Restoring a 4 year old Raspberry Pi

I wanted to get my hands on Raspberry Pi for a very long time. Ever since I started watching many videos on home automations using Raspberry Pi, it has been a great inspiration for me to give it a try. I initially thought of buying a new Raspberry Pi but then realized that my cousin bought one for his final year projects and did not use it much after that. I asked him and he gave it to me.

I did know a little bit about this but I was very much interested in practically trying certain things out. Before I get into doing any actual home automation stuff using this, I wanted to see what it was capable of and the first thing was to restore it. It was part of scrap in his house and he gave it to me and asked me to do whatever I want with that. Then only I realized that my old PC is also in a similar position. It was also a powerful one but I stopped using it after I switched to laptops. Maybe someday I should also take my PC out and try restoring that to see if it is still intact.

The first thing that I had to do was to update the packages. It had a 16 GB memory card that came along with the package with a pre-loaded Raspbian OS. I started updating the packages initially but then found many articles online that said that I can have my own OS preference. My idea was to get Honey Gain run on this but unfortunately, they are not supporting ARM CPUs, so it was not very helpful.

But in all these efforts I got to learn so many things now. If I had a stable internet connection at home, I can probably even run some interesting things with the Raspberry Pi. Today's exploration let me learn about network-related things, some Linux commands that would be useful, and also a lot about Raspberry Pi because that's something pretty new to me. I also came across two more websites that offer earning opportunities similar to Honey Gain. I will probably try to write a detailed article on the same in the future if it works out well.

While trying to do all these, I was wondering if there would be some option to restore or convert old phones to microcomputers similar to Raspberry Pi. We are not using mobile phones for a longer period of time even though it has very good specs. If the display is broken or even if the phone gets older, we mostly find it hard to dispose of. I was wondering if would be interesting to convert them to smart devices that can do some smart works for the house too.

I found a few videos on Youtube on this topic but I'm not sure how long it would take to become a reality. It should become very handy and easy to convert our old smartphones to other smart device. It is also compact and the phones we have today are more like pocket computers only. I'm planning to do more explorations on Raspberry Pi. You might see more articles on the same from me.

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Posted with STEMGeeks