The Minipc Revolution
Key topics
The "MiniPC Revolution" thread sparked a lively debate that veered off into a discussion about the perils and pitfalls of DIY electrical work, particularly when it comes to something as simple as changing a lightbulb. As commenters shared their own experiences with finicky lighting, it became clear that the UK's ring circuit wiring and strict electrical regulations were adding to the complexity. While some advocated for caution and hiring a professional, others chimed in with tips and tricks for troubleshooting and safely tackling the task themselves. Amidst the banter, a surprising consensus emerged: even the most basic electrical tasks can be daunting, and knowing one's limits is key.
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This made me laugh. I’ve currently got a home assistant controlled floor standing light in my bathroom because all the old school switch ones in ceiling are dead and landlord is being well a classic landlord
I've mostly lived in 100+ year old homes with old janky wiring and have never had a light fixture die, just bulbs.
With power off(easy case)?
With power on(difficult)?
ANSWER:
If the power is off, they likely will remove the glass bulb (one piece), examine the situation and then unscrew the metal bulb base (second piece) and finally, remove any stray material in the (unpowered) socket.
If the power is on, the correct answer is "No, they likely cannot unscrew the bulb. Instead they will likely short the circuit, blow a breaker/fuse and put themselves in a situation where they must call in someone more knowledgeable, (or worse)."
If someone doesn't know what the electricity zaps and couldn't think two steps ahead then they definitely should be anywhere near a power circuits, operating a car or be allowed to vote.
EDIT: of course it should had been 'shouldn't be anywhere' but it's even better, so I leave it as is.
If so, this may be the first time an important political question has been resolved without a light bulb turning on (figurative or otherwise).
Not what I would support it made that way...
OP here - no just dealing with UK ring circuits where the lights are wired inline with non-light devices. And since I'm renting I'm not here to do handyman work. Lightbulbs I do ofc replace myself.
* https://gov.uk/government/publications/electrical-safety-app...
That said, bringing in a mains-powered non-IP-rated portable floor standing lamp because the ceiling mounted one is broken is definitely not the intended outcome of such safety standards.
Don't forget to earth all your water pipes to ground, and only use sockets that are water-rated to resist biblical floods.
I remember being intrigued by a big 40 x 40 cm plastic box on the outside wall of the cabin we were staying at in the UK. Opening the movable front-flap revealed 1 (one) 220V power socket, protected on all sides with enough rubber and plastic to seal a submarine hatch. I had absolutely no doubt it fully complied with all the norms of health and safety..
BS 7671 (IEE Wiring Regs) does not require bonding of the pipework if the mains (service) pipes and the internal (installation) piping are both plastic.
I would like to have a light in my stairs. It's hard to see at night in the winter. My solutions is going to be to spin up home assistant, a zigbee base, and some fairy lights on a 'smart' switch.
I could learn the skills to troubleshoot why the electrical connection is (apparently) bad to the lamp, but given that said connection is in the walls, my DIY skills are trash, and I'm scared of electricity, I'm gonna do the project that's more fun and lines up with some stuff I wanted to do anyway.
I have no idea why the lamp doesn't work, especially because the fixture at the base of the stairs does, but the landlord insists it worked before we moved in.
- the two-way switched lights may have never worked as intended. So no matter what you do with the endpoints it may never work.
- doing it yourself is a waste of time and money. You'll learn nothing of value and will toss it all in the end.
-Proper solution is to hire a certified electrician who is familiar with two-way lights to fix/replace the current wiring.
If you rent, pay the electrician and send the bill to the landlord. Keep a copy. If landlord hasn't paid by the time you move out, bill him for the price. If he stiffs you, sue him in small claims court - he'll pay or you'll win.
Cheapest fix: run an extension cord with a bulb to the upstairs light, turn it on and leave it on all the time. Electricity is cheap, bulbs efficient. Having a light on inside keeps burglars away, esp. bathroom lights (according to Malcolm X).
Or just get a motion activated one.
