Must fight temptation to buy an overpriced raspberry pi
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There are probably a dozen things you can do to save energy on orders of magnitude higher than using a pi.
Like: using the pi to manage your HVAC more efficiently.
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Also, Raspberry Pi first got popular because of the size and cost. Now it's popular because it's popular. Not hating on them, I think they're cool, but they're not cheap any more. Especially with the scalping.
Getting x86_64 based systems is going to mean much less headache. Unless you truly truly need the size I wouldn't consider getting a Pi or other SBC. Just go to literally any used marketplace (Facebook, Craigslist, etc) and get anything.
Pi is popular with me because it's time efficient. Meaning: when I am trying to get it to do something, it takes less of my time to make the thing actually happen on Pi hardware as compared with most of the other small / embedded alternatives. Notable recent exception: ESPHome on ESP32 hardware, but even there the more limited variation of Raspberry hardware makes it similar to those fruity phones, MP3 players and computers - since there are a limited number of variations, you can usually find information specific to EXACTLY your setup, instead of having to infer from something almost the same, but figure out little wrinkles here and there due to differences between what you are working with and what you are reading about on the internet.
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but they're not cheap any more
People say this, but they really are still cheap.
The original Raspberry Pi Model B launched for £22 in 2012. The entry level Raspberry Pi 5 is £46, but adjusted for inflation that's only £32 in 2012 money. So only £10 more expensive in real terms.
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is only £14.40, which is only £10 in 2012 money. Compare this to the original Raspberry Pi Model A, which launched for £16.
People look at the headline cost of the high end RPi 5s (£115 for the 16GB model, £76 for the 8GB), but fail to recognise that there was nothing comparable to these in the Raspberry Pi lineup before, and these are not the only models in the Raspberry Pi lineup now.
There was the supply shortage price spike, they really were stupid expensive then if you supported the hoarder/scalpers.
Since that has cleared... most of the Pi price increases (in inflation adjusted dollars) can be attributed to improved features like more RAM, or people acknowledging that having a good dedicated $20 power supply is preferable to dealing with the flakiness of that old phone charger you found under the bed.
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10£ more, or 50% more expensive?
Don't like the expensive version? Get a Zero 2 W which outspecs the original by a wide margin.
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original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
Yeah... no. Old laptops idle at around 50 °C.
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I guess I am pretty far from saturating my WiFi in any way, the removal of cables with little to no impact on connectivity was far more of a priority for me. I have never noticed a WiFi related outage or performance loss.
I will say this: we had a big lightning strike a few years back and it conducted into the house via the internet cable, then spread via the ethernet cables taking out everything that was wired (over $7K in damage) - devices connected only by power and WiFi were mostly spared.
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Yeah... no. Old laptops idle at around 50 °C.
That just means they become 100% efficient in winter!
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Fake news. Modern RPis need up to 25W PSU. Even old laptops could idle lower than that, as otherwise they wouldn't be able to get significant battery life. Turning off the screen will also really lower their power consumption.
You're comparing a laptop at idle to the power supply for a pi that needs to power it at full load plus overhead and inefficiencies. That's like comparing apples to an orange tree.
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You're comparing a laptop at idle to the power supply for a pi that needs to power it at full load plus overhead and inefficiencies. That's like comparing apples to an orange tree.
I mean sure. If you want to compare actual efficiency then performance per watt is the metric. Here a laptop would easily win as it has higher performance for similar power. The TDP of a U class processor is only 15W normally. It would obviously help to disable things like Turbo Boost as well. Said laptop having more performance wouldn't need to stay at high power states for as long as the Pi either as it takes less time to process requests. Returning back to idle faster is a big advantage.
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Not quite. Unless the system has pretty advanced power management and is using very recent technology with high density, it's unlikely that an x64 chipset will use less power than a comparably powered arm64 chipset. Not just the processor, but the smaller board is actually a power saver and allows it to generate less heat meaning both less power wasted and dissipated as heat as well as less power needed for fans to properly dissipate the heat. I've never seen a laptop use 3W at idle when considering the whole device, maybe just the CPU, but not if you include the rest of the components like RAM and disks and power supply. And especially true in a laptop that is old enough that it's being recycled. Heck, the power supply and charger alone might be using 3W at idle with full battery.
