0.1 Hardware

Power adapter

Power usage depends on the Pi model, the attached devices, and the amount of work the Pi is doing. Since the Pi 3 can eat up 730mA on its own on full throttle, make sure you're not using an old 500mA phone charger you have laying around! Make sure your power adapter can deliver plenty, because otherwise you will get failing hardware and (possibly) disk errors on your SD card.

If you're trying to minimize power consumption, read ahead all the way to section 5.1.