• GustavoM@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    Care to share one of those things? Because I’ve got a rpi 4 and I’d love to hear some “under-the-sleeve” tricks to make my rpi 4 a bit more happier than it already is.

    • 486@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Sure! Shutting down certain peripherals can reduce power consumption. The biggest difference can usually be achieved by disabling the USB controller - this is also true for the Raspberry Pi 3 (although on the Pi 3 you would also lose access to the Ethernet controller). So if you don’t use it, turn it off (and it looks like the author didn’t use any of the USB ports, so this would have been an option). Even turning of the HDMI port saves a little bit of power - it makes a difference even if no display is attached. A tiny bit of power can also be saved by turning off the LEDs. I also tried lowering the CPU clock, but that didn’t result in a noticable difference in idle power consumption.

      At the moment I don’t currently have a Pi 4 on hand to experiment with, but I do have a Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module (CM4) on a very minimalistic carrier board and with that I am able to idle at about 1.3 W.

      • GustavoM@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        That is very impressive! And thank you very much for those tips. Oh, and mine tends to sit around 2.3W… and that is with over_voltage at 5, and both min and max cpu values at 1500 while running a couple things 24/7 (docker, a live stream on ffplay, pihole.)

        • 486@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          This thread has some interesting details as well: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=257144
          There people managed to get idle power on a Raspberry Pi 4B to a little under 1.8 W. Interestingly, people there report that on their Pi 4’s disabling USB doesn’t do much. If I remember correctly, there were a few Pi 4 firmware updates that optimized power consumption over time. So the different firmware versions can behave differently when it comes to power consumption.

          Your 2.3 W doesn’t sound too bad to begin with. Certainly better than the 5 W mentioned in the article.