posts.
- dwighttk 6y agoshould make a beowulf cluster
- xxel 6y agoGood Luck with your repairs! 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.
- intricatedetail 6y agoSo I was hoping to see some actual repairs, but author is just going to be bending pins and re-soldering connectors? I'd like to see a repair of traces or even a chip replacement.
- kelnos 6y ago> 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! 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.
- 0_____0 6y agotangential, but you can get a thermostat with a relay that you could potentially hack in in place of the logic board. fixed a fridge with a broken thermostat this way. i think it cost about $15
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoYou could get ESP32 and EspHome software, and turn the fridge smart in an afternoon.
- justsid 6y agoSerious question, what exactly does a smart fridge do for you? Unlike with other appliances like stoves, I usually don’t interact with my fridge other than to put food in, or take it out. Do people change the temperature in their fridges often?
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
- soheil 6y agoThis is pretty neat. I have a trading bot running on my raspberry pi, it also waters my plans every other day. It's pretty awesome to see such tiny devices be so incredibly powerful.
- leowoo91 6y agoSounds mostly fixable except SoC faults, but even that could be gathered from highly broken boards with healthy SoCs, I believe.
- shorts_theory 6y agoThis is awesome. I'd love to read the SD card repair post, because I have a Model 3B+ which died four weeks after I bought it in a quadcopter accident. My suspicion is that the problem is solely with the micro SD card reader as the card was bent in half when I retrieved it. The power LEDs still turn on, but USB boot doesn't appear to be working either.
- Wronnay 6y agoThis guy should start a YouTube channel - would be contrast to my retro computing and console repair bubble...
- dm319 6y agoI stupidly mistook the headphone socket of my Pi 1B and plugged in some sort of DC current into it. As a puff of smoke appeared I remembered it took microusb power. Anyone know if mine is reparable?
- scrose 6y agoWhen I was just a young (and poor) kid in high school I was looking for ways to make some side money and help my family out over long summer breaks. 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.
- Maxburn 6y agoMe too! My very first smart phone was a 3GS I needed to put a new screen on. Was actually pretty easy.
- tnorthcutt 6y agoTo the author of the post, in case you're here: I almost went to follow you on Twitter as suggested at the end of the post, bu then I scrolled through your timeline a bit and saw loads of "Hey @{username}, Thank you for the follow!", and promptly decided against it. 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!