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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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3DPrinting
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I will second this recommendation. The main purpose of the SBCs is running Linux with easy access to GPIO pins. If you are using USB just run off of a small x86 machine and avoid the hassle.
The up side to SBC computers is also their low power consumption. Something like a Pi is half the power consumption of an N100 PC, in addition to being half the cost. If you only need 1/1000th the CPU then why pay all this extra money and use all this extra power to gain nothing?
Ah, but the thing is there are older platforms than the N100 that are still faster and more expandable than a rPi.
I have an AliExpress eWaste special that's a N3350, 6gb of RAM, and 64gb of eMMC storage which was ~$50.
About the same price as a new Pi, somewhat better performance than a Pi, and at about 4w idle, roughly the same power as a new Pi. Full load is closer to 10w, but we're talking 3 or maybe 4w more than the Pi in a relatively rare situation for a lot of Pi use cases.
And, of course, at full clocks, it's faster than a Pi4 so you are getting something for those watts.
And use more power. If you're just doing octoprint then a full ass PC is kinda silly.
It's not the pandemic anymore so you can find pis all over the place for their proper price. My local micro center has 25+ zero ws in stock for $8 and that should be plenty for running octoprint. The Zero 2W $15 (current none in stock) and 3A+ $25 (1 in stock) are also a really good values. Even if you go for the Pi4 you can still find the base model for $35 here and there.
Compared to the power consumption of your 3D printer itself, the wattage drawn by an x86 mini-PC system is a rounding error. What, 19 watts burst under "boost" conditions, and 3 to 7 watts otherwise?
My Qidi X-Max 3 draws roughly 250 watts when printing basic PLA and its hotend and plate are at temperature. During preheat it can touch 400. And that's without the chamber heater -- that alone is rated a 300 watts.
Sure while the printer is going, but are you ever going to turn the computer off? I'm sure as hell not going to which is why idle consumption matters so much to me.
Why not? When I was using a Pi to run my old printer via Octoprint, I turned the whole shebang off at the power strip when I wasn't using it. The Pi doesn't have a power button, so it was easiest to just killswitch the entire kit and kaboodle.
A second hand NUC is quite a bit cheaper than a pi once you factor in power supply, storage and case. They're also not as power hungry as you suggest. My entire smarthome is powered by an old NUC running Proxmox with HA in a VM and some LXCs (adguard among other things), and it pulls a meager 7W on average, that's only a few more than a pi and it has a 3ghz quadcore CPU, 16gb ram and 1tb NVME, so it has all the overhead you need to do small projects on the side with it as well.
Unless you need the GPIO, an SBC is pretty much never the best solution anymore.
If you plan on doing a lot with the machine then yeah it does make sense to get something better than a Pi. But for just octoprint any Pi is plenty.
SD cards are a couple dollars, the pi 3 and below will run on any usb power brick. The 4 and 5 will run on any not low power brick you have lying around, but even if you feel the need to buy one the official one is like $15, and you can reuse it for other things too. And you can always 3d print a case if that's really a problem, but I just let my pis dangle there, or I put them back in their box.
Also second hand pis exist too, if you're really strapped for cash you can get a full pi, case, sd card, and power supply for about the price of just the pi new. During the pandemic when Pis weren't in stock I got a full setup for a pi 3 + this bluetooth keyboard trackpad thingy for $30.
But for 15$ more, you get an immensely more useful tool for when you (probably) inevitably want to do more/other things. SD cards for a few bucks burn out really quickly, so you'd really want a good one (significantly more expensive) or an SSD, bringing the total cost of a pi above a used NUC, with worse specs all around.
I really can't see the argument, neither financial, performance/watt or performance/$ for an SBC if you don't need GPIOs.
That's the key here, not everyone wants to do that. OP specifically asked for something to run octoprint, not an entire homelab. Not everyone is interested in that.