alt Hacker NewsNowadays, I just get old laptops with broken screens and take the mainboard out. They are dirt cheap, often even have 16GB of RAM, you can just dump pretty much any linux on them and they are usually way faster than Pis.
The boards are of course bigger, which I guess will be a non-starter for many. They'll also require active cooling unless you downclock them considerably. They often also require more power, although many mainboards can be configured down two a few watts of power consumption, depending on what peripherals and speed you need.
Yeah, it's more work than just getting a Pi, but given the current prices, it makes sense for me.
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The Lenovo “Tiny” line of ultra small form factor PCs is effectively laptop hardware in a proper case, with ethernet and no battery to deal with. There’s a steady supply of used ones at good prices from enterprise IT liquidators. I’ve had one on my desk as a home server for years.
Indeed is a good idea, but Pi has a better power consumption rate.
Old mobile phones or laptops are riskier because of batteries. Some laptops can work without batteries as well, but do old phones?
Factor in power usage, thermals (esp if they're sharing a living space with you), and time. This is where the modern CPUs on 2nm process nodes really start to pull ahead, especially when you can S3 sleep them or use IPMI type BMCs on stuff like real workstation-class systems and servers. Even an M6 Mac Mini can do a ton of work these days, and single-core speeds on those especially when you look at perf/watt are insane.
My home server is a first-generation Framework 13 laptop that I put into an enclosure that they sell on their website. I sold the battery and the case on their forum. It works great!
DIY perks has a really good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FStfdGjAwc
How do you power them? Via the battery? I was thinking about turning my old mbp into a build machine, but i am a bit concerned with running it via the battery 24/7
I'm not allowed to buy broken screened laptops anymore, my wife has threatened to leave me.
Thin clients could work too. A lot of them are just Windows machines configured to handle just logins and MS Remote Desktop.
How do you configure them after pulling out the mainboard ? For example if you need to ssh into them, how does it work, if it is not configured correctly before removing the display ?
Why not used Pi? Even if the board consumes 5wt, in one year it would cost about 45Kwh or 9 USD with current US average prices.
Same, but I've been using old Chromeboxen, with MrChromebox.tech EFI.
why go the hassle of taking the mainboard out, assuming you are using it as a server kindof config
Wanted to add that LLMs have become incredibly good at reverse engineering such devices, even when they don't have postmarketOS (now "Nura") or upstream kernel support yet. Been able to merge kernel changes and backport driver support to upstream kernels pretty easily by just giving them access to UART. They'll just go ahead and figure out all the partitioning and firmware quirks by themselves, and e.g. OpenWRT instructions seem to be well documented in the wiki so they'll understand the process on how to get there almost completely by themselves.
For my malware home lab, I decided to just reuse old phones and routers that nobody wanted anymore (quite literally got them from the trash bins). Now they're running an ARMv8 kernel as the host kernel and the rest is emulated or containerized, depending on the use case.
Works like a charm for most tasks I throw at it, and many old cheap Android phones have at least quad or octa cores in them, making them pretty awesome for podman/docker usage, too.
The only thing you have to look out for is to remove the battery, and that you use a separate power circuit with a step down converter to power it. But other than that, old smartphones have become amazing for selfhosting stuff now.
The goal of raspberry pi's was to have a standard GPIO connected to a moderately powerful and cheap computer for educational purposes. Then it slowly evolved into many use cases because of it's vast community and standardization and availability, not to mention the large number of boards that connect to it. The standardization did erode a little but it still maintains that reputation because of the community and availability and now because its turned into a big brand. Many industrial projects depend on it.
If you use the raspberry pi for homeservers or general compute (which I did/do sometimes) then the value proposition is quite poor regardless of pre AI prices unless you have very strict power requirements (in which case it probably fits the above use case already). The comparison with NUCs or mini PCs or laptop boards feels like it's a wrong comparison.
The chips used in PIs are repurposed Broadcom SOCs that have inferior bus speeds compared to a general purpose processor from intel or amd, even few generations old. For any general purpose computing these chips will always be slower. its like comparing apples and oranges. I never really understood why people did that.