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Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer
- djfergus 11y agoLove watching the progress of Raspberry Pi. The attraction of the platform to me (compared to something more capable, with more ram ghz etc) is that the ecosystem is now so mature, you can easily google and get a cut and paste guide to exactly what you want to do. This means you can spend time tinkering with aspects that interest you rather than maintaining an operating system or troubleshooting hardware... I'm curious to see how far optimisations could go. Analagous to the old consoles where developers could squeeze incredible performance out (compared to the equivalent processors elsewhere) since it was so uniform. e.g. the later games on a nintendo or neo geo were incredible compared to what was capable on a typical 8/16 bit computer of the time. A $5 version is just going to accelerate this ecosystem... looking forward to it.
- pjc50 11y agoThere is a lot of capability on the graphics side, which takes up most of the die. Can run Quake3 etc. Not very impressive compared to modern PC graphics, but very handy if you want to put something on a small screen.
- Tepix 11y agoSame with Arduino. You can use dozens of off-the-shelf shields and libraries to make it do exactly what you need without having to understand every little detail (however, if you want you can change every little bit or resistor!). Instead you can focus on solving the problem at hand, mostly writing high level glue code.
- xzion 11y agoI was really hope they refresh the R-Pi compute module at a pricepoint like this.
- robzyb 11y agoI just... I don't... I'm a bit lost for words. The sheer amount of "stuff" you get for $5 (albeit USD) is staggering. I am designing some simple electronics gadgets for Burning Man, and the electronics (low-end MSP430 based) for that is costing me a significant portion of $5 yet its significantly less powerful. I know, I know, volume is a key issue, but honestly, that doesn't make it any less impressive to me.
- weland 11y agoThe Pi foundation being good friends with Broadcom also helps.
- foxpc 11y agoAh well. I recently (a week ago) started a new project with the Arduino and then they release this beast. It's basically cheaper than an Arduino (except that there's no storage in the Pi) AND faster than the Arduino. Sure, it won't have the same IO capabilities as there's much more layers but it will be pretty close and I don't really need great performance anyways. I guess, I'll have to switch to the Pi, it's not even a fair race at this point. (luckily for me, I was mostly writing the SaaS that would work with the Arduino and only spent about a full day's work doing C/C++ coding so far)
- smarx007 11y agoWell, I would like to note that people on a budget have been buying Arduino Nano with USB for $2 from eBay for a long time.
- Mchl 11y agoOr a clone of SparkFun's ProMicro, which is absolutely awesome. It's basically Arduino Leonardo (Mega32U4) in the 'micro' form factor and able to work either on 3.3V or 5V. You can get it at around $3
- linuxkerneldev 11y agoNice. Interesting design choice to not have ethernet on it.
- LeoPanthera 11y agoA logical omission. Something so small is likely to be mobile anyway.
- happycube 11y agoEthernet is handled by an extra chip that also provides the USB hub function. This is wired up like the model A(+) which also doesn't have Ethernet.
- kevindeasis 11y agoThis is intriguing. Is there a list somewhere that shows the cheapest possible place to get raspberry hardware modules. Also, where do you guys buy your modules? You can include Arduino stuff.
- foxpc 11y agoI just use eBay for Arduino stuff. It's a bit more expensive than AliExpress but I suppose I get a bit more buyer protection. This screen* is pretty cheap, right? I'm currently using one (on an Arduino, different seller) and it works great. * http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2004-204-20x4-Character-LCD-Display-Module-HD44780-Controller-Blue-Blacklight-/181924103697?hash=item2a5b858611:g:TGMAAOSw5VFWPEpl http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2004-204-20x4-Character-LCD-Displa...
- kevindeasis 11y agoThat's really cheap compared to where I got mine along time ago. Very Cool!
- foxpc 11y agoIf you don't mind waiting for a month or so (depends on your location), you probably won't find anything cheaper unless you live in China/Singapore or buy bulk :)
- suneilp 11y agoSold out at Adafruit which is really the only place to buy it in the US. Life is sad right now...
- Leuli 11y agoIt would be nice if there was an interface to solder on one of these dirt cheap wifi modules. SPI?
- em3rgent0rdr 11y agoFree Raspberry Pi Zero with the magazine, wow! "Zero" is a great model name, since the price is negligible (approximately equal to 0 for most purposes).
- trymas 11y agoThat's great. Personally, one of the downsides of the original RPi (and RPi 2 as well), was it's , believe it or not, size. Sometimes I wanted to have some portable embedded projects, for which small micro-controller would not be enough, but RPi, was 10 times bigger. But it's just my personal nitpick, overall RPi devices, community and it's ecosystem is just great.
- solipsism 11y agoI'd like to get into this world. At this point I don't have enough experience or knowledge to know what kinds of things I can do with this thing. Or what kinds of things this is more appropriate for compared to a Raspberry Pi 2, or vice versa. Any pointers? Could I make some kind of driver/controller for a small synchronized christmas light show with this? Or some kind of toy with lights and sounds for my toddlers?
- foxpc 11y agoYes and yes. Obviously, you will need a bit more hardware than only a Raspberry Pi. The simplest one I found is here: http://opensource.com/life/15/2/music-light-show-with-raspberry-pi http://opensource.com/life/15/2/music-light-show-with-raspbe... And there's plenty of other results on 'raspberry christmas lights'.
- woodson 11y agoSomewhat disappointing that in Australia RPi Zero costs AU$19.38 (plus AU$12.95 shipping). Quite a lot more than US$5 (=AU$6.93).
- kelt 11y ago$19.29 over here in SGD :< wished it had wifi tho
- tomjacobs 11y agoYeah, just paid AU$20 for it. So it's $5 in theory, right?
- vertis 11y agoIndeed. Seems we have some stores here that think it's fine to double or triple the price. I decided to buy one from the UK for $16 dollars including shipping.
- zaf 11y agoAll sold out! Wanted the MagPI Magazine with a free RPi Zero but its sold out!
- frigo_1337 11y agoI don't see anything about Ethernet/Wi-Fi. Am I missing something? I understand they had to cut some features to reduce the prize. But networking is such a fundamental requirement for these types of systems, you'd think that it would be the last feature to be excluded.
- MarcScott 11y agoThere's a USB port.
- TD-Linux 11y agoThe networking on the other Pis is attached via USB. It's a very easy and obvious thing to drop.
- frigo_1337 11y agoYeah I guess. Still, I for one would be more than willing to pay a few extra bucks for a stripped-down version of the Pi with wireless included. Actually, all I'm looking for in this type of machine is Linux, Wi-Fi and GPIO, in a reasonably compact format. Maybe the Pi isn't a good fit, since it is more about "teaching computing" than "building your IoT stuff".
- Tepix 11y agoExactly. If you need Ethernet, a USB-to-Ethernet adapter is $1.50 on AliExpress including free shipping from China.
- tomjacobs 11y agoPlug a wipi into it via the USB OTG cable. Done.
- cherioo 11y agoNo. Wireless adapter needs better power source, so it's RPi to powered hub to WiFi, which makes the setup quite a bit bulkier and pricier. Like gp I wish some sort of network connectivity can be included to make it more complete as a standalone computer.
- tomjacobs 11y agoThis seems like an important moment for humans and computers. The cable to connect the computer now costs more than a 1GHZ computer. It feels a lot like a tipping point for something. http://makezine.com/2015/11/25/raspberry-pi-announces-5-computer-model-zero/ http://makezine.com/2015/11/25/raspberry-pi-announces-5-comp...
