3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: !functionalprint@kbin.social or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
Rules
-
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
-
Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
-
No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
-
No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
-
Do not create links to reddit
-
If you see an issue please flag it
-
No guns
-
No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is 
Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible
view the rest of the comments
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.