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Javier Zanon's avatar

Hey Tom. First at all, it's good to know your wife it's getting better. Best wishes to her. Thanks for sharing your experiences with Raspberry Pi 5 and all it's available accessories. I have a Raspberry Pi 5 with that same case,but didn't know that it had an expansion board for the NVMe disk. I wanted to ask how the Raspberry Pi 5 behave related to power consumption. I have one and couldn't find a power source that "pleases it" it's always saying "your power source does not have enough power" even with laptop usb-c power sources. With some medium power sources I even got it restarting due to power problems. I wish they make a 12v-powered Raspberry Pi to avoid having to deal with this "trillion-amp at 5v" power requirements. Nevertheless I really enjoy, like you said, the fact that is a 64bits, fully functional, palm-sized computer.

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Tom Salzer KJ7T's avatar

Thank you for your well wishes.

You have options for the power supply. Argon sells one with the recommended capacity of 27 watts at 5VDC (https://argon40.com/products/argon-pwr-gan-usb-c-pd-power-supply-27-watts). I prefer the official Raspberry Pi or CanaKit power supplies. Using these, I've never received that notification of insufficient power. The RPi and CanaKit supplies also feature shielded cable.

My specific RPi 5 build is happy chugging along with the CanaKit power supply, but (and this is probably a big one) I'm not driving a monitor with the RPi 5. I have it running as a headless computer. Is it possible you have a power hungry monitor attached to your RPi?

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Javier Zanon's avatar

Thanks for this power supply options, that CanaKit looks interesting with the shielded wire.

Yes, it RPi gets power hungry with a monitor. Even little ones.

I tried to make a device to carry on my motorcycle with a little screen. The idea was to attatch it a GPS, some VHF/UHF handheld and have some sort of ham-radio enhanced carplay, but power consumption runned crazy and wasn't fully stable.

Now I have it on my hamshack as an auxiliar computer. I want a big powersource to be able to attatch multiple soundcards and an MMDVM device to run different projects.

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Tom Salzer KJ7T's avatar

Well, the recommended power supply is 27 watts at 5 VDC. I particularly like this one from CanaKit (https://www.canakit.com/canakit-5a-raspberry-pi-5-power-supply-with-pd-usb-c.html) because it will ramp up to 45 watts. That might be the extra capacity you need.

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Javier Zanon's avatar

Great, I´ll give it a try

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Tom Salzer KJ7T's avatar

If you get the CanaKit PS, keep me posted, please. It would be good to know if it solves your problem.

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Gareth Howell's avatar

My best wishes to your wife, Tom. Seeing your picture of the Argon pi5 reminded me that I have an Argon pi4 sitting doing nothing in a drawer, so I’m going to build an AllstarLink node on that.

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Tom Salzer KJ7T's avatar

Thank you!

Arriving today is an Argon ONE M.2 case for an RPi 4: https://amzn.to/4mp05e3 I'm going to do exactly the same: build the node that is running on the RPi 5 on the RPi 4. That will free up the RPi 5 for some other, as yet unknown, project :-)

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