- makomk 11y agoThe cable to connect the computer now has more markup than a 1 GHz computer. Micro-USB OTG and mini HDMI adapters go for £1 each shipped on eBay, and I think most of that price is shipping. (Likewise, they've omitted the 40-pin GPIO header unless you buy the £10 bundle with the "Essentials kit", compared to £4 for the Pi itself.) Old, old business model - cut the headline price to the bone, make it back on cables.
- rdancer 11y agoI can't really see that — neither the circuit board header nor the cables are proprietary.
- makomk 11y agoDoesn't have to be - they're relying on people not shopping around for the cables and accessories, much like big brick-and-mortar retailers such as Best Buy have done for a long time.
- xuhu 11y agoTo what degree are the power requirements on their faq still valid for the pi zero ? https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/#power https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/#power The question I really want to ask is, how long will a 1.2A supply last with nothing else attached to it ?
- teraflop 11y agoYour question isn't meaningful, because amps are a measure of the rate at which a power supply can provide current. An AA battery can provide 1.2A for maybe an hour or two; a wall wart can provide 1.2A indefinitely.
- aldanor 11y agoHe most probably meant 1.2Ah
- lovelearning 11y agoReportedly draws ~80 mA idle and ~160 mA [1] (I assume with no peripherals whatsoever). So a 1.2Ah battery should last between ~7-14 hours. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFFQmdUc5Vg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFFQmdUc5Vg
- maheart 11y agoThis is seriously impressive. While the Raspberry Pi is not the perfect hacker-friendly computer, it has done a lot of good. Some reasons off the top of my head: 1. Providing a low cost computer has given many people access to computers. Giving more people access to the web, email, an office suit, a programming environment AND giving people the ability of safely tinker without the fear of bricking an expensive device. 2. Introduced many different types of people to the FOSS landscape of powerful tools (e.g. distros such as Debian, tools such as Python). 3. The Raspberry Pi foundation has paid developers to write/optimise FOSS (e.g. paid Collabora to optimise WebkitGTK+ -- I think some Wayland work was also done). 4. Built on top of existing FOSS tools (e.g. building Raspbian on top of Debian), instead of doing everything on their own in a proprietary fashion. This has no doubt also helped to introduce new people into these communities. This is a really good counter-point to all the "locked down" (hacker unfriendly) devices like smart phones and tablets.
- grp 11y agoAre you sure about 1? Where are the maths please? In my little circle, the only people who have raspberry already have awesome computers and co. Curious about that.
- joosters 11y agoHow many people are there in your circle who want a computer but don't have one? Perhaps your crowd aren't the target for point 1.
- grp 11y agoOh, yep sure! And the visible facts are? (really, no needs to downvote me. I would love to see this thruth, just sceptical)
- Mchl 11y agoHere are some articles in this subject: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/tag/developing-world/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/tag/developing-world/ Not saying it proves or disproves anything. I'm also interested in this aspect of cheap-o-computing
- trymas 11y agoNext awesome step would be RPi with integrated wifi/bluetooth, and it would become ultimate IoT/embedded development platform. Such step would increase price, I know, but AFAIK, most people are almost always buying either wifi or bluetooth dongles anyway. All in all, RPi ables to deliver exciting, rather (for me) unexpected and most importantly great and user-friendly products.
- Natanael_L 11y agoThe headers/shield solutions could easily provide that too, so it doesn't have to be integrated into the SoC if you want to add something not already there. These type of electronics have essentially become digital Lego.
- swah 11y agoWifi is a game changer IMO. I've just found out about esp8266, and its a mini revolution on the Arduino world.
- creshal 11y agoYou can find zigbee, wifi or bt dongles for $8 or less these days. I suspect board development costs are the limiting factor for the Foundation here, it's easier to slap on USB and tell users to plug in what they need.
- trymas 11y ago
- agumonkey 11y agoBeside the product himself, thumbs up at the whole team. From a funny project to a very famous name and large community. I can imagine Eben and his friends surprise.
- jwr 11y agoI learned to take these pricing claims with a large grain of salt. $5 sounds great and makes for great news. But then I head over to Farnell/element14 and learn that a) this is unobtainium, because the first shipment is expected on Dec 21, and b) it will cost me $17 + VAT + shipping. The title should say "the computer that might be available to some people at $5 at some time in the future".
- atmosx 11y agoThe TCO for something that can operate similarly to a computer, should be around 50 USD (micro-USB cable, HDMI cable, eth/wlan adapter, case). But all in all it's an impressive little machine that can do wonders for small home/school projects.
- smarx007 11y agoDon't be ridiculous. $5 will get you 80% of these peripherals from eBay. Especially if you're on the budget.
- teh_klev 11y agoSure if you fancy the risk of your house going up in flames because you bought some dodgy no-name power supply knocked out in a Chinese electronics sweatshop.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoHow big is that a risk, though? Serious question - because I'm really considering using Chinese USB power supply units as power sources for my home automation project. I've been using one of those units for the last 5 days with no visible problems - no overheating, no noise, etc.
- fulafel 11y agoFor that application it is better to get officially imported ones (eg. CE-marked in Europe), where at least the importer is vouching that the design meets minimum safety requirements. See http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-ap... for some horror stories about crap USB chargers.
- atmosx 11y agoQuick specs for those who don't wanna click on the article: A Broadcom BCM2835 application processor 1GHz ARM11 core (40% faster than Raspberry Pi 1) 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM 1 x micro-SD card slot 1 x mini-HDMI socket for 1080p60 video output Micro-USB sockets for data and power Unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header Identical pinout to Model A+/B+/2B Size: 65mm x 30mm x 5mm
- iM8t 11y agoIs there any way to buy these from Europe?
- timlyo 11y agoYou can get one with a subscription to the raspberry pi magazine, I haven't seen anywhere else to get them.
- sagischwarz 11y agoThe article mentions three vendors in UK. I just ordered mine from http://pimoroni.com/zero http://pimoroni.com/zero (they accept Bitcoin).
- iM8t 11y agoThanks! Just ordered mine. Looking forward to learning with it. Do you have any good bookmarks that You could share with a complete beginner?
- sagischwarz 11y agoIt's also my first Pi, more of an impulse buy. Have to find out what to do with it.
- dejv 11y agoCheckout Farnell, they offer next day delivery to most of EU countries. (Just ordered three of them)
- javipas 11y agoEven without the Ethernet connector this is impressive. Yes, you should add the microSD, cables and peripherals cost, but even adding that the RPi Zero is a marvel. http://theunshut.com/2015/11/26/raspberry-pi-zero-5-dollar-micro-pc/ http://theunshut.com/2015/11/26/raspberry-pi-zero-5-dollar-m... It’s amazing what you can do with $5.
- nl 11y ago$5 is an amazing price for something so functional. The current go-to device for semi-disposable network-attached devices is the ESP8266, which was supposed to be a WiFi add-on board for the Arduino until someone ported Lua to run on it[2]. That is ~$3, but nowhere near as functional as the Pi Zero. [1] https://batilanblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/first-experiences-with-the-lua-nodemcu-esp8266-based-wifi-network-development-board/ https://batilanblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/first-experienc... [2] http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html
- mschuster91 11y agoStill lacking: USB Device Mode support... :(
- KayEss 11y agoIs it not powerful enough to do this in software through the GPIO pins?
- mschuster91 11y agoNot at all. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=11558 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=1155...
- Tepix 11y agoThe Pi Zero is like the Model A, so device mode should be possible. See https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=74098 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=7409...
