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While everyone is bragging about their old ThinkPads, I am typing these on a Pi Zero 2W. I spilt coffee on my ~8 years old HP Laptop two weeks ago. While waitin
by Aerbil313 3y ago
While everyone is bragging about their old ThinkPads, I am typing these on a Pi Zero 2W. I spilt coffee on my ~8 years old HP Laptop two weeks ago. While waiting for my parents to buy me an iPhone 15 Pro (with its USB-C to connect to the monitor) I am using a Pi Zero 2W + Asus Zenscreen Portable Monitor + 10.000 mAH Powerbank setup, connecting to my server via RDP. Github Pro student credits on DigitalOcean, all free.
* Excellent power usage. Pi uses ~0.7 W and the screen is listed at 3.6W, though I believe it's actually ~7W.
* Each part upgradable and replaceable in a whim. Can change your motherboard or RAM, or add an extra GPU or an entirely different machine, as all of them are up in the clouds!
* Extremely lightweight, 0.75 kg.
* Incredibly thin, 9 mm. Its stand is also its cover, requires no extra bag, except for the HDMI and USB cables. Powerbank? I carry it everywhere anyway. Keyboard? It has only a slightly larger surface area than an iPhone 15 when folded, can carry in my pocket, a cheap Chinese bluetooth one I had lying around (couldn't be bothered to troubleshoot the USB on the Pi.).
* Unmatched connectivity, I have unthrottled datacenter internet, and I can use my phone's LTE connection to connect to the server without skyrocketing my cellular bill, as the only thing transmitted is the screen. School dormitory Wi-Fi is not the best, it introduces extra latency.
OTOH, It lags while scrolling a web page. Bottleneck must be the CPU, because there is no lag when connecting via my iPhone 7. I used NoMachine with the same setup in the past and it had no such lag, could even play YouTube videos from what I remember. I also didn't overclock the Pi to the max and am not using a heatsink nor a fan, and didn't do any sort of performance tuning for the RDP at all. Because I can't be bothered, it works bearably for my school work, and gonna get my new iPhone next week anyway.
Now don't ask me how I managed to re-pair the keyboard with the Pi when it got unpaired and the Pi's local IP got reassigned randomly, from Alpine Linux running in iSH on my current iPhone 7...
- regularfry 3y agoThe problem I have with the zero 2w is that building anything on it seems to knock out the wifi. I've got a couple on the local network as terminals and if I try to build (e.g.) a recent python interpreter, the ssh connection dies to the extent that I have to power-cycle them. I presume they're just going into swap, but they never come back. Now that's not your use-case if you've got a remote server and all you're using them for is a thin client, but they aren't exactly usable as general purpose devices. I do like the sound of that setup, though. Portable monitor plus powerbank is neat, and I can't help wondering if that plus a wireguard network wouldn't be the right way to do things away from home. There are more efficient SBCs but if the screen is the big drain that's exactly the choice I'd make too.
- fragmede 3y agoIt might be that your power supply can't keep up with the demands of wifi on top of heavy cpu use. What's your power supply rated?
- regularfry 3y ago12.75W, max 2.5A.
- larme 3y agocan you use mosh instead of ssh? I even built earlier zig compiler on zero1 because zig has no official 32bit arm release. I don't recall any significant wifi dropout with mosh. Another work around is connect zero to a usb port of your computer/ipad/iphone and enable usb gadget on zero. Then you have a ethernet connect between zero and host that is more reliable than wifi?
- larme 3y agoI love my zero 2w as a development machine. For web browsing I try to use w3m when possible. In headless model (using mosh to access), I can even disable 2 cpu cores with acceptable performance. "Each part upgradable and replaceable" -> super agree this point. You can clone microsd easily. So if microsd die, you swap the microsd. And if the board die, you just insert the microsd to another zero 2w and everything comes back the same as before. It's just like a "physical" vps.