I went the other way; I had a Dell r430 and downsized to two hp elitedesk g4 mini. Together, they use less than half of the power of the 1u server.
But I am never satisfied, I'm sure I'll want to iterate again next year.
I went: Pi 2 -> Pi 4 -> Odroid H3 -> Intel N100 box (current). All in all from about 4W idle on the pi to about 10W idle on the N100 box. So not a big power jump all in all, but my needs did get bigger since the Pi.
Love the evolution! How are you measuring the power consumption of your devices? I’d be interested in profiling my build as well.
I use a device similar to this. Pretty useful and handy.
Probably the easiest way. It's plugged into a smart plug with energi monitoring.
Them probably uses a special plugin device in the outlet.
I have this bash script you can use and have a general overview but I'm not totally sure if I fully understand it and if it's the whole system's wattage or only the CPU 🤷♂️
#! bash
time=5
sum_1=$(cat /sys/class/powercap/*/energy_uj | awk 'BEGIN { sum = 0; } { sum += $1; } END { print sum; }' "$@");
echo "before" $sum_1
sleep $time;
sum_2=$(cat /sys/class/powercap/*/energy_uj | awk 'BEGIN { sum = 0; } { sum += $1; } END { print sum; }' "$@");
echo "after" $sum_2
sum_1f=$(printf "%.0f" $sum_1)
sum_2f=$(printf "%.0f" $sum_2)
final_sum=$(echo "(($sum_2f - $sum_1f) / 1000000) / $time" | bc -l)
#echo $final_sum | bc -l | xargs printf "%.2f\n"
formated=$(echo $final_sum | bc -l | xargs printf "%.2f\n")
echo $formated "w"
Nice write up. I'm in a very similar place at the moment, considering upgrades to my pi4.
Zimaboard.
Thanks! What kinds of things do you intend to do with your lab? I felt that the Pi was suitable for most everything except media pipelines.
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