They have their own shenanigans, but...
But with it up the top of a set of stairs and in the air requiring a ladder or something to stand on I wouldn't recommend it for a first time because if you did get shocked, not knowing what is coming (and possibly even if you did), you would jerk or jump away and possibly fall down the stairs which is way worse.
I'm in the UK that has more reliance on ring circuits i.e. electrically its a chain of devices. So depending on details one fault can take out all the lights in a room
>Your landlord isn't changing your bulbs?
They're just taking their time.
Normally I'd just replace bulbs myself but this is a bit more complicated cause its hooked into other devices as well and i can't even tell what is broken
But bringing a mains powered non-IP-rated portable substitute into the room in the interim is a truly terrible idea. The regs also specify that there's a minimum distance that stuff should have from baths, sinks, showers, cisterns, and whatnot; and that they should not be reachable at all by a wet human being.
I'll wave this at you:
* https://electricalsafetyfirst.org.uk/guidance/safety-around-...
And you in turn wave this at your landlord:
* https://electricalsafetyfirst.org.uk/guidance/advice-for-you...
Better yet, pay someone to do it (and maybe show you the hows and the hazards). Then you could be living like a true American.
And without risking the "standing lamp" falling into your bathtub!
a $20 lamp you get to keep is smarter and safer than fixing someone else's property doing unlicensed electrical work at your own cost and without their permission... why does this even have to be explained?
Are you from the US? The overwhelming likely fixes to "my bathroom light won't work" are not work that would require skilled electrical work or a permit. The cost is also not likely to be more than a floor lamp, and the tenant can also keep the fixture when they leave.
Also many jurisdictions (willing to bet covering a huge plurality of Americans) would let you subtract the cost of necessary repairs from your rent.
> You can expect average power draws of 20-50W in usage and 6-12W in idle.
> Put that in perspective with high-end machines with hardware concerned with performance and not power draw, that can easily idle at 100W.
Have you measured that? I think my full ATX desktop only idles around 30 watts. (With a bunch of apps running ofc) I took out the GPU to reach that, something was wrong with the power saving, feels like bad drivers.
That said... I'm not totally disagreeing. I have a mini PC running a couple web and P2P services. I'm trying to unburden my ATX so it can shut down at night to save power and do maintenance. And having more computers would shift me away from my "kitten" habits, so I'd abstract over hardware better.
https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-eq14-n150?_pos=4&_...
Where can I find that? My current Intel NUC has two M.2 slots and a SATA connection. If I were to relax the definition of a MiniPC to include mini ITX then yes I can find these, but given how the author talks about being all-in-one, I doubt the author is talking about mini ITX builds.
Or make it a 5x1 parity for a smidge of redundancy.
Currently in Pre-order, but $210 for 6 slots and an N150
One thing to note in this recent trend is that these designs mostly use the Alder Lake-N / "Twin Lake" cores, which are quad low-power E-cores (still adequate). But more critically, there's only 9 lanes PCIe 3.0! And some of those lanes need to go to networking, be it ethernet and/or wifi! Often there'll be 1x PCIe lane per SSD. Given that it's a NAS running maybe dual 2.5Gbit, this isn't catastrophically bad (1x can do 8Gb/s), but conceptually I find it a bit dismaying anyhow. https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/processor-n150.c4109
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme...
You can also get larger ones like the Asus Flashstor that can do 12.
6-10w idle (similar to rasp pi) but 4-10x more perf.
(Not saying they're not a good value, but you'd have to cherry pick a few benchmarks to say there's 4-10x performance.)
At the wall? I measured mine and it was higher with gpu disabled.
Real world benchmarks/usage is going to be dominated by sd card speed vs m2 perf. That’s why upgrading system is so much slower on pi vs n100…
Above that they need a fan.
