Must fight temptation to buy an overpriced raspberry pi
-
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.
Oh, for sure. It depends what you need it for. A lot of people just want a pi for something like a pihole or a stats dashboard of some kind (that's my use case, anyway). You get what you pay for and sometimes you've gotta pay for what you wanna get.
-
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?
And that's 60W while charging. In idle with the screen off, low end laptops often consume as little as 2-3W. Which is not far off from a pi.
-
original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
damn you all, now I impulse bought an old thin client for 30EUR
but, fwiw: I mostly use RPi for my purposes, up to RPi4; RPi 5 I think missed the mark, with its active cooling requirement and power use. (and price...) the only use case where an i86 alternative is justified is my jellyfin setup (where realtime transcoding is needed). -
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.
Nah no way does the average ewaste tier laptop use less power than a raspberry pi for any given task. The power consumption floor for a laptop may be lower than the rpi ceiling but that's not a fair comparison
-
And for some (including me) that's our only computer (other than phone). I just can't afford anything, so all I have is a shitty laptop from 2010 that barely plays 1080p video. I deeply want something better, especially a steam deck, but doesn't look like that'll happen anytime soon (or ever).
And then you see people have steam decks that just sit there, unused, gathering dust.... fuck.Consider buying used hardware from an office. Lots of places sell used gear for dirt cheap. A used office desktop with a used GPU from the last 3 years or so would be a massive upgrade without spending much.
Steam Deck is still a good deal for what it is though, but I wouldn't use it as a primary workstation.
-
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 ÂŁ1. 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 ÂŁ2 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.
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
Ewaste computers actually tend to be on par if not better than an RPi in power consumption these days. It might feel like a RPi should be more efficient given the size and USB power connector, but modern Pis consume a solid 10-20w while in use which is more or similar to most miniPCs (they idle at single digit watts now and can "race to sleep" more effectively than a Pi) while costing about the same and the Pi is far less upgradeable
-
original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
Yeah... I'm not going to stick a clunky old laptop on top of my bookshelf and have it run 24/7 as my PiHole. My Pi Zero 2 W is far more appropriate.
-
And for some (including me) that's our only computer (other than phone). I just can't afford anything, so all I have is a shitty laptop from 2010 that barely plays 1080p video. I deeply want something better, especially a steam deck, but doesn't look like that'll happen anytime soon (or ever).
And then you see people have steam decks that just sit there, unused, gathering dust.... fuck.Honestly, if you're in the States I have a bunch of HP ProDesks that my wife would be very happy to see disappear from our basement (I bid on an auction I didn't expect to win lol). I'd happily send one for the cost of shipping
-
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.
I would assume that landfill laptop manufacturers are trying to minimize costs even harder on the charger.
but what timeframe do you mean with "anymore"? laptops made in this decade, or the last 10 years, or something else? there's plenty of old laptops that fitinto OPs category.
-
Laptops don't even use that much power. You guys are really not into home labbing or as good with tech as you think you are lol. Lots of people run older real servers and desktops as home servers. They use way more power than laptops. Raspberry Pis sound good but use progressively more power in each generation, and still struggle to compete with mini PCs and even older laptops in performance. They also never had good performance per watt. In performance per watt basically nothing beats a Mac Mini, though other mini PCs are also good. Laptops aren't bad in energy efficiency either. They are literally designed to run on battery so have as little idle draw as possible. They would be comparable to a mini PC if you turn off the display.
Edit: Modern RPis apparently use 25W, which is firmly in the territory of what a laptop would use when not running the screen or charging the battery.
Jesus 25W is about what a miniPC would consume at a constant 30-50% load!
-
Get them from where? I always read about these basically-free computers but have yet to see one
eBay, work, friends/family, friendly ask of your work's IT person, or just call up the local recycling/ecycling company and ask
-
Did someone fall asleep on the keyboard when they came up with kjiji?
I think it's secretly Khajiit's new marketplace for wares if you have the coin
-
original post: https://mk.moth.zone/notes/a8zer7ypj6uv02ka
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.
-
Yeah... I'm not going to stick a clunky old laptop on top of my bookshelf and have it run 24/7 as my PiHole. My Pi Zero 2 W is far more appropriate.
No reason why a laptop wouldn't work though.
-
Yeah... I'm not going to stick a clunky old laptop on top of my bookshelf and have it run 24/7 as my PiHole. My Pi Zero 2 W is far more appropriate.
I agree that the Zero is up to the task, but I prefer a wired connection for my home DNS/DHCP server and if I understand correctly the Pi5 has better wired ethernet than its predecessors... Yeah, utilization is laughable, but there's something to be said for reduced lag time too:
Hostname: pihole CPU: 0.2% on 4 cores running 318 processes (0.3% used by FTL) RAM: 25.9% of 2.0 GB is used (7.4% used by FTL) Swap: 35.9% of 512.0 MB is used Kernel: Linux pihole 6.12.25+rpt-rpi-2712 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.25-1+rpt1 (2025-04-30) aarch64 Uptime: a month (running since Sunday, May 18th 2025, 17:54:59 -
The market is about to be flooded with them with Windows 10 going EoL in October.
About to be? The bottom has been falling out for desktops and laptops on processors not on Microsoft's supported list for the last year or more. I've seen roughly the same system go from ~$200+ down to under $100 on the last year based on eBay pricing alone
-
damn you all, now I impulse bought an old thin client for 30EUR
but, fwiw: I mostly use RPi for my purposes, up to RPi4; RPi 5 I think missed the mark, with its active cooling requirement and power use. (and price...) the only use case where an i86 alternative is justified is my jellyfin setup (where realtime transcoding is needed).As a Pi Hole, the Pi 5 doesn't require active cooling.
Now, I am running a separate Pi 5 with a HAILO 8 for Frigate monitoring of a bunch of video streams, and it does need a little air movement, so I built a box with a 200mm fan pulling through a filter and I just threw all my Pis in there along with the Frigate rig so they stay nice and cool... I'm thinking that I should probably switch Frigate over to a Pi 4 for the h.264 hardware decoder, but the 5 is working fine for my needs and endless tweaking gets boring...
-
All computers are single board computers if you take out their guts and tape them to a board
And they passively cool better that way much of the time too...
-
Back when I lived in a (quite nice) apartment building I was constantly surprised at the things people threw out. Perfectly good furniture but also stuff like perfectly functional printers, artwork, computer cases...
If you go near college housing there's usually a given day of the year (either moving day or an official cleanup day) when tons of people put out stuff they don't want to bother with keeping/moving. It's Hippie Christmas baby!
-
No reason why a laptop wouldn't work though.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I mean, a lot of things would work, I could power it all with potato batteries if I had enough. The Pi Zero 2 W only cost ~ÂŁ15 anyway.