- mschuster91 11y agoInteresting. > The single USB port on the model A is capable of working as a USB slave (OTG mode). The model B cannot do that because of the USB hub/LAN chip being in the way. Please, please do not tell me that the Pi CPU has only a single USB controller?! facepalm
- rwmj 11y agoI know I'm complaining about an almost free computer, but ARM11 (ARMv6) isn't compatible with most Linux OSes which long ago moved to ARMv7. If only this was compatible with ARMv7 it would run a lot more stuff.
- lucaspiller 11y agoI don't see this as designed to be a general purpose computer, but as an alternative to Arduino and other microcontrollers in the hobbyist/maker space.
- edent 11y agoNot sure I understand. I runs Debian derivatives like Raspian, Ubuntu, and Kali. If you're a masochist it'll run Windows 10 IoT core. https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux/raspberry-pi-luks-disk-encryption/ https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux/raspberry-pi-l...
- rwmj 11y agoThose are specially compiled with different compiler options. Ordinary Debian is compiled for armv7 and will not run on RPi Zero or RPi 1 (note that RPi 2 is armv7).
- yuhong 11y agoThat is Raspberry Pi 2 I think.
- Asmod4n 11y agoThe only modern distro it runs is Raspbian. Ubuntu and Kali don't run on it let alone Windows 10 IoT core, same goes for Arch and pretty much everything else. This is a ARMv6, for which most distros stopped support several years ago if they ever ran on it.
- ac29 11y agoArch will definitely run on a Pi: http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi So will Win10 IOT core, Ubuntu, and several other things: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
- TeMPOraL 11y agoArduino Uno for $2, NodeMCU for $3, RPi for $5... please let this trend continue. A year or two, and we'll basically have computronium - simple dev boards powerful and cheap enough to just tile your house with them. I've recently figured out that there's no point in designing your own PCB for placing sensors at home, when you can get an Arduino and an ESP8266 for $5; add power (and some ~$0 of voltage regulation) and you have a base station. Or just buy NodeMCU for $3 and skip on wiring Arduino and ESP8266 together.
- utku_karatas2 11y agoI'm speculating, rather sooner than later, the foundation will let people (read Chinese) clone Pi Zero at will ala Arduino way. They can't even have a profit margin with that price point. So why not open-source it anyway to let go of the burden of manufacturing? That would be a great boost for the Raspberry platform.
- mSparks 11y agoraspberry avoid this by using chips only supplied to them.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWhere are those chips actually made? ;).
- mSparks 11y agoWhat does it matter? broadcom wont sell you them. and you cant legally import them yourself.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoJust because Broadcom won't sell them doesn't mean the factory won't make some more. This is China, they have a pretty liberal (and one could argue: more reasonable) approach to issues of intellectual property :). Or at least it used to be so; sadly, in the last few years the US was pressuring Chinese government to crack down on it. Anyway, you can read more about this phenomenon here: [0]. Oh, and one more thing. It may not apply to RPi in terms of cloning it because it's still quite a niche product, but in general, they actually recycle electronics here. Like, seriously, when you throw away your smartphone, it'll likely end up in China for desoldering. So will your laptop. The amount of desoldered components and especially ICs available for sale is staggering. I have no data for this, but I'm pretty sure people here are making small-scale production runs out of recycled ICs. So Broadcom may not sell you their chip, but the lady on the first floor of SEG building in Shenzhen just might. BTW., I love how they recycle components so much, and how it leads to interesting situations sometimes. For instance, I recently got my phone fixed - $15 and 15 minutes of waiting was all it took to get the front half of Galaxy S4 replaced with a brand new part (screen + touch surface + glass + box) and to get a new camera (electronics, lens and all). The equivalent repair at home would cost me around $240 and would take a few days. The secret of such cheap and fast repair? They took the broken parts from me. They'll regain 90% of value of that repair by simply replacing broken subcomponents in their own time, and then pushing the fixed modules back onto the market. [0] - http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20
- bootload 11y agoBlown away with this. As a youngster cutting my teeth on Cambridge based computers, great to see a Welsh machine. Currently using RPis for most of my development, I'm working on a design for a RP laptop. Not hard, but I did want to thrown in multiple boards. This looks to be one way to achieve this. Technical details (cant seem to find any power requirements) and tour here from adafruit: - https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-zero?view=all https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-zero... - https://www.adafruit.com/products/2885 https://www.adafruit.com/products/2885
- listic 11y agoDo you want to have multiple boards in a laptop? In that case, it would be great to have high-speed interconnect between them, I guess.
- lamby 11y agoThe "$5 computer" is, of course, £4 in the UK. http://pimoroni.com/zero http://pimoroni.com/zero
- jenscow 11y agoWithout VAT, it's about $5 [0] [0] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%28100%2F%28100%2B20%29+*+4%29+gbp+in+usd https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%28100%2F%28100%2B20%29+*+...
- buserror 11y agoBroadcom must be delighted to have managed to find a use for their obsolete part from 2007 or so. Some accountant, somewhere, is happy :-) Probably a neat little board too, but unlikely to be $5. It's at £11.88 [0] ex VAT ex shipping at farnell UK (and can't be ordered anyway) -- that's more like nearly $20 these days. [0]: http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspberrypi-zero/sbc-zero/dp/2508221 http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspberrypi-zero/sbc-zero...
- agumonkey 11y agoOn the cynical game I'd add that selling a pi zero at 5 then many phats to get audio, network etc, might provide more global revenues and maybe more profit :)
- icebraining 11y agoIt's £4 in the Pi Hut (disabling the extras): http://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero http://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero
- buserror 11y agoNice one, they are not too extortionate on the 'essential kit' either. That pi zero might become an alternative (for me) to the Olinuxino Micro [0] and the NanoPi [1] -- these are ARM9 based so even more dated than the Pi Zero; however I can boot these two in 0.7 seconds to an application, so they've been the first draft of quite a few professional projects for me... [0]: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/iMX233/iMX233-OLinuXino-NANO/open-source-hardware https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/iMX233/iMX233-OLin... [1]: http://nanopi.org/NanoPi_Feature.html http://nanopi.org/NanoPi_Feature.html
- kennydude 11y agoSame on Pimoroni https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero
- reitoei 11y ago€9.61 EUR from PiHut in the UK, shipped to Ireland.
- RohithMeethal 11y agoIt is so sad that when it comes to India price is increased to $18 http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-79263 http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-79263
- zuron7 11y agoThat's because they're throwing in a HDMI cable as well as an OTG cable.
- agumonkey 11y agoCute form factor, let's have pizero hats (battery, lcd, foo). ps: too late, they're call phats http://pimoroni.com/zero http://pimoroni.com/zero (stupid me)
- markokrajnc 11y agoFirst thought: Is this an April Fools Joke? :-) Second thought: This is G-R-E-A-T!!! :-)
- wiradikusuma 11y agoI just received "Black Friday promo" from chip (http://getchip.com/ http://getchip.com/) which claim to sell s/$9/$8 computer. I wonder how they fare with this new RPi.
- CJefferson 11y agoI suspect this is in competition to the currently-being-released Micro Bit, the BBC's similar tiny computer (The microbit isn't aimed at the same market, as it has buttons and LEDs built onto it, and no HDMI. But it is threatening to push the Raspberry Pi out of UK schools).
- kubiiii 11y agoI immediately ordered one. It does not have a camera port though, I hoped there were ways to operate the camera through the GPIO but could not find anything.
- Yaggo 11y agoIt's possible to connect HDMI display to GPIO pins[1]. Maybe similar technique is also possible with CSI camera connector? [1] http://www.adafruit.com/product/2453 http://www.adafruit.com/product/2453
- hoodoof 11y agoThe missing piece to this puzzle is being able to buy these connected to high speed Internet. Maybe Raspberry Pi build build a data center filled with these things.
