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Comment by telgareith | Hacker News Reader

Because an 8gb rpi4 costs close to $160. You can buy a m920q i3 with more compute- and with a similar amount of RAM (Conversion losses, Storage, and then Cooling or RAM(a few watts per 8gb) are the largest power consumers) and it can do a lot more than 50mbit. It might actually use less power than the rpi4. And, it could replace whatever is powering the TV display.

Of course, choose your power supply badly and both those sub 10W machines will be 50W at the wall.

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I also thought that Tailscale would probably incur some type of charges after using it that much, though Im not super familiar with their free tier policies and how sustainable they are in the long-term.

Tailscale sets up point-to-point WireGuard VPNs and only proxies through their relay servers when they can't establish a direct connection. In my experience that's pretty rare, Tailscale tries a whole bunch of NAT traversal tricks before falling back to relay mode.

Their free tier is pretty generous because it's basically a way for Tailscale to get homelabbers hooked on the product so they'll recommend a corporate plan at work. They even state as much: https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan

The Pi 3 was essentially free to me because I already had it on a shelf. When I duplicate this setup at some other relatives' homes, I'm planning on using an Orange Pi Zero 3 ($30 CAD, quad core A53, gig of RAM, gigabit Ethernet).

They're not proxying your data. That's why there are no usage limits

They do proxy your traffic if it can't set up direct connections, and it's still free.

https://tailscale.com/kb/1232/derp-servers

Wat.

- You're replying to a thread about someone using a 1GB Pi 3 to stream multiple 4K movies. It's $44 on Amazon including fast shipping. Cheaper on eBay if you can wait 3 days.

- The 8GB Pi 4 is $75 on canakit, not $160.

Anyway if you want more compute (on an edge device? why?), why not grab a AM4 board and CPU for like $80 each? That's 25W at the wall and gives you a ton of flexibility if you later wanna repurpose the machine adding GPUs, NVMe, SAS enclosures, etc

>The 8GB Pi 4 is $75 on canakit, not $160.

To be fair once you add in shipping, a sd card card, power supply, case/heatsink, and you'll get to around 160.

Bizarre. MicroSD cards are $5 on Amazon. I figured everyone has a bunch of spare 5V 2.5A PSUs in the box of wall warts in their garage, but maybe that's a bad assumption. $5 for a brand new PSU and $15 canakit shipping. So it's $100 total if you didn't care at all about cost and bought the most expensive Pi for use as an edge device for no technical reason.

Why would you need a heatsink unless you use a case? Why would you use a case? That price tag is entirely self inflicted

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