Hi Pi fans. Here is a short video talking about the power consumption of the new Pi 3 A+.
compared to some of the older models
such as the Pi 3 B+ and the original A+.
Hi everyone this is a short video
where I talk about the power consumption
figures for the new Pi 3 A+ and
compare it to the older boards such as
the original A+, the Pi 3 B+, the
standard Pi 3 and the older B+ models
now these are just some basic tests but
what I use is this device here which is
a PortaPow current and power meter
and what you do is you feed in the
normal power supply into this USB cable
here and then you feed the Pi from this
output here and then on the display you
can measure the Watts used or the
milliamp hours used just by changing
this mode here and it can also keep a
running account of how long it's been
running for so what I tend to do is I
tend to run a test for about 10 minutes
measure how many milliamp hours it's used
and then that can help you just get
an average current used over that time
when it's powered up this voltage here
will will read 5 volts if everything's
working ok so that's why I use. It seems
to be accurate enough for these sort of
purposes it's quite a good device and it
doesn't doesn't cost that much
so the tests I ran was to create a card with just a standard Raspbian image on,  the latest
one at the time of recording, and then
what I did was I just measured the
current used when the desktop was
running but nothing else going on
with and without Wi-Fi and then I did two
other tests where I played a YouTube
video, just using the chromium browser,
and also played a 1080p
MP4 file which I launched in OMX player on the command line and so
what that gave me was a number of
readings for each of these models.
So here  are the results overall so you can
see the the numbers for each of the
devices for the desktop, the playing the
video, playing the YouTube video and for
the desktop and the playing the MP4
video I did both versions with the Wi-Fi
on and off and generally you got a
consistent drop when you turn the Wi-Fi
off and that was reasonably consistent
actually on on all versions of the the
Pi 3 it tended to be about 35 to 40
milliamps.
So what I found was the original
A+ has the lowest power consumption
the 3 B+ has the highest power consumption.
So in order it's A+, 3 A+, B+, 3 B and Pi 3 B+.
with the highest power consumption.
These results aren't that surprising, that's
probably the order most of you were expecting, so playing a 1080p video from
the command line tended to add about
15 to 20 milliamps, whereas playing a YouTube
video via the Chromium browser tended to add about 50 or 60 milliamps.
What my tests don't do is really tax the Pi 3 and it's four cores so what you might find
is these values don't necessarily
reflect the maximum power you're going
to get drawn from the PI 3 you would
have to do something a bit more bit more
intensive to sort of draw that out of
the device but the the idea of these
tests was just to give a really quick
comparison between as many devices as
possible just with some basic tasks just to give you a bit of an idea, but the
Pi 3 obviously has capacity there to use
up a lot more current if you
put it to work a bit harder.
So those are my results obviously the measuring
device I'm using is fairly basic so
they are only as
accurate as that device. I believe
that my numbers will at least show the
relative difference between the devices. If you run the tests again you sometimes
get slightly different results however I
hope that these numbers are useful
to you in deciding what Pi you might
use for a particular project or to give
you an idea of what the impact might be
if you're going to basically replace an
older Pi with one of the newer models.
Anyway thanks for watching and until the next time ...
goodbye!