I got soooo tired setting up a gaming system for parties on my projector. There are so many various problems and tweaks, gamepads disconnecting if you put a hand between the gamepad and the pc/playstation etc. BSODs on windows, driver problems and stupid obscure things varying from pc to pc. I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations. I am too old to debug this stuff to play a game for so little time, I would rather not. I didn't really believe in steam machines at the time, but now I sort of do, especially with game streaming and local LLMs that might be hosted there now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Valve-Fremont-Upcoming-console...
I'm glad they are. There's probably a sizeable market for a console that runs PC games smoothly at 1080. And could double as a PC. If they get it to the size of an XBox Series S or smaller, I would probably get one.
I already have a Steam Deck that I can't let my kids touch, which is stupid. I can't hook something like this up in a shared space of any kind without improved parental controls, including ability to toggle visibility of game library entries, and (ideally, but not strictly necessary) the ability to say "do not show this user's entire library to anyone else on this machine, or on the network, nobody with a different login"
I wonder if a stopgap solution would be something like Bazzite on the Deck. Then you could have true multiuser while retaining the Deck's ease of use. But I could see other problems.
I'm sure you've probably already tried this or something similar. I just couldn't resist thinking out loud. It's an interesting problem.
I hope they'll fix their rumored team wars inside the company.
Valve launched Steam Machines with their own OS and started shipping a version of Steam on Linux with predictable library versions. At the same time, they started working with the Wine project and shipping things which is now called Proton but is actually the cumulative results of their own patches.
This paved the way for the success of the Steam Deck when adequate material became available.
I don’t think it makes sense to call the Steam Machine a misstep because there was no Proton. There would be no Proton nor Steam Deck without the ground work started with the Steam Machines.
I’ve written before about how I think the Steam Deck is one of the best v1 products in recent memory, in large part because Valve learned so much (and so well) from the failures of the Steam Machines.
I don’t know if I would call it a misstep, but it was absolutely a failure. And a brutal one. Valve should be lauded for taking the right lessons from that failure and investing in Proton and doing the compatibility work themselves rather than expecting devs to do it (Apple is the only company that consistently gets developers to rebuild for their platform, and even game developers won’t do that), but we shouldn’t let the fact that it wound up on the right path years later diminish the fact that the original strategy —- if not the devices or idea itself —- was hugely flawed.
Personally, for such an early and unlikely product, I don’t view it as a failure at all. They ironed everything they had to using the platform as a stepping stone.
They can also introduce Windows/DirectX APIs that Proton will have a hard time copying, by requiring additional hardware or subsystem features not easily copyable.
They can let their legal team have some fun.
Finally, companies don't last forever, and I am betting as the 2nd most valuable company in the planet, Microsoft will outlive Steam's current management and eventually deal with the problem in another way.
They can try making Proton's job more difficult, but I'd expect that major changes to the APIs would prevent a lot of existing games from working on Windows.
Legally, I don't think they've got a leg to stand on.
Steamdeck is already a niche device, and they have direct competition since years now. Optimizing the software and interface won't probably make it much worse for Valve.
> They can also introduce Windows/DirectX APIs that Proton will have a hard time copying, by requiring additional hardware or subsystem features not easily copyable.
Seems unrealistic that games will adapt a new restricted API, which at the same will be a longterm hazzle for Wine/Proton, and will survive that court-battles. At best, it's just some annoying money-sink, with Microsoft playing on time to make it worse for everyone without gaining any real advantage.
> Finally, companies don't last forever, and I am betting as the 2nd most valuable company in the planet, Microsoft will outlive Steam's current management and eventually deal with the problem in another way.
That's actually realistic, but there is also the chance that valve will be outliving Windows and has to battle with whatever will follow.
How so? A console is literally a gaming PC.
I can see the point of “need multiple consoles because game X isn’t on console Y” or “I’d like to play an RTS/MMO that isn’t on a console” but since you mentioned gamepads that point mostly dies.
I also haven’t ever had a PS5 or Switch controller lose link from a console because someone walks or stands between myself and the console.
