Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand (2023)

All this complexity to save a few bucks per year on your electricity bill? This is ridiculous, the Pi costs far more than what you can be expected to save.

Are you a programmer by chance? Some are, and they enjoy it!

I know a lot of sysadmins / platform engineer types. A lot of them really enjoy the mix of hardware and software integration challenges.

I don't know any sysadmins who would do this. Task scheduler for Windows or rtcwake for Linux. We try to reduce complexity with existing battle tested tools, not create whatever this is. This is definitely not the easy way.

Ah, you're not a tinkerer!

I definitely am. But this is a very solved problem. It just adds brittleness to the system. Maintenance for this is going to suck. It's going to break in less than a year because you forgot to set a static IP address, or a Python library changes, or the SD card in the PI gets corrupted, or the jack on it fries, or its cheap PSU died and fries the board, etc. Then you're going to have to try to remember how the damn thing works, then figure out what other tiny change somewhere broke something. You should never add more failure points to infra, ever.

I guess everyone has to go through it.