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Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

If you don't need GPIO, then you don't need a RPi. They are useful, but an old laptop can do most things a Pi can do, and putting them to use keeps them out of the landfill longer.

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I'm a bigger fan of Dell desktop that companies have put out to pasture after a refresh cycle. They're very expandable, have plenty of horsepower, and the idle power draw isn't that bad. The better thermal characteristics compared to a laptop usually lead to very long life as well.

Related to a sibling comment, a decent UPS could power a Dell like that for a couple of hours if it's mostly idling.

That and latitude laptops.

Optipliex desktop is around 10-15W idle

Laptops with screen off can hit around 5W (close to pi under load).

I would assume what loads the pi would almost be idle in these older dell machines.

Yes, I've got a Dell T3610 under the desk here now. My only beef is that it has weird Dell proprietary hardware, so I can't easily fit quieter fans to the PSU, or reuse the case with an ATX mobo

Agreed. A laptop also comes with battery backup, screen, and input devices out of the gate. Granted, it consumes more power than RPi. But a laptop is definitely a solid choice, based on my experience with RPi resets and corrupted SD cards, etc.

> If you don't need GPIO, then you don't need a RPi.

You might not need a Pi. You can by a hundred ESP8266 boards for the price of a modern Pi. ESP8266 and ESP32 are also more forgiving with their GPIOs.

And includes built in battery backup

Normally a good idea to remove the battery actually, they bulge over time and could present a fire hazard.

That assumes the battery still works. I have some old laptops, but few have usable batteries.

A laptop would consume significantly more power than an RPi.

However, you can buy a lot of electricity for the price of a scalped RPi these days.

This is true. But some people are not concerned just about the price.

What are you concerned about?

The feeling of waste when I'm running a 20 watt laptop in the corner 365/24/7.

20 watt is very little. Are you sure it's more of a waste than buying a brand new energy-efficient device?

Depends on the use case and your perspective. If you want to run a few dozen lines of code to do something like monitoring a sensor and calling an API endpoint -- a microcontroller can do that with milliwatts of power.

Depends on the laptop really. Got enough laptops that use 1W idle with display off while the pi seldom idles because every process is work

I hear this argument all the time. But unless you're doing something that's solar, battery, RTG or otherwise non-grid powered, then what does it really matter? At what scale is a person running so many old laptops that they need to switch to RPi's to save power?

And if that person can afford the Pi's, they can afford the power, so there's no point quoting power costs.

I can also afford to let my faucet run 24/7. Should I do it to avoid needing to turn the knob when I need to wash my hands?

Here in Ireland water (to domestic properties) is free - as I embarrassingly discovered when phoning them up to setup an account :)

In theory, I could leave all the taps on 24/7, however that’s A) abuse of a free service, and B) a complete waste of resources.

Even cleaning the car I’m very strict about turning the hose off when I’m using the sponges.

Good, you understood my point. Using an overpowered device is a complete waste of resources.

I didn't say that having resources meant they should be abused. I said that if somebody can afford $150 for a RPi can afford $2.50/mo for power instead of $0.50/mo for power, and that as a result, factoring in lower power use is a poor reason for buying something you don't otherwise need, especially when that power is easily available.

If that power were coming from locally finite source such as solar or wind, or battery, it's a different story.

You know there's this little event going on called climate disruption, and that a leading cause is energy overconsumption, right?

> A laptop would consume significantly more power than an RPi.

Not necessarily true. Even some of the TinyMiniMicros mentioned in the article have a single digit W consumption when idle (because they are basically laptop parts).

Now, when loaded this would be true. However, their higher processing power also means tasks get completed faster, so they don't stay at the higher power states for long.

That's a broad generalization. Sure, reduce, re-use, recycle.

But... it's nice to have a system that has a very minimal footprint, which isn't exactly the case with a laptop.

Then again, we can argue semantics over "need" vs "want".

> but an old laptop can do most things a Pi can do, and putting them to use keeps them out of the landfill longer.

But you'll lose Internet points.

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