- callesgg 11y agoThat is pretty great, i do which that it had wifi built in. As generally you need an Internet connection, and the usb port for a keyboard. Plugging in a USB hub fixes the issue, but then it would be smarter to just buy a normal PI.
- gloves 11y agoJack Lang, Chairman of Raspberry Pi gave a fascinating talk about how the Pi came to be at Business of Software Europe last year. (really is worth 33 minutes of your time) https://vimeo.com/136196471 https://vimeo.com/136196471
- eccstartup 11y agoI want to buy 10.
- rdancer 11y agoGo for it!
- mhandley 11y agoFor me, the best thing about this is not the price. It's the combination of small form factor and no Ethernet/USB hub. With the original Pi, almost half the power consumption came from the USB hub/Ethernet controller chip - this was always the main advantage of the Model A, which could be very useful for small robots. I would assume the Zero shares that advantage, while being smaller, faster, and more RAM.
- schappim 11y agoThe Specs: - A Broadcom BCM2835 application processor - 1GHz ARM11 core (40% faster than Raspberry Pi 1) - 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM - A micro-SD card slot - A mini-HDMI socket for 1080p60 video output - Micro-USB sockets for data and power - An unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header - Identical pinout to Model A+/B+/2B - An unpopulated composite video header - Our smallest ever form factor, at 65mm x 30mm x 5mm Source: http://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-zero http://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-ze...
- david-given 11y agoDon't forget, also, that the ARM11 in the BCM2835 is actually just a secondary processor; the main CPU is a blisteringly fast dual-core Videocore 4, which lots of interesting DSPish and vector processing instructions. (You can call out to it from the ARM.) See: http://maazl.de/project/vc4asm/doc/index.html http://maazl.de/project/vc4asm/doc/index.html And if you're into shader programming, the GPU has a 24 GFLOP shader unit. https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv-qpu https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv-qpu Only suitable for very specialised purposes, but astonishingly fast.
- vertis 11y agoYou can't actually get the USD$5/AUD$7 version from piaustralia/littlebird though. It's a kit for AUD$25 (plus AUD$7 shipping) and no other option. I ordered one from PiHut in the UK because that was the cheapest I could find (AUD$16 including shipping).
- Aissen 11y agoJust as CHIP was announcing their $8 computer: http://getchip.com/ http://getchip.com/ . It has wifi and bluetooth though. Same as Pi, watch for high shipping costs.
- agumonkey 11y agoAnd 4GB of flash on SoC, also apparently some direct support for LiPO batteries. Not that I really understand it but makes the $9,$8 fair compared to the $5 pizero.
- aorth 11y agoFantastic development, but I can't help but think about the years of pain we're going to be in security wise when people inevitably start using these for all sorts of "Internet of Things" purposes. Software stacks on these type of devices inevitably have lackluster cipher suites, sub-par protocol support, unpatched kernel/userland, etc—even if they run all the latest things out right now, they WILL get out of date and WILL NOT receive patches!
- rdancer 11y agoNot sure what you mean by "these type of devices", but you will be overjoyed that on Raspbian, updating the system is as easy as `apt-get udate && apt-get -y upgrade`, the kernel is currently v4.1.13 [1], and the rest of your comment is also FUD. [1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/blob/master/boot/kernel.img https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/blob/master/boot/ker...
- Tepix 11y agoI wouldn't call it FUD. Embedded devices tend to get updated less frequently than PCs. Connecting them all to the internet is not helping.
- rorykoehler 11y agoIf security is an issue set it up to run a system cron job to update.
- aorth 11y agoUpdating Raspbian is easy, sure, and I have faith you'll update your media center or the one powering lights in your house, but for $5 I could connect one to all the cows on my farm, or to every car in the fleet of my delivery service, to the soda machine in the office, etc—people are going to use them EVERYWHERE. Then what do we do when we find out that there is a new, practical attack on SHA1, TLSv1.2? Or some exploit in OpenSSL, bash, etc? This is not FUD, this will happen.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
- codecamper 11y agoThe biggest problem I had with my Raspberry PI was that it is seriously slow compared to a desktop machine. It takes time to setup. Time is money, right? I suppose if you have some mass deployment to do, then great. But for the individual maker hacker.. there must be a better way to setup and experiment than waiting for this computer to reboot with the new config, recompile, etc.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI guess it depends on your use case and on your expectations. It took me about as much time to set up my RPi 2 as it takes to set up a new Linux VM, and since then it lies peacefully on top of a wardrobe, and I just connect over SSH to it. Rarely I need to reboot it :).
- codecamper 11y agoI wanted to set up the pi as a wifi repeater. This sort of thing required lots of reboots. Took way too long to setup. I think the way it should work is they need an emulator that runs on a desktop machine. Just like iOS & Android development. You get your setup working on the desktop & then deploy to device. I guess the main problem with this is that often you want to try hardware that only works on the pi. Not sure what the solution is there. Maybe soon these $5 computers will be screaming fast with fast SSD as well, will reboot in a few seconds, and so no problems.
- lngtmelistener 11y agoIf you do want to play with it as a wifi repeater, perhaps another OS is a good idea? Something like openwrt https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_foundation/raspberry_pi https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_foundation/raspber... should be quick to write to the SD-card and quick to boot. Raspbian may be a bit heavy.
- aerique 11y agoI found the Pi1's to be unusable as a desktop but thought the Pi2 was pretty good. Which Pi are you talking about?
- kgs42 11y agoHi, maybe not entirely relevant for this topic - but maybe you guys have any idea how to build and cheap system which will gather temperature wireleslly to one place. Ideally I'd like to have 2 sensors (one inside and other outside, with own batteries) which will send data to some central device. I have home server on MacMini - so WiFi could be option. Any ideas? I've always wanted to build something like this which - but always ended calculations that are rather expensive and devices are relatively big.
- cuonic 11y agoHi kgs42, I've actually created such a setup, I have 3 battery powered temperature sensors built on Arduino Pro Minis, they all communicate with a central RPi node via NRF24L01 transceivers, and the node then sends the different temperatures to a server via GSM. The sensors are pretty cheap to make, and if you put them in a sealed box they last for months without recharging the batteries (Currently 7 month battery life on 4 x AA batteries) Here is some of the sensor code: https://github.com/cuonic/Arduino-NRF24L01-Thermometer https://github.com/cuonic/Arduino-NRF24L01-Thermometer
- gedrap 11y agoHow about running a http server on the mac exposing restful api, and using something like ESP8266 + temperature sensor, sending basic http requests to the server every minute or so? Should be much cheaper than arduino.
- kgs42 11y agobut I have to connect ESP8266 to something (Arduino?) or is it standalone device?
- gedrap 11y agostandalone :) some inspirations for you http://hackaday.com/2015/09/05/esp8266-web-server-farm/ http://hackaday.com/2015/09/05/esp8266-web-server-farm/ http://www.instructables.com/id/ESP8266-Wifi-Temperature-Logger/ http://www.instructables.com/id/ESP8266-Wifi-Temperature-Log... If you end up working on it, feel free drop me an email, I'm really curious about the result :)
- StavrosK 11y agoThe 80s are widely considered as the golden age of hacking, but what the hell? I just bought ten microcontrollers that can run Lua/Python/C for $20, there are full-blown computers for $5, and all the supporting ecosystem (sensors, components, etc) is cheaper than most toys. I am very optimistic about the future, given that people (and children) these days have trivially cheap access to powerful programmable and easily connectable computers, and hopefully they'll start to demand more and more that all their other devices are equally hackable. If most people have a microcontroller at home that they made themselves that controls the coffee maker, they will want to be able to connect other stuff around the house up, and that can only be done with open protocols. The next few years are going to be very interesting on the maker scene.
