That is a good point @amiller, perhaps I misunderstood what @james was asking. I know some were working on porting Zcash software to be able to run on an ARM 64 processor like those you find in the Raspberry Pi or many phones. This would be a good project to sponsor!
Although, with the limitations of such hardware it would allow wallets, JoinSplit (!) or even a full node to be run on a low power device but not necessarily make the device viable for mining. An army of low power nodes would be good for the security of the network.