4 ms·
I've seen some cool mods where someone took a USB hub or a wifi dongle out of its case and soldered the pins directly to the USB pins on the Pi itself. That get
by khedoros 11y ago
I've seen some cool mods where someone took a USB hub or a wifi dongle out of its case and soldered the pins directly to the USB pins on the Pi itself. That gets around a lot of the mess.
- dheera 11y agoI'd gladly pay another $2-3 extra for someone to do that for me with some automated manufacturing process, and sell me "Pi Zero with Wi-Fi" boards. Soldering mini-USB can be a bear, let alone doing it 10+ times to get a room full of mini-robots or drones or something else to do interesting things. The true value in a cheap computer is really that I can buy a huge number of them at a reasonable price. But a huge number of mini-PCs is terrible if you have to mod each board. If I only needed one, I'd be okay paying $100 for it. Even better if it's a "Pi Zero with USB Hub and Wi-Fi" for, say, $15, so that I can actually add something else useful besides Wi-Fi, such as a camera or sensor or something else. Sure, there are GPIO pins, but there are a lot of super-useful things out there that come in USB. I use an Arduino Yun for a lot of basic tasks such as having a sensor report values over Wi-Fi, or putting a couple servos on Wi-Fi with as little work as possible, but the price is steep at $60+ and not much computing power.
- khedoros 11y agoI take your point; soldering individual boards scales badly (although the pitch for the USB+power contact points only looks a little worse than for the GPIO pins: http://hackaday.com/2015/11/28/first-raspberry-pi-zero-hack-piggy-back-wifi/ http://hackaday.com/2015/11/28/first-raspberry-pi-zero-hack-... ).