Must fight temptation to buy an overpriced raspberry pi

[crmsnbleyd@sopuli.xyz]

original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka

[saltyiceteamaker@lemmy.ml]

the 20 year old pc of my grandparents had a graphics card failure, i fixed it but tgey decided i should keep the pc and help them pick a new one (valid after 20 years ngl) now this PC runs debian and hosts my game servers and all

[kalcifer@sh.itjust.works]

l a p p i e s

[princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

The power constraints are more important to most than the size constraints honestly.

[j4k3@lemmy.world]

You lose the I/O and power efficiency is no comparison. You can get better power efficiency and sometimes some I/O with an old router and OpenWRT, but you'll be in the class of a Beagle Bone and a much harder learning curve. I've never managed to get a sensor or peripheral working on some old laptop's SPI or I2C buses like how easy it is on a Rπ.

[jol@discuss.tchncs.de]

It's not just the size constraint. The power usage is significant...

[pewpew@feddit.it]

New low end chromebooks are much better for this anyway, an intel N4000 will consume just 8 watts at its peak and it's even supported by Windows 11, and they are usable if you put Linux on them

[kingofsleep@lemmy.ca]

That word made me hear the whole thing in an Australian accent.

[bizarroland@lemmy.world]

If you have the lid closed, you're looking at 3 to 15 watts to have a laptop running in the background doing some basic server shit.

Maybe a little more under high load, but those are going to be intermittent and not constant.

I'm just saying it's not that much more electricity usage, and the recycling more than offsets the CO2.

[hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Better than an old laptop, get a mini-pc like thinkcentre tiny. They're more upgradeable, space-efficient, power efficient, have better cooling

[hornedfiend@sopuli.xyz]

Or any compact pc like gigabyte brix, nucs, lenovos , etc. you can get those for 70-200 on ebay and they are amazing for running any homelab projects, including stream services like jellyfin with hardware decoding.

[minibyte@sh.itjust.works]

I bought a dell latitude on eBay for a few bucks and run Debian on it. This one speaks to me.

[letak@feddit.org]

I have an old pentium laptop N3520 with 4GB DDR3. I removed everything and put it in a receiver box 1U size. It consumes so little energy that it can run 5-7 hours from its battery (I call it build in USV). Last time I measured 3-7w. Also passiv cooled , no noise.
Another machine I use , is with a i7 4770 with 16GB for Proxmox, 7-20w , peak is much higher but rarely used , only on boot and vm startup.

[letak@feddit.org]

Oh and the i2c etc stuff, I connected ESP32 and other microcontrollers over USB.

[mooglemaestro@lemmy.zip]

If you have the lid closed, you’re looking at 3 to 15 watts to have a laptop running in the background doing some basic server shit.

Not all laptops make effective use of power with the lid closed, sadly. Not saying this as a correction, but for others to know that they need to make sure these settings are available in the bios of the system they are buying.

[star@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

I wish there was a convenient place to get these

[alligatorblizzard@sh.itjust.works]

I've thought about asking the folks at the local Free Geek about getting a laptop or two like this that I can mess around with. I had an old HP Stream 11 and I'm still disappointed that it died.

[cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de]

There are also a lot of mini PCs that are comparable in price to a Raspberry Pi 5 once you factor in the cost of a case, SD card, and power supply for the Pi.

[jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works]

What is i2c?

[j4yt33@feddit.org]

Get them from where? I always read about these basically-free computers but have yet to see one