- visakanv 11y agoThis is awesome. I wonder what the next iteration will be? Will they eventually start giving out Raspberry Pis for free?
- dkx 11y agoThey already have: https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/
- Piskvorrr 11y ago6 quid is not quite free - but reasonably close.
- alexbilbie 11y agoThe magazine is £5.99 every issue to buy so yes the included PI is free. Not only are you getting a PI but you're getting a magazine full of advice and tutorials for the computer they've included.
- codeshaman 11y agoIt's out of stock :(
- merah 11y agoIt's flying off the shelves, had to vist three news outlets to find one! I got a spare one for a family member too, but if they change their mind I'll gladly post to a UK address.
- cconcepts 11y agoAmazing. If only I'd get my act together and do all the amazing stuff I planned when I bought my first pi - then I could justify buying this
- girishso 11y agoTwo years after buying mine, I put the pi to a good use only last week! Now I am using it as ad-blocker thanks to http://pi-hole.net/ http://pi-hole.net/, works like a charm. I ported the web interface for pi-hole to Go single executable (https://github.com/girishso/pi-hole-web https://github.com/girishso/pi-hole-web) Now looking for something interesting to do on my second pi! Edit: Added pi-hole-web link.
- bambax 11y agoThat's great, thanks!! I have a pi as a media server* connected to a projector via HDMI, that reads media files from a NAS on my home network; very efficient and lightweight. I will definitely try pi-hole; maybe I can have both running on the same pi. * via Raspbmc, which I just found out has apparently ceased to exist...
- simon_vetter 11y ago> * via Raspbmc, which I just found out has apparently ceased to exist... Try OSMC [1], it's a massive improvement over Raspbmc and is being developed actively. Works like a charm. If I'm correct, the main Raspbmc dev went over to OSMC a while back. [1] https://osmc.tv https://osmc.tv
- bambax 11y agoYes, thanks, but for now raspbmc works really well, I'm not sure I want to go through the whole update now unless there's a big compelling reason. I might upgrade to a 2B though, it's probably a lot faster (the current setup tends to freeze a little on rapidly changing frames).
- pavlov 11y agoA single transistor cost several dollars in 1950. A full-blown 1GHz computer is now the same price (cheaper even, accounting for inflation). What will $5 buy in 2080? It's going to be a billion times faster than this, but it's hard to imagine the form factor.
- partiallogic 11y agoI picked one up because why not but now I need to also buy several adapters so that I can use it.
- abdelhadikhiati 11y agoRaspberry still costs more than 100$ in my country, due the rarity of such tools sometimes we found ourselves obliged to buy it with that price and pay the difference, and even though this is such a great step, i really doubt it would have any effect on 3rd world countries where this is really needed.
- danpeddle 11y agoWhy the huge difference in costs..? International shipping..?
- abdelhadikhiati 11y agoIt's almost nonexistent in the market, so people having it, take advantage and sell it for imaginary prices compared to the original prices.
- danpeddle 11y agoIf there is a user group, then purchasing together and dividing costs might make life a little easier. could be a fun base to work on for making more hardware available too.
- privong 11y agoI suspect it's due to the combination of low sales volumes and import taxes. Here in Chile, Pi B's are around $50–60. Though to be fair, traditional PCs and laptops are more expensive than in the US (but not 2x as expensive).
- jgowans42 11y agoI find the lack of ethernet or wifi concerning. I get that they're trying to keep it small and low cost, but I can't immediately see any use for a Pi that can't run standalone.
- neals 11y agomedia player with an external HDD for content.
- jgowans42 11y agoYeah, that's basically all I could think of as well. I'd gladly swap the HDMI port for a wifi chip.
- yuvadam 11y agoSo you're basically saying you're not getting enough value for $5?
- drcross 11y agoNo, but like the Op, I would gladly pay double the price for some sort of onboard network connectivity.
- andygates 11y agoThere's nowhere to put it! And if you want bigger and more connected, just get the mainstream Pi.
- Klathmon 11y agoThere's a kickstarter I backed called C.H.I.P. that is exactly this. It's very similar in specs to the pi but comes with onboard wifi and bluetooth for $9 pre-shipping!
- daveguy 11y agoShould probably include an asterisk there to explain the shipping with the C.H.I.P. $9 pre-shipping* * shipping is $10 to $20 depending on destination So, a "$9" computer that's actually $19-$29 due to sketchy shipping practices. I expect Raspberry Pi will not gouge customers on shipping to make up for their advertising gimmick.
- jws 11y ago- 1ghz arm11 (40% faster than original pi) - 512MB ram - HDMI - Micro-usb - Micro-SD - 40 pin GPIO https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero/
- harel 11y agoThe MagPi magazine comes with a Raspberry Pi Zero, like the old floppies of the 90s. The lady at WHSmith told me they run out as soon as it got in today.
- gloves 11y agoJack Lang - Chairman of Raspberry Pi gave a great talk at Business of Software Europe on how RP came to be and its success since. http://businessofsoftware.org/2015/11/the-story-of-raspberry-pi-raspberry-pi-zero-jack-lang-business-of-software-europe-2015-talk/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2015/11/the-story-of-raspberry...
- jawns 11y agoFor $5, I'm in. Now: What the heck can I do with it?
- jacquesm 11y agoJust about everything you can do with a regular linux computer, if you need networking you're going to have shell out a couple of bucks for an interface. Ideal for embedded stuff, computers that you tie to some appliance, robotics, data acquisition, scada stuff, media players and so on.
- noonespecial 11y agoOh Nice! They are finally delivering on what I feel was the great promise of the Raspi in the beginning. Full linux install in the size and price of a micro (read: Arduino). Some people are bound to gripe about the "lack" of ports but its not like this one displaced the A or B models. Its just another spin of the concept where you don't have to pay for expensive physical parts you don't need. Its a linux server at a price cheap enough to buy one for each little project you want to do and then leave it there. Makers rejoice. I've got to hand it to the Raspi folks. They've really done an outstanding job creating their product line and getting it out to the masses. When they started, there was nothing but a sea of vaporware and "next-year" promises in the inexpensive SBC linux world. I rather famously doubted them at first. I am very happy to have been wrong.
- melling 11y agoThere is a great new USB standard for this form factor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Type-C https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Type-C It needs to reach a tipping point so the price drops but we're probably only a year away.
- DHJSH 11y agoI have no idea why Arduino is so popular--it has NO debugging support unless you use an ICE. (People "debug" with printf statements.) We use Netduinos because with .NET we can single step and inspect variables in live code.
- duskwuff 11y agoWhy is Arduino so popular? Brand name recognition, a decent standard library, and a ton of sample code and tutorials online. I agree that it's not a great platform, though. I personally prefer STM32 these days; it's dirt cheap (a basic development board is <$5) and powerful (72 MHz / 20 KB RAM / 128 KB flash on one of those boards). I believe there's even a way to integrate it into the Arduino IDE nowadays!
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoIME Arduino is so popular because it's so cheap. I can buy Arduino ProMicros on Alibaba cheaper than I can buy the Mega168 MCU itself. And that's not counting the PCB, additional chips or board.
- davexunit 11y agoDoes it still require proprietary blobs to function at all? A $5 ARM computer sounds great, but not if it needs blobs.
