So SBCs are shit now? Anything I can do with my collection of Pis and old routers? - eviltoast

I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

  • qjkxbmwvz@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    I love my orange pi (5+, 16GB, 256GB eMMC, 2TB NVME). New, with case and eMMC (excluding NVME) was about $200.

    Smart switch says it idles at about 2.9W, transcoding 1080p with Jellyfin draws about 5W (at several hundred FPS with HW transcoding — so it presumably won’t draw that much for the entire duration of the media). Not sure how reliable smart switch is at those powers but I’m guessing it’s ballpark accurate.

    Works flawlessly for Immich of course.

    The duel 2.5G NICs are underutilized by me but kinda fun to have I guess.

    For me, idle power is important, so the ARM SBC route is pretty appealing. A new x64 NUC at same price might offer comparable performance I suppose, and something used could be beefier at the expense of more power usage. But to each their own!