Over the holidays I decided to set up the Roon Extension Manager on a Raspberry Pi.
I decided to set it up on a Pi Zero W 2 running dietPi, the set up was super easy and everything went well.
When I went to move it from my desk to connect to ethernet near my core I got thinking… I want this to be on the same time my core is on (always, unless the power has been out), I don’t really want to manage it’s power separately or add yet another USB power supply, so wondered could my NUC8 USB sockets provide enough juice to power this little computer?
I very quickly got my answer, NO. It would power down, or not be contactable.
So is there a way to make it work? Maybe.
First thing I tried was setting the performance settings to the powersaver mode in the dietPi UI, limiting the processor to 600MHz. The issue still existed.
I maybe should have tried to get the Pi Zero version 1, the quad-core processor on this new model
just pulls too much power. So next thing I tried was to shut down 3 of the cores.
I edited the /boot/cmdline.txt file and added ‘maxcpus=1’
On reboot I can now see the number of threads per core is reduced from 4 to 1.
Wanting to give the single core are much headroom before it runs out of amps, I decided to kill the HDMI output, as I’ve see it reported elsewhere this can give 10-15mA reduction in power draw.
So in the dietPi UI I disabled the output, and verified on reboot that the HDMI was off via ‘/usr/bin/tvservice -s’ command.
The extension manager has been running for over a week and I no longer see the issues I did before. I know this is a niche case, but I found it fun trying to detune the computer to the point where it could run from the NUCs USB sockets. Hope it helps someone.
EDIT: Found out that installing a new extension was enough to cause the unexpected shut down, when the package was being extracted. So be warned this is probably NOT a good idea 