Must fight temptation to buy an overpriced raspberry pi
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Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time - a server typically isn't.
This is actually something that applies to cheap products too. Was in Asda a little while ago and saw 2 LED bulbs with the same lumen rating. Cheaper one used 3w more and you only saved £1. Running it for 8 hours a day for a year would cost double that saving in electricity. For a server you are looking at almost £2 per watt each year. Does that ewaste look so good to you now?
Some things are absolutely worth getting second hand, but you really should be careful considering the power cost as well.
Quick edit: If you don't need it running 24/7, consider something like AWS too. I love selfhosting but if its not running much it might be cheaper to not bother buying hardware.
Are you living on a space station? What is this shitload of power? A whole 60 watts? Are you rationing AA batteries to run your household?
What is it with the bullshit fanciful rationalizations people come up with to consume consume consume?
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I'm not taking electronics advice from someone who uses the term lappies.
Where I'm from those were 10$ and legal in Quebec.
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I dislike posts like this. Technology moves quickly. PIs are great for hobby electronics where you need a little computer. Want a cheap computer to run a few things 24/7 and know what you're doing? Pi it is. You don't need to run containers on a pi because you have the skills to install the dependencies manually. They cost pennies to run 24/7.
I think of pis as beefed-up calculators. I have made lots of money using a pi zero running code I needed to run 24/7. Code I developed myself.
Having an old laptop with outdated parts taking up lots of space, weighing a lot, and having components like fans, keyboard, and mousepad most-likely soon dying and needing replacing is an additional concern you don't want.
Someone below saying use an old laptop if you're living with parents and don't pay the electricity bill is a bit lame. Do your part for the world. Someone will be paying for it.
Ultimately, use what you want but if you're just starting with servers, use a virtual machine on your computer and log in to it. You can dick about with it as much as you want, and reset back to a working state in seconds.
Pi's are ARM-based, which still to this day limits the scope of their applicability.
Also, you should absolutely inspect a laptop before buying. Many, if not most, of old laptops will run just fine for the next few years.
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Or get a used thin client (e. g. HP T620, T630, T640 or Dell Wyse 5070). Cost: ~40-100$. Biggest advantage: Passive cooling, i. e. they're absolutely quiet.
Wanna get something like this and a large SSD going forward. Make a silent NAS out of it, and have it in my bedroom without issues.
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You want a steam deck to replace your only computer?
They make a quite capable desktop machine when plugged in, with the benefit of portability, and definitely better than a 2010 laptop
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Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time - a server typically isn't.
This is actually something that applies to cheap products too. Was in Asda a little while ago and saw 2 LED bulbs with the same lumen rating. Cheaper one used 3w more and you only saved £1. Running it for 8 hours a day for a year would cost double that saving in electricity. For a server you are looking at almost £2 per watt each year. Does that ewaste look so good to you now?
Some things are absolutely worth getting second hand, but you really should be careful considering the power cost as well.
Quick edit: If you don't need it running 24/7, consider something like AWS too. I love selfhosting but if its not running much it might be cheaper to not bother buying hardware.
lowendtalk, hella cheap vps with plenty of resources for most self hosted apps, the issue with it is usually storage space but there are ways around that connecting your drives from elsewhere
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lowendtalk, hella cheap vps with plenty of resources for most self hosted apps, the issue with it is usually storage space but there are ways around that connecting your drives from elsewhere
Warning tho, hella shills too but you could literally make a post asking if certain companies on the site that have active threads are scams and get valid responses that don't get removed or anything so thats nice, like half of the ones I looked at were giving less resources than they claimed
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Rpi uses 25watts? My old acer 6th gen laptop has a 15watt TDP and remains around 8watts 24/7 even with my services and without disconnecting the internals. My 8th gen laptop pulls 6watts with the screen on. People here saying older laptops arent a good choice are insane considering the ~$100-300 diffrence between an ewaste laptop and dedicated minipc + backup power bank (laptops have internal batterys you can easily replace when they go bad)
yeah even the best overheating overpowered gaming laptops have way lower power draw compared to your average desktop? It's really not that high or crazy to use an old laptop instead of buying a pi lol.
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It's not just the size constraint. The power usage is significant...
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.
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Not so sure about the last part. It takes ehhh about 3kg of c02 to produce 1 Watt for a year. Carbon footprint to build a laptop is about 200kg or so, but you're not offsetting one of those you're offsetting the raspberry PI you WOULD have bought which is just a small fraction of that. After a year or 2 you've almost certainly burned through your c02 savings if it's on all the time.
