XCELLENCE CONTINUED
Well it's finally looking like winter out here now, rather than
just feeling like it. It's been raining all morning, and I just
gave in and put on the heating because at 1PM it was still 10.5degC
inside. I'm trying to look after my hands this winter, I don't get
very good circulation and it's easy to let them get too cold.
Usually I end up with some swelling and sores that last until the
weather warms up again. I got a bit of that earlier, but have
managed to reverse it. If I touched someone else they'd probably
still remark that I have very cold hands, but they're warm enought
to work at least, and noone's allowed to touch now anyway (not that
it changes much for me).
He seems to have stopped now, but it was nice to read mn03's series
of posts complaining about the hot weather in Japan. Another one of
them and I might have been able to put off turning on the heating
for another hour and save a bit of power. Ahh, 40+degC days... Well
no I hate them too actually. There are probably places in the world
where the temperature is always around 18-25degC all year round,
why on don't I just move there rather than suffering the extremes
of the place where I was born? Such might be the wonder of most
animals on this planet I suppose...
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/nm03/
Anyway, this is meant to be an update on my last post about setting
up an "internet client" to run all of the internet related software
that's likely to become obsolete, so that I can access it from
other machines on my LAN without having to keep them all up to date
(could I have saved a few hundred words just by starting my last
post with a summary like that?).
Well that last post did at least prompt me to think more seriously
about the options, and I realised that the range of ARM processor
versions is just way to complicated. Even besides the problem of
Firefox not running on the Raspberry Pi Zero W, and all of the
unanswered questions regarding the Banana Pi Zero, the choice of
distros was too limited. There are plenty, but most use Systemd,
and the rest tend to be side-projects of x86 distros, likely to
have bugs, or a limited range of packages available, or both.
So yesterday I finally ordered an Atomic Pi. Nobody in Australia
sells them, so I was going to buy directly from the "Digital
Loggers" mob, but the overseas postage options had disappeared from
their online store. So I sent an Email to them asking about postage
to Aus, and next time I checked the whole Atomic Pi page had been
taken off their online store! This happens to me a lot for some
reaon - I see something I want advertised online but I have just
one question, so I send an email and then it disappears (maybe
after being there for years), and I never get a response. Sure I'm
probably not the cause this time, presumably someone bought out
their remaining stock, but it's damn annoying. Anyway I bought one
off Ebay in the end, which may or may not have been more expensive
than buying directly depending on how astronomical the postage
quote would have been. At least there was one lonely Ebay seller
willing to post directly to Australia, rather than via the
expensive and slow Ebay Global Shipping Programme. $88AUD for the
$35USD board in the end, but about the same as a Pi4 (though I
could have bought that locally, which was one of the main
attractions of it).
https://digital-loggers.com/api.html
During the week I did go through a phase of considering just using
an old laptop instead. All my spare (working) laptops are too old
even to match the Intel Atom in the Atomic Pi for performance, but
I thought I could buy one with a broken screen cheap. The trouble
there is that I didn't know how much power a laptop would use
without a screen or HDD running, whether that would be comparable
with the 7-15W of the Atomic Pi. So I dug out all of my post-2000
laptops, pulled out their HDDs and their batteries, booted them up
then measured the power draw with the screen off:
["Run" is the main figure of interest - measured when booted to
BIOS after HDD and battery removed, and screen turned off]
[Thinkpads had their CD/DVD drives removed too]
*Thinkpad R31
- Standby = 5W
- Run = 23W
- Screen = 4W
*Thinkpad T43
- Standby = 6W
- Run = 27W
- Screen = 7W
*Thinkpad R60
- Standby = 7W
- Run = 19W
- Screen = 6W
*Toshiba
Satellite A60
- Standby = 6W
- Run = 49W
- Screen = 5W
*Toshiba
Tectra A7
- Standby = 7W
- Run = 28W (broken - won't boot)
*Compaq Presario
700
- Standby = 5W
- Run = 36W
- Screen = 6W
*Sony Vaio
PCG-991L - Standby = 10W
- Run = 26W (HDD still in)
- Screen = 6W
I think a lot of the standby power is used just by the mains power
supplies, though I only measured this for the one used to power the
Thinkpad R31 and the T43. [EDIT: Also "standby" means what most
people would call "off", but with the power supply still plugged in
and connected to the mains, not the "standby mode" entered from the
OS]
So it varies a lot between models, but assuming power figures
haven't changed too much with more recent laptops, you might expect
them to consume roughly twice the power of an Atomic Pi, with some
risk of it actually being significantly more.
I did later find this page on Thinkwiki that shows some much lower
idle power figures for Thinkpads. I think this might in part be
because they're using the laptop's own power measurement in ACPI
while running off battery, whereas I was measuring the power at the
the mains input to the power supply. So the power used by the
switch-mode supply was included in my measurements. Also I didn't
account for the phase angle, but a laptop should be a mostly
resistive load anway, so that shouldn't matter. They also measured
in Linux and enabled every power saving measure they could, whereas
I was booting to BIOS where those features might not be enabled yet.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Idle_consumptions
In the end I decided to try the Atomic Pi, not least because
laptops still manage to command a significant price on Ebay if
they've only got a fixable issue like a broken screen. Untested
ones don't but then it's probably the case that they were tested,
but found to be completely dead. Also used laptops might not last
as long as a new Atomic Pi, especially given their more
space-constrained cooling systems. It does show that the're an
option for upgrading the system later if future internet software
requires a faster computer than the Atomic Pi. That's comforting
given that there's unlikely to be anything like an Atomic Pi 2 when
that time comes.
There are also various "Mini PCs" like the Intel NUC (I had no idea
that Intel had started making complete systems). But again they
start at about $200 second hand, and nobody provides any data on
real-world power consumption (some even advertise "low power: 12V"
for the sake of the electrically ignorant). I'm just too cheap for
this game.
I did find some benchmarks to put them in perspective though.
Here's an "Up Board 2GB" which is very close in specs to the Atomic
Pi (same CPU (Intel Atom x5-Z8350 @ 1.92GHz (4 Cores)) and RAM (2GB
DDR3)), compared with an "UP2 N4200 4GB" with an Intel Pentium
N4200 @ 2.50GHz, and 4GB DDR3 RAM. As well as an "UP Xtreme i7 4GB"
with a 4.10GHz i7 CPU (4 Cores) and 4GB RAM. These latter boards
are rough equivalents to what you might get in a recent-model used
laptop or Mini PC:
https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1905059-SP-1612202TA42
The PC CPUs do wipe the floor with the energy-efficient Atom.
A fairer test is against the Raspberry Pi 4, though the Atomic Pi
still comes off a close second in most of the tests:
https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1903178-SP-ATOMICPI954,1907128-H
V-1907127HV99
There's no clear winner overall, but the Atomic Pi is the
compromise that I went with in the end. For now I'll try to set up
the internet client system on my "new" laptop, running from a Micro
SD card, so that I can move it over to the Atomic Pi when it
eventually arrives (it'll probably take a month or more from
America at the moment). Things aren't going too smoothly getting
that laptop set up either, mind you.
- The Free Thinker.
