FYI: Alternatives to Raspberry Pi for this hobby

An update after about a year hunting down and working with these thin clients, and the continued scarcity/high prices of Rasperry Pi hardware. Understand this is from a continental US-based perspective, price/availability experiences may be (are) likely different elsewhere. This is just my perspective - there are many paths to the ‘right’ configuration, whatever defines ‘right’ for those in this hobby.

Patience in shopping has yielded a nice collection of HP T630 thin clients over this time, replacing the HP T520 clients I initially found (and have since recycled). They are quad-core AMD SOCs 2GHz, 8GB memory, 128GB SSD, hard-wired ethernet. Oddly enough, the measured power consumption (Kill-A-Watt device) on average is the same as the HP T520 running the same kit (dump1090-fa, piaware, tar1090, graphs1090). I re-purposed the HP t520 power supplies (they use the same 19.5VDC/3.3amp supply). I found the HP T630 client with the above configuration for a total of USD37 each (including sales tax and shipping). Genuine HP power supplies can be found for around USD10 on ebay (risky with a non-HP supply because of issues). If you really need a stand, those can be found as well - I do without. The PROs/CONs I originally talked are still valid for me.

In retrospect, the HP thin clients (HP T520, HP T620, HP T630) still all represent a good value in this hobby considering the current status of RaspPi in the marketplace. Whichever one you can find (complete) at the best price will still run circles around the RaspPi in performance, at the cost of power use (8-9 watts) and size (bigger) - up to the individual to decide if those (and any other perceived factors) are worth it.

Also, if you want to see the relative power consuption of your running process, have a look at the powertop (apt install powertop) - while it is mostly suitable for laptops and tuning battery power profiles, it’s handy to see what consumes power in a running system (if it’s measureable).

root@debian:~# apt-cache policy powertop
powertop:
  Installed: 2.11-1
  Candidate: 2.11-1
  Version table:
 *** 2.11-1 500
        500 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

On the same HP T630 client running all the above, it’s barely working (see the CPU frequency load)
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