How useful is an original Raspberry Pi in 2025? (ft Blue Raspberry)
This is the most unique Raspberry Pi I own, and it's blue. And no, this isn't the Brazilian version or the red Chinese version. This blue version is one of 1,000 that were made to celebrate Raspberry Pi's first anniversary 12 years ago. What's crazy is this original Pi, well, technically it's the second revision of the original Pi. It's still supported by Raspberry Pi. Apple usually
stops supporting their Macs after 5 to 7 years. and Microsoft. Well, it's complicated, but generally you're going to get 8 to 10 years if you're lucky and picked the right hardware. But my goal today is to learn a little more about this Blue Pie and see if I can boot it up with modern Linux and maybe actually do something useful with a 12-year-old $35 computer. So, I found this on eBay uh after I saw it in a Reddit post. Somebody on Reddit had a couple of these that they had and were posting them on eBay. That's pretty much the only way you're going to find one of these things nowadays. And there's not a whole lot
that are floating around. Uh there were a thousand made and most of them went to like education or students, that kind of thing. And they allotted some to a month-long giveaway that RS Components did on Twitter. You had to tweet out a
certain hashtag and what you wanted to do with it, and they would select winners and send these out to them. And this one is number 878 of 1,000. And later in the video, I'll talk about a few other ones that I've spotted online. Uh, but each one came with this certificate of authenticity. Now, this is interesting. Uh, I actually looked at, uh, Lee PSP's video on this, and, uh, he looked very closely at this Eban signature here, and I actually emailed, uh, some higherups at Raspberry Pi to ask about this. I took a macro photo of
this, and you can see that there's uh, some evidence of halftoning, the way that this thing is printed on a printer. And uh so it does not look like that's actually signed by Evanban, even though in the uh original announcement it said that these would be signed by Evan. Technically, that's his signature, but I wouldn't say that means this is signed by him. So, I don't know. Little little uh 10 year later controversy. You can talk about whether that's important in the comments or not. I personally don't care that much. Uh it'd be cool if it
was. Uh especially if the pie itself was signed, but it's not. And it does have a number on each card that should correspond to a number on the pi itself that we'll get to. Uh but anyway, yeah, 2013 March 4th, Pi Day. It's always a
fun day of the year. And uh not really signed by Eban, but it has his signature. So there you go. And it comes with this crystal case. I'll talk more about this later. Uh it's not the best
case in the world, but it's also not the worst. This is the case that I had for my original Pi Model B. And uh this one is not great. It's very hard to unsnap once you've snapped it together. This one hopefully will be a little bit better. Uh, but it was custom designed for this special edition Pi. So, not
many of these exist either. Uh, but I'm sure somebody could replicate it pretty faithfully with a 3D print. And interestingly, these old cases did have some ventilation. So, this one has some holes in the bottom, and my original case did as well. Uh, but it didn't have
a lot. And, uh, you'll see that over the years, Raspberry Pi has increased the ventilation. It has ho ones in the bottom. And this uh 5B has a ridge in the top for this fan to blow out of. But
the original pies didn't get that hot. They they got warm. Uh but they didn't have the overheating problems that the modern pies have. Uh so anyway, we'll get to that later. This one contains the actual pie. And it's a blue case. And I don't know if you can hear that. That doesn't sound too inspiring.