One big part's the library. I can still play Steam games I bought when the Gamecube was current. My Gamecube games do not work on the Switch. My Dreamcast games certainly don't! The library for the PC is enormous and generally you don't have to re-buy old games to keep playing them, even after major hardware upgrades. Hell I got like a few hundred games on Itch.io years ago for so little money they may as well have been free, and sure they're mostly short "jank" games and art games and stuff, but that's still games and I like them! You can't get that kind of thing (with that kind of "OMG I may never even get through all these..." magnitude, I don't mean jank or art games, both exist on consoles, even if they're not well represented) on a console.
To do anything similar with consoles, you need, like... a dozen consoles, or more, with keeping that number down requiring putting a lot of money and time into careful curation and selection. A single PC does the trick, though.
Another's longevity & archiving (not unrelated to the library thing, but not exactly the same thing). The PC is my platform of last resort for console game archiving. Consoles don't really fill this role at all. Even a "hacked" console (if it's hackable) is on borrowed time. The hardware dies, and eventually the only ones left are in museums or crazy-expensive private collections. Meanwhile I play freeware PC games I downloaded in the 1990s, sometimes, like the exact same binary (to the degree it's "the same", which it isn't, but I just mean I didn't have to go download it again) that's been shuffled from one disk to another ever since. They're not gone. And thanks to PCs, neither are old console games (this is a state of affairs that's on life support, for newer consoles, but not quite dead yet)
Another's the controls. I don't really want a console at my desk (and there's gonna be a PC regardless, so that's nothing extra) because I definitely want one on my TV, and I don't want two of the same console. I don't really want to use a mouse & keyboard on my couch, I've done it, the best solutions I've found take up a bunch of space, look bad, and are still a worse experience than a desk. Some games that I love, I have no interest in playing them if it's not with a mouse and keyboard (and for plenty of others, a controller is better! I like tons of games that are best played with a controller, but for some, it's mouse & keyboard or I'll simply not play them).
Another factor's modding. I've gotten hundreds of extra hours out of games I've bought, thanks to mods. 50+% of my time in the Half Life and Source engines has been in total conversion mods. I'd probably only have put about a quarter as many hours into Morrowind or Skyrim as I have, without mods. I never touched the base game of Rome: Total War again after I discovered the Europa Barbarorum mod, which I sunk probably a hundred or more hours into. All for free, and you don't get that on consoles, the closest you get are things like level designers, sometimes, in LittleBigPlanet or what have you... and those all die when the game servers die.
FWIW I have... a lot of consoles, I don't hate them or anything, and these days most (90%?) of my gaming is on consoles. But they're not a gaming PC.
(Really, if gaming PCs were more-stable, less-janky, and didn't have such a hard time consistently pairing with and juggling multiple BlueTooth controllers [even the SteamDeck fails to live up to "real" consoles, on any of those fronts] I'd probably not bother with consoles at all, but that's such a crippling issue for PC hardware that instead I have a bunch of consoles, and have even re-bought games 3 or 4 times just for the convenience of being able to play them on one of the small set of real consoles currently connected to my TV)
Consoles are walled gardens, while PC is an open park. On a proper PC, you can choose anything from everything, while consoles are very restricted in terms of software and ability. I mean, think about modding, running other software besides the game (browser, (voice-)chat, etc.), having special hardware like a mouse, keyboard, capture-card, a second screen... Consoles are again slowly those things, but it's still not the same as a proper Gaming-PC.
The zimaboard runs pfsense & an nginx reverse proxy, then all six of the mini-pcs run proxmox. 4 mini-pcs run k8s clusters (talos) and the other two run home services and selected one-offs (home-assistant, plex, bookstack, build-tools, gitea, origin servers for a subset of projects).
It was a lot easier to set up than I had expected. Its was still a massive PITA though. I got what I wanted out of it work-wise, and its a nice little novelty.
