Raspberry Pi Zero – Conserve power and reduce draw to 30mA
We've actually found that the RPi doesn't draw enough power, specifically to the USB ports. Our peripherals are within the USB spec of a 500ma max pull, but even so we are experiencing sporadic CPU brownouts. The first thought was to double the max_usb_current in /boot/config.txt, but that only lengthened the time between brownouts. We looked into hacks that could increase the current even more, such as this bypass method: <a href="http://hackaday.com/2015/04/06/more-power-for-raspberry-pi-usb-ports/" rel="nofollow">http://hackaday.com/2015/04/06/more-power-for-raspberry-pi-u...</a>. Unfortunately, this isn't a viable solution as we continue to scale up our deploys. Some viable alternatives include switching to a board that supports USB3.0, underclocking the CPU, or doing a custom solution through Element14. I really wish the RPi was more stable around power / fault tolerances, but they're a blessing nonetheless :) [Plug]: If you're based in NYC, enjoy hacking hardware and find these types of problems to be delightful, please shoot me an email: mykola@colorcreative.io ;)