- markokrajnc 11y agoYou can try without a blob: https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv (booting directly from Broadcom VideoCore IV)
- david-given 11y agoEven if you write your own VC4 boot code, like a lot of these processors (including the Allwinner!) there's an onboard boot ROM which is the first thing which executes. On the Pi the boot ROM, which runs on the VC4, has enough intelligence to mount the SD card and load a VC4 executable from there into the internal SRAM. My understanding is that this initialises the SDRAM, and then loads another VC4 executable, which contains the RTOS which runs alongside Linux. Once that's up and running it initialises the ARM processor, loads the ARM kernel, and starts that going. But you'll never get away from proprietary blobs.
- mschuster91 11y agoI'd like an updated Compute Module. Given how small the Pi Zero is, it should be doable to fit it inside the layout and with the connectors of a MiniPCIe board (though, of course not with the pinout). Also, the compute module has support for USB Slave mode but there is no documentation for this - I'd like to see some expansion in this area as well. Or choosing of a CPU with a MII interface to allow real GBit or, heck, fiber/powerline/wifi adapters...
- Natanael_L 11y agoSame here. What I'm fantasizing about is a kit with a set of compute modules in a "tower stack" with a power supply, with horizontally oriented boards stacked on the height, with all compute modules connected to ports in the tower. And you could choose where the pin-outs leads - either straight out to connect to some electronics on the outside, or straight down to a router in the bottom. Then you could dedicate some pins on all boards to link to the router, making for a small compact HPC setup (easy to ventilate too) and connect stuff like per-module LED rows for module status info and whatever else you might like. Bonus point for a "split" tower with modules on both sides, folding down like some toolboxes do: https://www.howdentools.com/data/howden/ul/1406847600/1409331356b2885a151f3a0c2bea69246f9f1356c4.jpg https://www.howdentools.com/data/howden/ul/1406847600/140933...
- VLM 11y agoGoogle for PC/104 its exactly what you're looking for although its aimed at industrial control users (and unfortunately priced accordingly) Of course if you could guarantee a production run of 5 million then a contemporary PC/104 board could probably cost as little as a ras-pi. Note that there's PC/104 the concept and form factor, and another concept with the same name was a 104 pin header that was vaguely a PC/AT bus. After all, S-100 can do almost anything so an extra 4 pins shouldn't hurt anything LOL. Anyway my point is if you find references to the 80s era 286-AT level of performance bus, don't worry for a decade there's been stackable PCI equivalents and all that. Something to think about WRT "limited" PC/104 bus speed is its not like spec-ing gamer graphics cards... if the purpose of the bus is to connect a 4 kilosamples/sec 12 bit A/D converter, even something as slow as RS-232 would not be a limiting factor, for example.
- Raed667 11y agoI'm still bothered by Raspberry Pi's choice not to include WIFI by default in all/some of its products. Almost every Raspberry Pi project I have encountered needs some sort of connectivity and doing this with 3rd party dongles (some don't even work on most recent versions of Raspbian) is just ridiculous in my opinion.
- pjc50 11y agoThat raises the CE certification costs considerably.
- Raed667 11y agobut if they make like a B2 model + WIFI and just add 10$ to the unit price. That would cover it.
- VLM 11y agoHighly unlikely. For a market as immense as the USA that is way too high. For small markets it'll never pay the labor and local-FCC-equivalent certification costs. There would be tradeoffs and other problems; some countries are very locked down and unamused at the idea of someone telling their wifi they are in Japan despite being somewhere else thus enabling unusual power and freq limitations. Small countries and markets would be discriminated against, likely never getting a pi legally shipped to them, an intentionally avoiding serving poor people is kind of counter to most of the politics and rhetoric of the group. There is a compromise of putting a port on the thing where a locally puchased wifi dongle could be installed. The port would have to provide power and be fast enough to be wifi usable. It would be really nice if that port were popular. The Pi People seem to like community building and a USA distributor could bundle a USA FCC certified wifi adapter with every board, just plug it in. That port is called the USB port. So the solution to various implementation problems devolves into the current situation.
- Raed667 11y agoThis seems now like a first world problem, a nice guide to find would be like "Cheap Wifi dongles that work on raspbian".
- Hockenbrizzle 11y agoAwesome sauce. I wonder if they plan to make it modular like the folks over at Project Ara from Google ATAP. That would be a total hit with the Maker community.
- Natanael_L 11y agoLike the RPi compute module?
- castell 11y agoThe Zero, which like its predecessors is being manufactured in Wales I have an original RPI made in China. That was right before the made them in UK, as far as I remember. The Zero would need an Ethernet-port addon-board. And for further RPI 2 iterations they should move the power-connector to a different position (e.g. like the original RPI) - would be better for headless embedded projects with limited space. Having the Ethernet and power cable on the same (or opposite) side would be a great benefit.
- Kurtz79 11y agoFor 5 bucks it's fine without an Ethernet controller. I'm all for bare minimum functionality at this price. If you want connectivity there are plenty of options available: - buying its "big" brothers instead - use a USB to Ethernet adapter - Buy a wireless dongle (http://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-wipi-wireless-adapter http://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-wipi-wireless-adap...)
- Patronus_Charm 11y agoThis is great, truly impressive.
- eddd 11y agoI am no Rasberry expect, so I need to ask: Is it possible to connect Rassbery Zero to some network in some convenient way?
- theinternetman 11y agoMicro USB to ethernet dongle or USB dongle to Wifi Dongle
- thawkins 11y agoSomething like this would probaly work well, you would probaly be able to hack it and put tbe pi inside. http://www.dx.com/p/combo-usb-2-0-lan-ethernet-adapter-3-port-hub-for-tablet-pc-dark-grey-147462#.VleeZWiwrMI http://www.dx.com/p/combo-usb-2-0-lan-ethernet-adapter-3-por...
- mentos 11y agoWhat speakers/mic/battery/wifi dongle would be best to pair with this if I wanted to make my own open version of the Amazon Echo? I could see printing a 3D shell and selling a kit for $20 with the appeal of users being able to easily break it down if they wanted to repurpose the RPi.
- Yaggo 11y agoToo bad they didn't include camera module connector (CSI). Low-latency hardware-encoded h264 stream from camera is one of the most cool features in RPi platform. The Zero would be great e.g. for FPV fying folks, if it supported camera module. (USB cameras aren't answer here, as they typically don't have low-latency hw-encoding.)
- intrasight 11y agoYeah, I had hoped for that as well. But connectors cost money. Could the camera module be attached via the header?
- duskwuff 11y ago> Could the camera module be attached via the header? No. The Raspberry Pi GPIO header doesn't include all pins, and in particular it doesn't include pins that were used for other peripherals, such as the camera and display interfaces.
- Yaggo 11y agoInterestingly you can get out DPI display signal from GPIO pins. Adafruit is using this technique with their Kippah display, giving you fully accelerated display signal (unlike those crappy low-fps-low-res framebuffer driven GPIO displays).
- duskwuff 11y agoCorrect. My understanding is that trick was made possible by design -- one of their engineers specifically chose pins to bring out to the GPIO header to facilitate it. I've seen some variants on the "Kippah" to directly drive VGA.
- Yaggo 11y agoI asked this on RPi forums and got clarification from their engineer. It's not possible to connect CSI camera to Zero via GPIO. Required CPU pads are not connected.
- facepalm 11y agoWhat I would like to know more about is how to power these gadgets. Say I want a sensor that sends data to a server. Do I need to plug it into a power outlet? Can I run it off a battery for a significant amount of time (months)? Can I use solar power? How much power does WiFi consume, or should I look into Bluetooth or ZigBee?
- peter303 11y agoCertain cellphone chargers. As little as $5 on Amazon. You can buy this in a kit too with common connector cords and simple peripherals like lights and motors.