With a raspberry pi 4, the typical power usage for the 2GB RAM model is 5W under load for the whole device and about half that for idle. Add a couple of watts for the extra memory and wider bus on the 8GB model and other things can add to that, but that's mostly accurate. The pi 5 is a little more and the 3 is a little less. Of course, the efficiency of the laptop at full load might end up being better than a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount if work, but comparing a single pi or any other reputable arm-based, single board computer to a single laptop at idle is always going to be that way.
Battery charging circuits don't operate continuously when the device is charged. Pi also still needs a PSU, typically a phone charger, and for a server application would need an SSD or HDD in most cases. SD cards have lower performance, write endurance, and capacity after all. A single raspberry pi couldn't match even a somewhat old laptop in performance. In terms of actual efficiency (performance per watt) Pis don't do that well as they are using cheap processors made using old core designs and even older process nodes. Even the latest Pi 5 uses a 16nm process node with a core design from 2018. A 10 year old laptop might have 14nm process node which would be better. This means that a laptop would have more performance, so even if it had more power consumption at peak it could still end up with significantly better performance per watt, and that extra performance allows it to idle more often as it spends less time processing requests.
Of course the ultimate in performance per watt is always going to be a modern high power server or an Apple Silicon device. Mini PCs can also do well for home use, and are much lower power so better suited to less demanding usage, and have the best performance per watt for consumer devices. The M4 Mac Mini for example is pretty much best in class in performance per watt, and low power consumption at the same time.
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Yeah... no. Old laptops idle at around 50 °C.
So do Raspberry Pi?
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Get them from where? I always read about these basically-free computers but have yet to see one
wrote last edited by [email protected]We have bins around our city for people to drop electronics off for recycling. I’ve taken a few laptops from there. You’re not supposed to, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
One I gave to my buddy who needed something just for emails and web browsing and whatnot, one is running a server, and a couple more went back in to the bin because they were actually broken, but I took the hard drives for the server machine. I have one on a self ready in case the server machine dies so I haven’t gone looking for any new ones in a while.
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Look for refurbished elitedesk g5, it runs debian magnificantly! I splurged a bit on the memory and ssd and have a quite nice desktop (developer).
this is the way
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That just means they become 100% efficient in winter!
Idk, heat pumps have become a lot more popular in recent years.
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Are you living on a space station? What is this shitload of power?
Some of us live off-grid and make every Watt-hour we consume. So it may be that one man's fanciful bullshit is another man's daily life. For context, this is my 2,461st day offgrid.
A whole 60 watts?
Over the last 30 days I've averaged 2.01kWh/day, or an average constant consumption of 84w. All in. And that's on the high end for folks in similar use cases. In this scenario adding in another 60w would be significant (ie, impossible for my rig during winter months).
As Sesame Street taught showed us it's a matter of perspective.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Um if you’re living with computers are you really „off the grid“ computers require the grid to be manufactured. If you’re off the grid because you worry about the way the worlds going and you think you’ll need to be off the grid to survive I wouldn’t make having access to computers part of the plan.
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original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
You'll have no end of problems and won't know whether it's a hardware or software problem.
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All computers are single board computers if you take out their guts and tape them to a board
Technically a Pi is a single chip computer but they're called an SBC because they replaced stuff like a Motorola 68HC11.
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10£ more, or 50% more expensive?
Sure, but the specs aren't directly comparable.
They also still manufacture the RPi 4, which starts at £33- which is £23 in 2012 money.
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original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
Its all fun and games until the power bill arrives. Performance per watt is important, please look at that first. Don't be me.
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You'll have no end of problems and won't know whether it's a hardware or software problem.
Damn straight. Another reason not to buy a pi.
