I’d argue rental is more predictable. Housing has a huge amount of upkeep — $10k ac, $5k water heater, $20k roof…

Furthermore, bugs. To this time there’s random crashes that happen with sleep which limits their use

The grid gives you expensive guarantees about reliability. Just giving power does not do that.

Edit: it’s absolutely not true universally and it’s ridiculous to suggest it is. Comparing averages will be very tricky as well.

That’s not a cheap buck lol. Order of magnitude more expensive then 12v not even mentioning capacitors that can withstand 80v is $$$ and your derating goes to shit

It’s simpler than doing a limit on number of states, and for some applications consistency isn’t super important.

Doing a time limit also enforces bot moving in a reasonable time. It puts a nice limit to set up a compromise between speed and difficulty.

Doing state limit with a time limit might be better way to do it, but is harder.

For power I don’t know about orange pi 5 but for many SBC power was a mixed bag. I had pretty bad luck with random SBC taking way more power for random reasons and not putting devices in idle mode. Even raspberry pi was pretty bad when it launched.

It’s frustrating because it’s hard to fix. With x64 you can often go into bios and enable power modes, but that’s not the case with arm. For example pcie4 can easily draw 2w+ when active. (The interface!)

See for example here:

https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip/issues/606

My n100 takes 6W and 8w (8 and 16gb). If pi5 takes 3w that’s not large enough to matter especially when it’s so inconsistent.

Now one place where I used to like rpi zero was gpio access. However I’m transitioning to rp2350 as it’s just better suited for that kind of work, easier to find and cheaper.