- teraflop 11y ago> Can I run it off a battery for a significant amount of time (months)? Depends on how big a battery you're willing to use. In the other thread, someone claimed that the Pi Zero's typical power consumption is about 0.8 watts, so running it for a month would require about 600 watt-hours. That's roughly the energy content of one car battery, or ten Macbook batteries, or about 230 alkaline AAs. A USB wifi adapter would probably add another 0.5-1.0W. The Raspberry Pi isn't a great option for this kind of long-term low-power application, because it doesn't really have any power management capabilities to speak of. If you can get by with a low duty cycle, you could use additional components to wake up the Pi only when necessary. Less-powerful microcontrollers are more likely to have this functionality built in; for example, TI's Tiva series of ARM Cortex-M4F chips have a "hibernate" mode in which they can draw as little as 5 microwatts. > Can I use solar power? Again, it depends. A solar panel that can provide ~1W is not very large or expensive, but that's the rated output under direct sunlight. The actual power available could easily be 10x lower if it's cloudy, or 100x lower under very bright indoor lighting. And presumably you'll still want a battery and charging circuitry to keep things running at light or in low light. It's certainly doable, but the power supply will end up costing a lot more than the Pi itself.
- facepalm 11y agoThanks!
- vonklaus 11y agoDoes it make sense to run your own hardware again? If you leased rackspace at a provider, you could just have tiny clusters of these everywhere for each service and pay virtually nothing. You could have it triple redundant and have it configured however you wanted. Edit: it was a dif time, but wasnt that hiw google got started? Tgey just bought a ton of hardware.
- geerlingguy 11y agoLike http://www.pidramble.com/ http://www.pidramble.com/ - running in my basement right now, but it's comparable in performance (for many workloads) to a cluster of t2.micro instances.
- harperlee 11y agoSo for the price of a $1000 pc I could get 200 of these. What would be great experiments for them?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- giarc 11y ago>What would be great experiments for them? Donating them to school computer clubs and seeing what teenagers do with them.
- harperlee 11y agoWell, if I were to use that hypothetical $1000 to help others, I think there would be more efficient ways to use them than donating RPis... my question was trying to point to technological discussion! But thanks for the suggestion nonetheless :P In the mean time, I found out about Beowulf clusters, highly interesting!
- ck2 11y ago$5 price tag makes sense now considering you can buy a full smartphone for that much now: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/net10-zte-paragon-4g-with-4gb-memory-no-contract-cell-phone-black/4297500.p http://www.bestbuy.com/site/net10-zte-paragon-4g-with-4gb-me... (just don't try to order more than two or hours later your order will be canceled) or http://www.bestbuy.com/site/verizon-wireless-prepaid-motorola-moto-e-4g-with-8gb-memory-no-contract-cell-phone-with-blue-grip-case-black/4407800.p http://www.bestbuy.com/site/verizon-wireless-prepaid-motorol...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 72deluxe 11y agoVery interesting! Still loving my early Raspberry Pi boards.
- mingodad 11y agoI just bought 2 magpi to get 2 raspiberry pi zero but connecting then to a android charger (without and with sdcard http://director.downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite/images/raspbian_lite-2015-11-24/2015-11-21-raspbian-jessie-lite.zip http://director.downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite/imag...) none of then lights the green led to indicate power on. Someone have a different experience or can tell something about this ?
- wldlyinaccurate 11y agoMake sure you are connecting the 5V power supply to the PWR IN port, not the USB port.
- mingodad 11y agoYes I did connected to the usb power in not on the other general purpose usb. Can someone tell if only connecting the power supply would light the green led (no sdcard) ?
- tdicola 11y agoOn a normal Pi the red light comes on when there is 5v and the green light flashes during disk activity like booting, I would bet the zero is similar. Don't use a cheap phone charger, use a good quality 1-2 amp power supply. Also be sure your sd card was correctly burned. Use the instructions and tools from raspberrypi.org--there are lots of crap SD burning tools so avoid them all. Try a different sd card and again use a good brand.
- mrob 11y agoI bought a copy of MagPi, and my Raspberry Pi Zero does not light up when I apply power. But if I connect it to my PC with a USB cable the Broadcom BCM2708 Boot device is detected, so I assume it is working. I haven't tested with SDcard present.
- mingodad 11y ago
- api 11y agoThe Pi is a wonderfully disruptive thing. I think it's a quiet stalking horse for the second personal computing revolution.
- ausjke 11y agoReally need a full-sized USB host port, so you can hook all kinds of gadget/dongles to it without an odd adapter dangling.
- rockmeamedee 11y agoThis is great, but for people who want to "get started in computing", don't they also need a display, a mouse and a keyboard? LCD screens are like, $100, a mouse is $10-$20 new and low-end keyboards are $10-$30. At that combined price, why does it matter if the computer is $25 or $5? And if one is going to outlay the 150 bucks in peripherals, they might as well spend a bit more than $5 on the computer to get a significantly better computing experience. Is there anything else going on here? Do they have a different approach that I'm not getting? It feels like, yeah, Moore's law is great and computers are cheap, but once RPi got to around or <$50 (which it did with the first version anyway), the computer was already cheaper than everything you needed to plug in to it.
- Frenchgeek 11y agoI'm guessing it's a rework on the compute module : small enough connectors to avoid having to remove them to start with and cheap enough to put it anywhere an arduino isn't quite powerful enough to work.
- lentil_soup 11y agoTrue, but imagine an university that could have a few peripherals and each kid could have their own RPi and share the monitors. Maybe it also makes it easier to do more daring things with it? it it breaks it's only $5.
- Xeoncross 11y agoThere is a lot of peripherals lying around. Even years ago when I didn't have two pennies to rub together I could still get unwanted keyboards/mice and even smaller unwanted screens. On the flip side, I don't need a screen for all my computers. Some are network devices now (SSH only) and some share the same screen because I use them for different things at different times.
- pcthrowaway 11y agoRight? But there are also plenty of computers with 512 MB of RAM lying around that you can get for free. And they're 'programmable' too.
- sawwit 11y agoSomeone made this nice comparison over on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3uc55k/58_years_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3uc55k/58_years_on/
- nojvek 11y agoI'll be that guy. The chip is cool but still requires multiple components through usb to do something useful. What I want is a $5 hackable phone with battery, touch lcd, camera, wifi e.t.c Great if it has a solar panel and gpio, so I can stick it anywhere and forget about it.
- malandrew 11y agoI would love to see someone sell these as preconfigured as minimal bandwidth tor exit nodes with wifi so they can be spread far and wide. Just connect to power, make sure it is connected to a wifi network and then leave it alone. Just make sure it advertises itself as such so that law enforcement knows that it is likely not owned by the owner of the Internet connection and therefore doesn't make sense to do anything other than find the device and disable it if that's what they want. It should have a similar disclaimer as the standard tor exit not notice, except it should say something like "this tor exit node is operating on a disposable computer and was placed clandestinely on this network without the consent of the owner" or something to that effect. I know there are ethical implications here, but that doesn't mean that something like this shouldn't or won't exist eventually.
- VMG 11y agoThere are also economical implications. Bandwidth isn't free. Now if you also could charge for your service with micropayments, we have a winner.
- Hyperborian 11y agoI believe the implication is that these would be placed in locations that have free wifi available, without necessarily having permission to do so.
- feelix 11y agoMcDonalds would be perfect
- geographomics 11y agoMost wifi networks are NATed, so this would only work if you could also reconfigure the router to forward the necessary ports to the device. You could use it more easily for hosting hidden services though, as those only require an outbound connection to be made to the Tor network. Hidden services on a hidden device.