I've been thinking about ditching most of it for a while; I like the idea in the article about breaking it up - move one under the TV, one into the office, one under the stairs, and the remaining 3 + zimaboard I'm tempted to sell. I'd keep running proxmox on them, but I wouldn't link them up. The key thing that needs to happen for this to make sense is using something like cloudflare to route domains.
The part I never sorted properly was storage. It has 3TB of storage, but getting that storage into k8s for proper dynamic allocation without giving random nodes CPU perf issues was a too-long-for-one-session task which meant it never got finished. I was tempted to add a NAS, but most NAS's are horrid.
A man can turn the means into the purpose.
Now I often have the 4 k8s hosts off. But use them maybe once a month.
Ceph ebds are pretty easy and can offer good resilience but definitely have some performance issues in a standard homelab.
Something dumb like smb/nfs actually can work quite well if your workload doesn't mind it.
Rclone volumes work quite well for some cases not served by obvious other solutions but you have general FUSE limitations.
Even without wanting to attribute that to any malicious planned obsolescence, my impression is that the very small size of mini PCs makes it almost impossible for the manufacturer to ensure proper thermal management for keeping all components constantly at a temperature low enough for device longevity.
I've had great luck with Mac minis over the years. I've had many of them. I'll probably go that route in the future if needed.
I know there are better quality x86 options out there, but the prices go up fast, and I find them hard to justify for what I'd be doing with it. The Mac is really price competitive, which makes it even harder to justify those other options.
The whole idea was that I wanted it to be a simple flick of the switch, or turn of a knob, to play some music. The “smart” stuff and apps have more friction than I’d like when I just want some background noise. The random lockups and reboot issues created a different kind of friction.
A few old G4 Mac minis just came back into my possession. Maybe I’ll just use one of those. My main issue there is memories of old iTunes getting caught in a loop when shuffling. Do it do long and it starts to essentially play the same playlist it generated on repeat. But maybe for this I won’t care, that’s how most radio stations seem to operate anyway, and I’d have the power to force it to mix things up.
Not sure what went wrong with the beelink; the os shouldn't have locked by by itself, too.
That's the mistake. Secondhand Dell, HP, or Lenovo mini PCs would probably have served better. They're cheap when second hand and the ones I've had have lasted a decade because the big OEMs are experienced in building office PCs.
So much for being reputable.
This is especially frustrating because I have an ancient dell optiplex and dell precision with i3-2100 and i3-5xx that still work. I occasionally need to open the box to reseat the ram for whatever reason after a power failure but by an large these machines are over ten years old!
Different kind of support concern from yours, but also noteworthy. Really unfortunate.
I still have an old HP EliteDesk (i5-8600t) that is my one reliable 24/7 system, still runs fine. Also no bios updates, so I guess there's that. Mini-PCs to me started more as a way to buy cast-off business gear, these small affordable small business systems, even cheaper second hand. It's amazing and great seeing this new market rise up to make interesting mini-pc's, and the value is often still pretty good, but it's a very different character from where the trend started.
If it’s an EliteDesk G2 Mini, the last BIOS update was released in May 2024.
I thought it would be moot, because I vaguely remember HP starting to require support contracts for bios updates. But I guess that only applies to HP Enterprise gear? Yuck, what a pox.
The thing is that once lights are computer programmed, you can program them. For example I had made a program to stop playing music after I leave home because I hated to put the music off and then walk out, but I also didn't want the music to play all day while I was out.
I set up one to run Frigate [1] to detect motion over my several security cameras and send me notification emails with still images and video clips attached. It works well, and I hate the idea of sending my private videos to the cloud for processing with usual security camera setups.
[1] https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate
If one wasn't likely to have a rack of desktop PCs at home, one probably will be hard pressed to have a reason for a collection of mini PCs.
On the other hand, there are a few more use cases than just over-egging a light switch or being a big file server. One can replaced dedicated hardware such as network gateways/routers, and do self-hosting, for examples.
There are RaspberryPi systems that one can get with extra Ethernet ports that can be set up to do application gatewaying and routing with general-purpose operating systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, and such. And obviously filtering HTTP/other proxies incorporating spam/advertising/malware blockers are a well-known use case.