I don't think this has ever been opened before. It still has the security seal, but you know, that could be tampered with if somebody's very careful with it. Uh, but I'll I'll get this open here. Yeah, that's not that's not a very
good security seal. Usually security seals would rip as you pull them off. I think this is just shiny stickers that they call security seals. So, this may have been opened before. I'm not sure. Uh, but we're going to open it here. And we'll leave these somewhat intact. And, uh, let's see what's
inside. So, what is rattling around? Ah, so that's just something that was retaining something inside this case. I don't Oh, right here. So, it looks like this was intended to hold an SD card, which is not included here. I don't know if they Yeah, they don't include an SD card on here at all. And it comes with the Raspberry Pi regulatory warnings and stuff. There's a a quick start guide from back in the days when all that was included. I guess
they still include some of that in Raspberry Pies nowadays. We'll close this up for now. And look inside here. And I'm not huge into nostalgia or
anything, but this was an interesting enough pie. And the fact that I only had one original pie, and sometimes in my testing and experiments, it's nice to have a spare, especially if I ever blow this one up accidentally. And it's actually a very dark shade of blue. I don't know if you can see that in the video that well, but look at that. It's not a blue like this. It's more like a a deep blue or, you know, not not not really a royal blue at all, but it has RS another sticker that's kind of shiny like these on here. I'm guessing that's
not a security seal either. Uh, and then just like all factory pies, it has a little bit of capp tape over these connectors to kind of hold the little the little lock down tab down. Uh, but this original Pi was a lot different than all of the later Pies. I think it
was the model B plus that gave us 40 pin GPIO. It took off this composite video output. It moved uh ports over here. It put more USB on this side. It changed from an SD card to a micro SD card slot. So, lots of big changes. And these
oscillators are comically large. This is a 25 MHz and 19.2. These are much smaller on modern Pies. Uh, but these original pies also had a similar design, but it's it's a little bit different. I think I think these are uh flip chip stacked. Uh, there's the SOC silicon underneath this little RAM chip. So, the
RAM is on top. The actual SoC is underneath it wedged in there. And they still use that design, I think, on the 02 and a couple of the other pies. But that was just a way to save a lot of board space. Notice you don't have a an extra RAM chip sitting out here. It's stacked on top of the chip. So,
interesting design there. Looks like the power filtering was also a lot simpler back then. And over here we have all the LEDs for activity power. And then the Ethernet LEDs are actually over here.
They're not on this itself. And I think one change they made in this is this has magnetics. It has the little little inductors or whatever inside here for protection. The original Pi first version didn't have that and that caused some problems on Ethernet. Uh but on these special edition Pies, the one big difference is uh besides the fact that they're blue is they have the number.
So, there's 878 and there's 878 printed under the SD card slot. And these SD card slots would break, I remember quite a bit, uh because people the SD card is sticking way out here and if you yank it or anything, it would rip right off. I've seen a lot of these original pies with broken SD card slots. Uh yeah, but
that's it. Let's uh let's get it inside this case. See how easy or hard that is. I don't like this. Uh okay, I guess you drop that in first. The fit and finish on this case is not not incredible. I have a feeling that
we're going to break this thing before we even get it to uh go into the case here. It does look like it has to be in the case first in this bottom part. And that just feels wrong. Feels all sorts of wrong here. Okay.
Well, okay. That's that's more like it. And uh I guess that's just a little standoff where the case was made. manufacturing defect. So, there it is. Uh, we have it
together. And I'm going to see if I can plug it into my modern HDMI monitor and my Raspberry Pi keyboard and mouse and get this thing to work. We'll get it plugged in first. Here's an HDMI cable. Look at this. This Raspberry Pi has an actual HDMI port. None of this micro HDMI junk that's on the modern pies. I
hate that thing. All right, so let's plug it into there. And I don't have Ethernet over here, but I do have the USB keyboard. So, plug that in. And these old pies used uh micro USB. They didn't use USBC. That didn't come until the Pi 4,
actually, which we can verify looking at all of these pies and their various power inputs. You can see that the first one that used USBC is the Pi 4. So there's 5, four, uh, 3B plus, 3B, 2, and then one. So these old pies used full-size SD cards, not the micro SD cards that we know and hate today. Uh, but I have this little NOOBS card that I bought, I think, from MicroEnter years ago that has a 32-bit PIOS on it that I just downloaded a few days ago from uh, straight from Raspberry Pi using the imager. So again, 12 or 13 years old, and you can still find images that run on these. They're