A raspberry pi is not as efficient as people are claiming. They need up to 25W PSU for a reason. Laptops can idle lower than that certainly. Something like a MacBook Air M1 would idle in single digit territory, as would any netbook basically ever made. Only really high performance or older laptops have idle power draw issues since battery life is a major selling point of a laptop. Said laptop is probably also faster than a raspberry pi. The people building Pi clusters are really not doing themselves any favors with power efficiency.
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The only caveat here is the fire-hazard non-removable lithium batteries.
These things are removable with a screwdriver in most cases. If the battery isn't completely dead it's actually useful for backup power.
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but what will fix the fire hazard of the charger? how will you be able to keep it plugged in 24/7?
Laptop chargers are no fire hazards anymore than raspberry pi PSUs are. In fact probably the RPi parts are worse as they are built down to a cost.
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The day i can fit the power of a computer capable of emulating the switch 1 in a gameboy shell will be glorious.
Do you mean the steam deck?
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Low power and arm architecture are big differentiators between Pi and laptops.
I totally agree recycle laptops where possible, but they're generally noisier and less energy efficient plus the battery degrades over time and is a fire risk.
They're not necessairly a good fit for always-on server or service type uses comparef to a small board like Raspberry Pi. But a cheap or free second hand laptop is definitely good for tweaking, testing and trying our projects.
How many people keep up with this misconception RPis are ultra efficient? They are bargain basement SoCs. The power draw isn't that low (25W PSU), and the performance they deliver isn't great. They are all made using older process nodes and techniques that result in less efficient processors. Add those together and you will find they have less performance per watt than all modern laptops with the screen turned off, and less than most Mini PCs. Mini PCs and other SBCs are where it's at for efficient home labs. If you can find a Mac with Apple Silicon for cheap they are even better. Everyone in the home labbing community pretty much knows this by now. I struggle to understand why Lemmy hasn't got this through their brains. I think it's partially the miconception that ARM is always better, and partially down to people not understanding that low maximum power draw and efficiency are the same thing. Not even thinking about idle power or performance per watt.
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It's low power that is still making arm small computers popular. It's impossible to get a pc down into the 2-5 Watt power consumption range and over time it's the electrical costs that add up. I would suggest the RPI5 is the thing to get because it's expensive for what it is and more performance is available from other options supported by armbian.
Yet a Mac Mini does exactly that. Or like any Intel N100 based mini PC or laptop. Those also have way better performance, IO, and software compatibility. Raspberry Pi's fill a certain niche, but efficiency isn't it. At least not anymore.
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original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
All computers are single board computers if you take out their guts and tape them to a board
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What are the better options?
Pis have great software support so for GPIO experimentation it's so useful.
Not super familiar with the gpio side of things, and I also haven't dug that deep into the space lately since I already own my rpi and it works for me so take all this with a pinch of salt, but I found some options that seem reasonable
- Libre Computer Le Potato
- Orange Pi Zero 2
- Radxa Zero
- NanoPi R2S
- Banana Pi M2 Zero
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Not super familiar with the gpio side of things, and I also haven't dug that deep into the space lately since I already own my rpi and it works for me so take all this with a pinch of salt, but I found some options that seem reasonable
- Libre Computer Le Potato
- Orange Pi Zero 2
- Radxa Zero
- NanoPi R2S
- Banana Pi M2 Zero
It's been a while but I remember Orange Pi having terrible support? I haven't heard of the others.
Whereas the RPi has the amazing compute module if you need it too.
Sometimes paying more is better.
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Not the person you're asking but personally I use Jetson nano for some work stuff (and when I upgrade the "old" one is mine), odroid I've used for some misc creations and testing, and I'm personally looking forward to trying the radxa x4 as an htpc.
What I am really excited about right now is tossing my recently acquired spare jetson nano on a drone, right now I'm setting it up to walk around with it and test CV before it gets mounted up on the drone.
Will you use a separate flight controller chip or try to do it all on board?
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There is quite a range of devices out there now with varying capabilites. Things like the Onion Omega2+, Oranage Pi, and more.
Raspberry Pi also remains good. While the Pi5 is expensive and more powerful - raspberry pi also makes the Pi Zero boards which are cheaper less capable boards which are closer to what the original raspberry Pi was but newer hardware.
I'd say the Pi5 is a heading more towards a full PC like device (hence the comparisons to cost and capability minipcs pepple are making in thia thread). But there remain plenty of lower spec machines out there now similar to the original cheap Raspberry Pi concept. And we've had high inflation recently - to some extent the cost perception avtually reflects money being worth less than it was and buying less for $10 or $20.
Yeah, the Pi moving to full computer thing is weird because the SD card is still a massive bottleneck on normal day-to-day usage.