There are oddball mini PCs in some parts of the world with loads of serial ports, useful as terminal hosts if one has a lot of systems with no disploy/HIDs. (I saw one mentioned on the FediVerse the other day. It turned out that it was an old Russian point-of-sale system, with 6 serial ports.) More of a use case for someone who already has lots of PCs (with serial ports), of course.
But yes, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone is Kitboga with a server farm in xyr garage running speech synthesis engines and language models to call scammers. (-:
On the gripping hand, I swapped out someone's under-the-desk tower for a mini PC years ago simply for space reasons.
- Specs are too limited for my needs (storage capacity for backup / home NAS purposes; compute power for local AI work; throughput for local high speed network traffic shaping; etc)
- can't upgrade over time (right now I'm averaging 15 years for my boxes, with incremental upgrades like storage, RAID adapters, memory, CPU etc, and I don't need to go through the days-long hassle of reformatting, reinstalling and reconfiguring OS's, services and software).
- less supported over time (I can still download driver upgrades in some cases, and find solutions if I run into something unexpected as the vendor is still in business and supporting the legacy model).
Full sized machines aren't difficult to build, and I've had great luck with second hand enterprise-targeted parts (eg. for a long time years back, used Mellanox Infiniband cards were dirt cheap on eBay because universities were upgrading to later generations, they were an order of magnitude faster than NIC's available at competing price points at the time, and as a bonus had lower latency). Older Areca RAID cards were great for SATA drives, easily upgradeable to new models, and I still have a few kicking around in production today.
Meanwhile neighbors have thrown out piles of ewaste and wasted time after their commodity junk failed unexpectedly.
I feel like I rarely upgraded anything except GPU and storage. And GPU's are not needed for a server.
Enclosure means easy storage upgrade and I can always reattach the enclosure to another machine quickly. Might even install OS on the enclosure, then the whole setup will survive compute upgrades until the predominant architecture changes.
Seems entirely reasonable so far, everything works well. It’s much quieter and lower power than the HP micro server gen8 it’s replacing.
Unfortunately a lot of the mini-PCs skimp on USB ports. AMD's FL1 form-factor mobile "socket" has 4x 10Gbps + 1x 40Gbps USB-C ports on the SoC, but many of the designs often only have ~2x usb3 class ports and rarely the USB4 port at all. I'd really appreciate these mini-PC's exposing more of the chip's usb! Definitely something to shop for.
With USB4, there's also the added benefit of having host-to-host interfaces: it's short range but 40Gbps host-to-host is real nice to have (in practice it's often half or less this speed alas).
Upgradability is over-rated, when costs are low. A Minisforum 795S7 can be had for $400, and has dual ("only" PCIe 4.0) SSD slots and a 16-core 7945HX Zen4. It's mobile-on-desktop (MoDT): I can't ever replace the CPU, but I suspect this crazy cheap system is going to have a long long life before I feel the need to upgrade it. Replacing it whole when the time comes seems not a concern. RAM and SSD are separate and can be moved out if desired.
Having a couple of pre-built nas' from QNAP or Synology can go a long way to getting one's feet wet to learn what they offer that we sometimes learn the hard way about.
You can also run a single storage box and then just pop over network (10gbe, thunderbolt, etc). One big box of spinning rust and tons of cheap compute.
Most folks are running proxmox and your OS installs are automated. Use ansible. I like docker swarm on top of a fleet of cattle vms on proxmox.
They're cheap enough that I don't mind dedicating one (or two) for specific tasks.
I initially was recommended a "Minisforum" thing, which I did buy, but it absolutely hated Debian for reasons I don't understand. It would boot, but not reboot, so you'd have to power cycle it every time. Not practical.
The Asus also came with its own issues - it only supports one stick of RAM unless you do a BIOS update, so you have to be careful not to put both sticks in until after the update. Slightly crazy.
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