32-bit, so software is starting to get a little bit harder to run on it. Uh, but we'll put this in and see how it works. Carefully, I want to break that port. Okay, that's in. And you can see why these ports would break. These cards stuck out a lot. And uh, anytime that you'd have these installed somewhere, if you picked up the pie, it could rip it right off. So, if you get one of these
old Pies, be careful with that. But let's plug in power and see what happens. We have power and activity. Okay. And it's booting up like any Pi should boot up. It's doing its reboot to resize the SD card. And uh it looks like everything is working out of the box here, which is uh good. And one thing
anybody who used the original pies remembers very well is how long everything takes to run. The nice thing is they don't use much power and they don't get very hot. So I guess that's a good thing. Now there's more backstory to this. The Raspberry Pi blog post that I have linked in the description goes into some of it, but basically this was a first anniversary kind of celebratory board and it uh was made after a million pies had shipped. Now, at that time, nobody thought that there would be a million $35 Raspberry Pies. They The
initial one had 256 megabytes of RAM. It couldn't do a whole lot. It was a hobbyist thing. At the time, there were a lot of other little SBCs that were kind of coming out of the woodworks, like the Beagle Bone and things like that. I I don't think anybody could have ever predicted the success that Raspberry Pi enjoyed over the next years. uh but because there was so much
success I think at that point it might have been one of the most popular computers ever made in the UK um RS components who is one of the two manufacturers of Raspberry Pies uh partnered up with Raspberry Pi and made this thing now an interesting fun fact RS components and element 14 were the two original manufacturers and they made tons of Raspberry Pies in that first decade Sony's factory that where they make them now I don't think that was online until like 2014 14, 15, 16. I don't know exactly when it started coming online for for some of the Pi models. Uh, but I went and visited there and saw the Pi 4 being produced. And uh,
that was not how it was for the first long while. RS components and element 14 were the ones that were doing everything. In 2022, probably partly because of the Sony deal and partly because of the PC parts shortages that meant that they just couldn't make enough. RS Components
actually ended their agreement with Raspberry Pi after a decade being one of the main manufacturers and distributors of these things. I know for me, at least a few of the Pies that I bought had either Element 14 or RS stamped on them. So, even if you bought them elsewhere in the world, you you'd see their branding kind of stamped onto the packaging with Raspberry Pi. But getting over to why blue, uh I you know, there's a food theory video about the flavor blue raspberry. And you know, Matt Pat says,
"What flavor did you get, Dan?" Blue. So, I guess that was kind of the reasoning. It's It's like the the slush puppy pie. It's blue raspberry. Uh it's one of the flavors of raspberry pie. Uh but this was not also the only blue pie.
I mentioned in the beginning of this video that there was also a blue pie made in Brazil. And the reason for that was Brazil had a lot of tariffs and regulations and things. So, Raspberry Pi made a special model of the Pi for just Brazil. Uh, but it was a very light shade of blue and it didn't have any special markings. It didn't have serial numbers uh stamped into it like the this special edition blue one does. There
were also some red versions uh that were sold in China. And there's actually a really good uh post from raspby.tv that has all of the Raspberry Pies up to like the 3B Plus generation.
Uh there hasn't been another one since then. And uh it'll be interesting. I have not had the time to go and dig around for it, but it'd be interesting to see some other um classifications of things that came after the 3B Plus as well, cuz there are there are I believe a couple special Pi 4s maybe. I don't know if there's any special Pi fives out there. Uh but it's just an interesting tidbit uh looking into the history of this particular Pi and other ones like it. And I did look up a little bit more information about the blue case. It was
designed by N Design in Wales. Wales is right by where the Sony factory is. Uh 1 N design doesn't look to be very active anymore. There's still a 1 N design out there, but it I don't think it's the same one cuz this one N design made a bunch of Raspberry Pi accessory type things and it seemed to be a very kind of mom and pop shop type thing. It
wasn't like a big design firm or something global like a hobbyist shop that was just making a cool little thing for a Raspberry Pi. But but let's get back to the pie itself instead of going into all this history. Ah, we have a background and the mouse. Okay, the mouse is still working. This is good news. Oh, and the waste basket has loaded in. And even the menu bar. This is great
news. Okay, here we go. Oh, come on. You can do it. You can do it. Let me use the menu. Appearance settings is loading. Wow, this is this is painful.
