I would say it can sometimes be nice to have an old Laptop for this purpose, you have to slightly over build your solar but can be nice to have a mouse and keyboard attached and monitor, ssh works. Still have an hp laptop with a core i5 2nd gen sitting out in my greenhouse, is a little more power hungry but not terrible on idle, and is nice to be able to configure changes to watering without going back inside or wrecking the zen by bringing phone.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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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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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.
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.
Laptop performance when closed is quite variable, but depending on where you live, each 10W of idle consumption 24/7/365 could cost you somewhere around $20/yr (assumes @$0.20/kWh, YMMV). This isn't overwhelming on it's own, but it is "cost difference between a junked laptop and a Raspberry Pi" kinda money.
And you are often paying 140-200 for a pi nowadays to make it have the same usability as a laptop (pi, power supply, sata hat, data drive because SD cards simply fail after a while under server IO) while you can get cheap used laptops for 0-100.
So unless you are running it for more than half a decade (which rarely happens with selfhosters for a main server), you are probably spending more in total on the pi.
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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
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Get them from where? I always read about these basically-free computers but have yet to see one
I do e-scooter mechanical stuff, I always have a bid war with the local franchisee scooter shop nearby fighting for the scooters. I know its them, so I try to raise the bids for them as much as possible to fuck them around.
eBay, work, friends/family, friendly ask of your work's IT person, or just call up the local recycling/ecycling company and ask
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I mostly agree, and did the same with my second gen lab build - instead of shiny new NUCs like I had used round 1, I bought old off lease Dell Xeon boxes. SO MANY PROS -
- Got them up to 14c/28t each
- They can take GPUs and actually do heavy transcoding/ML work
- They can take up to like, 128GB of memory, which is GREAT when they're all hypervisors
The downsides can't be denied though -
- Even without the GPUs and beefed up CPUs, they are power hogs - the CPU alone uses more than an ENTIRE NUC
- They run HOT
- They run LOUD
The same holds true for off-lease SFF stuff, Lenovo and the likes ...
So while reuse/repurpose is absolutely of the utmost importance, no question - when it comes to technology and how quickly it advances and miniaturizes, a thorough and logical pros/cons list is often required.
I'd add another option though - if you do need what a Pi brings to the table - do you really need a shiny new Pi 5? Is it possible a used Pi 3 or Pi 4 would do the trick, and check the reuse box?
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Where are these cheap e waste laptops with gpio and actually low power?
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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.
We must be pretty close on that by now, I can emulate a number of Switch 1 games surprisingly OK (not amazing, just OK) on my S21!
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You probably could with a phone
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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.
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The only caveat here is the fire-hazard non-removable lithium batteries.
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