- StavrosK 11y agoBy the way, if you get a bunch of these and want to have them communicate with other devices and themselves in a secure manner, I wrote a library to do just that: http://www.stavros.io/posts/introducing-string-phone/ http://www.stavros.io/posts/introducing-string-phone/ Feedback appreciated!
- davidone_f 11y agoAny place where could I find this magazine, guys? Tried in Liverpool Street / Moorgate (WHSmith / Waterstone) with no luck.
- seabee 11y agoCouldn't find it in those places in two other locations in outer London. Would be nice to have a list of stockists!
- tlrobinson 11y agoThis is neat, but I'd rather see a $10-$15 board with onboard WiFi.
- SarahofGaia 11y ago> Today, I’m pleased to be able to announce the immediate availability of Raspberry Pi Zero, made in Wales and priced at just $5. I'm confused: they say it's $5 but at Adafruit (one of the places where USAians can buy it), the cheapest are the Raspberry Pi Zero Starter Pack and the Raspberry Pi Zero Budget Pack, priced at $59.95 and $29.95, respectively.
- jedahan 11y agoIt's $5 at Adafruit. The starter pack has a whole bunch of stuff you might want for your first Pi, but probably can scrounge around for free or cheaper.
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- makomk 11y agoIt's not $5 at Adafruit because the stand-alone Pi Zero is out of stock and cannot be backordered. They'll quite happily sell you a $30 or $50 pack with it in though.
- SarahofGaia 11y agoIf it's $5 at Adafruit, then how come it doesn't show it? Most of the time a store will list something even if it's out of stock, but will just put a sticker on the entry that says "Out of stock".
- j4d3 11y agoThe $5 standalone was on their site yesterday morning with an "Out of stock" label. I suspect I wasn't the only person who was annoyed to see that listed next to the bundles, and they removed it because complaining. I still bought a bundle, because I haven't found any other way to get this in the next few weeks, and the board plus a few basics will be a great <$10 white elephant gift (after I see if I want to keep it for myself).
- ChuckMcM 11y agoPretty awesome price point.
- spencertg1 11y agoLove the whole raspberry pi mission. I wonder if in 10+ years time we'll see the children learning on it today generating a growth surge in "middle(young)-aged hobbyists"? We all hear about the heyday of the homebrew computer club, maybe the future waves of innovation will be from the "homebrew raspberry pi club". Here's to hoping!!
- rebootthesystem 11y agoTo me the most significant event is that of a magazine giving a way a computer. For me something like NVidia Jetson is a far more significant (and useful) development than the ever-shrinking bubblegum stick computers that simply aren't that useful. Yes, it costs 100x more but there's no comparison when it comes to what you can do with one. And, if that's too much, how about something like this for $39 (includes CPU): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157594 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157... or this for $59 (includes CPU): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138417 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138... of this one for $99 with a quad-core 2.4 GHz Intel CPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157626 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157... No doubt that a $5 stick computer has huge value for educational purposes and in some parts of the world it's going to make a HUGE difference. Bravo for that. Yet, we still need a keyboard, mouse (maybe) and a screen. Because the Pi Zero has an HDMI output the cheapest monitor you can buy is likely to be in the $80 to $100 range: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824112027 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824112... In other words, this is great in that now the cost of the computer has become a rounding error in the total cost of everything you need to actually make it useful. In other parts of the world if you are going to be in computing the difference between spending $5 and spending $100 is zero. If you have an iPhone in your pocket (very likely) you or your parents can certainly afford to spend $200 on a computer. Every single kid in the FRC robotics team I mentor has a smart phone and a laptop. If they want to hack on some hardware it'd be no problem for their parents to buy them a $200~$300 setup. You can buy a whole new mini laptop for that kind of money. Same token, every single kid in the FLL team I mentor owns one or more Lego Mindstorms kit at $350 a piece. Maybe what I am saying is this: What I would see as having more impact in education (again, the economic in other part of the world are different) isn't necessarily a cheaper computer. A race to the bottom with a crippled $1 computer isn't what is keeping the kids I interact with from having access to technology and computing. No, what's keeping them from entering is a lack of motivation due to a decidedly uninteresting process. When I was a kid I had to work hard to have a computer. I had to build it out of chips. Wire-wrap it. Bootstrap it with assembler. Write my own Forth. Write my own text editor. Learn about electronics and software. Build my own floppy disk controller board, etc. I was challenged and had to engage in discovery and there was no internet to hold my hand. I am not sure what the modern equivalent to this might be. I find that things like Pi, for some kids, make things so easy that they are bored almost instantly. Once they get the thing up and going there's nothing to do or whatever it is they can do gets complicated and messy very quickly. At the other end of the scale I see kids absolutely ripping it with Scratch on their laptops. It's fun, interesting and challenging enough with some guidance. I don't have the answers. Just a brain dump from working with about 100 kids of different ages and levels of motivation in two robotics programs.
- Jemaclus 11y agoI've got three Raspberry Pis. I don't know why. I don't know what to do with them. None of the projects that I've seen have been particularly compelling to me, and I'm not creative enough to come up with a good idea. So they sit on my desk, gathering dust, and act as a conversation piece when friends come over. "That? Yeah, I can build X, Y, or Z." and they say, "oooh, cool" and then I never actually follow through. I'm a terrible nerd. :(
- Spooks 11y agowhy not build a htpc or an arcade box? very straight forward and you'll have more to talk about when your friends come over!
- dwd 11y agoNice idea. 70s era arcade games running on a processor with more MFLOPS than an early Cray at ~1/1000000 the price.
- superuser2 11y agoCan you actually build an HTPC? My understanding is they can't really handle video, except from the purpose-built camera module.
- Fuzzwah 11y agoI've been running R-Pi based HTPC since the original R-Pi release. I current run a distro called OSMC (debian based, with Kodi on top) on my R-Pi 2 and it plays everything I throw at it with out an issue. http://osmc.tv http://osmc.tv
- xanderstrike 11y agoThat's exactly wrong. They have the same processors as used in phones, which means they have hardware level decoding for video. My B+ can stream massive 1080p blu-ray rips over ethernet with zero problems. They make fantastic HTPCs.
- shams93 11y agofor me this is my chance to build a cool digital synth with csound at the core
- cdnsteve 11y agoWhen I see $5 all I can think about is a massive cluster of these working together with something like Apache Mesos (http://mesos.apache.org/ http://mesos.apache.org/). The Raspberry Pi Zero, due to low cost, low power requirements (Around the 160mA mark (0.5/0.7W!) and small form factor, could be the future of data centres. You could literally build a 100Ghz machine for $500.
- metral 11y agoAmazing news to see this! I made a Homemade Sports Ticker using a Model B almost 1.5 years ago and its still going strong. Here's a couple of links: * Blog post: https://medium.com/@mikemetral/a-homemade-sports-ticker-875c73a5339 https://medium.com/@mikemetral/a-homemade-sports-ticker-875c... * Code to write to LED Sign: https://github.com/metral/led_sign https://github.com/metral/led_sign * Code to pull the scores: https://github.com/metral/scores https://github.com/metral/scores * The LED sign itself: http://brightledsigns.com/programmable/indoor/bs-4x16-mini http://brightledsigns.com/programmable/indoor/bs-4x16-mini Fair Warning: I haven't touched the code in over a year so it's not maintained. If I were to do things today, I'd probably switch to Go to make the score requests a bit more streamlined than the single synchronous process I have now, and I would throw it into a container as the #1 request I get is people struggling to install both the code base and the dependencies. Happy Hacking!
- prokes 11y agoThat's cool man, I'm sure you're friend was stoked. Props on the write up. I've got an old monitor I want to connect to the Pi, just not sure what info is worth displaying yet.