Are the following Pi’s daily drivers for 24 * 7 applications?

Last Updated on September 30, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

We are looking for a SBC which can run 24/7 without interruption, charging over night is acceptable, as well as swapping batteries. We made some tests with power banks, different SBCs with and witout display. The following table shows our test results with values from a single test.

Device	configuration	running mode	battery (mAh)	battery life (hrs)	source	remarks
Pi zero 2 w	without display	idle	10`000	longer than 24	tested by MRIS
Pi zero 2 w	5 inch display	idle	20`000	longer than 24	tested by MRIS
Pi Pad 5	5 inch display	idle without OS	20`000	longer than 24	tested by MRIS	(*3)
Pi 4	without display	idle	20`000	around 8 hours	tested by MRIS
Pi 4	7 inch display	idle	100`000	around 18 hours	tested by MRIS
Pi 4	7 inch display	idle	20`000 & 100`000	longer than 24	tested by MRIS
Pi 4	without display	idle	Sunfounder Pi PiPower UPS	3 to 4 hours	data from Sound founder (*1)	(*2)

• (*1)

SunFounder Raspberry Pi UPS Power Supply with Battery, Protect The Raspberry Pi and SD, 5V/3A Power Bank Expansion Board, Compatible with Raspberry Pi 4B/3B+/3B/Zero 2 W/Zero W (Battery Included)

• (*2) The battery life time of the Sunfounder Pi Power UPS does not confirm the long running time of 10 hours with a setup with similar battery capacity mentioned here:

Are uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) more power efficient than power banks?

• (*3) We did a test with the Pi Pad 5, but we think this is not an option for us, a CM4 board without display would be better to have the option to choose for instance an Android phone as a display.
• We tested the Pi Pad 5 but we where not able to install Raspberry Pi OS according to this instruction at the first attempt:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/how-flash-raspberry-pi-os-compute-module-4-emmc-usbboot

• We did a second trial to install Raspberry Pi OS on the Raspberry Pi Pad 5 with CM4 and tried to do it very carefully according to the demo video of leepspvideo for the Pad 5 and the OpenWRT mini router who uses the code from Jeff Geerling. But we failed again and only had error messages with every single step.

• installing Raspberry Pi OS on a Pi 5 or Pi zero 2 w is much easier than on a Pi Pad 5.

We suppose that a power efficicient solution with an Android device and a HDMI capture card connected over usb as shown here:

Android phone & tablets – the most power efficient Pi screens?

is a better solution as the ones shown in this table since our preliminary tests showed that Pi screens consume a lot of power and should be avoided for mobile applications if possible.