It is painful to use the desktop on the original Raspberry Pi, a modern Linux desktop on a 12-year-old $35 computer. This feels like action retro. It says turn on wireless land, but there's no wireless interface, so I don't know why it would think that would even be a possibility. Um, but I do have this
little Tenda Wi-Fi module that I remember using with my Pi 2. I think I'm going to see if it works on here. Just going to plug it in and see if the Pi Oh, well, be careful plugging in USB devices. That was unexpected. One eternity later. Okay, so I've plugged in the Wi-Fi adapter and it looks like it has picked it up. So, I'm going to turn on Wi-Fi and see if I can jump on my network here. And I realized that this
Wi-Fi adapter is 2.4 GHz only. So, this is like an old 802.11g or very old uh Wi-Fi adapter, but it should work okay with this box. Uh it's it is comically
slow getting uh just the authentication popup. But the fact that this all just works is pretty cool. Like 12 years later and a modern Linux distribution just runs so far. Besides plugging in a
USB device, which is probably a hardware level issue, everything else is working. It even has an IP address. So, let's see if I can get uh the internet here. Huh. So, it looks like Chromium will not run because it says it lacks support for neon SIMD extensions. There's Firefox. Let's see if Firefox is happy on an old old Pi 32 bits. This entire time the CPU is at
100%. I'm guessing it's trying to do some apt updates, which is a terrible idea. One eternity later. Okay, at least Firefox says it's not supported on Raspberry Pi Model B. Uh, I don't know if any browser is supported on this old Pi. Let me check. This might be a
terrible idea, but at least the CPU is not running 100% anymore. I think that the apt software updator has finally stopped doing its automated check for updates. But, uh, even opening the terminal here has taken its merry old time. I don't think that you'd want to run a desktop OS on an original Pi in 2025. Uh, but this is kind of working. So, let's try pseudoapp install-y midori which I believe might run on this old pi. It's installing. So,
I'll come back to you in I don't know 5 10 20 30 minutes when it's installed and we'll see if it runs. One utility. Okay, Midori should be installed. We'll see if it will boot on here. Even going in this menu, the CPU
goes to 100%. That is crazy. So, let's click on it and we'll see what happens. And it looks like we can type in a URL.
I'm going to go to my own website and see if it loads. It's loading. It even has a little progress indicator that shows us how many minutes it will be until the page loads. Look at that. There we go. Let's see if a blog post will load or if the images kill the pie here. It hasn't
locked up, but it's uh stuck here. My guess is that there's something in this blog post. Probably a YouTube embed that I have that is just crushing it. I was going to try loading YouTube on here. I think that's a terrible idea. So, I'm going to skip that and we'll do something else. And I mean, it's not like people were browsing the web that much on the original Pi anyway back when it came out. Back then, there were still
some websites like mine that actually respected people with slow internet connections, but that's just not the case today at all. And it is just painful trying to load even a very efficient website. So, instead, I'm going to uh install Pi Hole on here and see if you could run one of these as a Pi Hole server for your network instead. So, I set it to boot to console instead of the desktop environment. And uh it's
a lot faster booting into this, and it seems a little more responsive just from that perspective. But at this point, the mouse is pretty much useless. So, we're going to set that aside and uh see if we can get to a console prompt here. It's still doing something apparently. There we go. Let's see how quickly Raspby config loads on here. That's not too bad. I'm going to go to interface options and make sure that SSH is turned on and see how quickly it is unloading from another computer. So, I went ahead
and over SSH. I'm doing this just because of convenience. It is not uh super fun to be over on that thing trying to get web web URLs and things. But I went to Pi Hole's documentation and grabbed this script and I'm just running it on the Pi to see if it will install on an old 32-bit 512meg Raspberry Pi Model B. So, I got Pi Hole installed on it and the install script worked perfectly, which I was actually kind of surprised by, but I guess it's one of the main things you could still run on a Pi this old. It's not even slow
either. You don't have to route all your internet traffic through the Pi, just tiny DNS requests. And the old Pi is still fast enough to route that stuff quickly. I ran all my DNS through it for a few hours and honestly, I didn't realize it was on here and not on my normal Pi4 back in the rack. I mean, if
you're going to run DNS benchmarks, I'm sure you'd see a difference. But there are other things you can run on here, too, if they have modest needs. Like, you could run a smartome controller or web UI for some service. Though, as time goes on, more and more software is abandoning 32-bit support that's required for this old of a Raspberry Pi. Like people used to run UniFi controllers on these older Pies, but newer versions are 64-bit only and this can't run that. But whatever you choose to run on here, set your expectations accordingly. It's not going to run fast,
but it might just run. Anyway, that's the mysterious Blue Raspberry Pi. And until next time, I'm Jeff Gearling.
2025-06-05 04:05
