11 ms·

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

501 points by jwoglom 5y ago

rbanffy 5y ago
Now the Pi ClusterHAT can go to 20 cores of pure arm64 performance!
vmurthy 5y ago
Tangential but important : supply :) Here in Australia, seems like it is available from Nov 8 at Core electronics [0] [0]https://core-electronics.com.au/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-wireless.html https://core-electronics.com.au/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-wirele...
- justin66 5y ago
  When you're talking about the Zero, supply isn't a tangent. There has never been a strong enough supply of them.
boondaburrah 5y ago
Welp, excited to not be able to buy one of these. One thing that's been interesting is that despite the 2x markup of anything pi related where I live, the pi pico was available almost immediately at about $6. I guess I'll be going a bit lower level then.
sebbul 5y ago
Pi Zeroes always looked like a scam from Canada, as the approved resellers limit you to 1 unit and shipping was more expensive than the unit. Now at 15USD, it's the first time shipping is cheaper than the unit, but I can't get it below 35CAD (28USD) shipped to Toronto.
geerlingguy 5y ago
I've been testing one for a couple weeks, and a quick rundown on it: it has a quad-core A53, same CPU/SoC core as the Pi 3, with 512 MB of RAM. This means it can run 64-bit Pi OS, but it is memory-limited and even some of the benchmarks I ran needed extra swap space to complete. But for anything that does run in the 512 MB of LPDDR2 RAM, it is at least twice as fast as the Zero/Zero W, and sometimes 3-8x faster, depending on how things handle threading (4 cores is better than 1!). My biggest concern is overheating—even at the base 1 GHz clock, it will start to throttle after a few minutes in a case with no airflow or heat sink. You can overclock to 1.2, 1.4, or even in some cases 1.5 GHz, but it starts throttling a lot more quickly unless you have really good cooling.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Does it overclock/throttle automatically like Intel? E.g. if I put some good cooling, will it run on faster frequencies?
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    have you tested lz4? it's probably a little worse ratio, but it is ridiculously fast to decompress.
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    I could get it to run stable at 1.2 GHz in open air. 1.4 required good forced air cooling and still was a little unstable. Someone got it to run at 1.5 GHz but it was a bit unstable at that clock (overvolt of 8). Inside a case, it quickly heats up under load! In all cases, the CPU frequency starts stepping down when the temp hits 80C, and on the default clock it will go to 800 MHz until the temp is 79C. If it reaches 85C, it will throttle severely, all the way down to 400 or 600 MHz, I believe, until the temps get back down to 84C.
- jwoglom 5y ago
  Definitely seems a bit disappointing that 5-6 years after the original Pi Zero there's still only 512MB of RAM. Regardless, I'm excited to see what new projects will become feasible with the extra CPU performance. I just finished watching your YouTube video, so thanks for providing all of this insight. A new Pi Zero will certainly make small handheld emulators a lot more promising...
  - tehbeard 5y ago
    512mb probably means the power budget it's designed for doesn't get completely stomped. If you need more memory just get the pi4 and a suitable power brick for it
    - geerlingguy 5y ago
      According to the launch post, they also couldn't find a single-die 1 GB RAM module, so they couldn't physically install more unless they upped the complexity of the design significantly.
rektide 5y ago
Original RPi0 supposedly can idle at 0.4W, where-as the 3 (whose cpu this is based on) idles at >1.5W. It's cool to have this great small package, but this is a very different offering than the first RPi0W. It's felt really weird seeing so little progress in available low power ARM over the years. Atmel/Microships SAMA5D3 / SAMA5D2 with it's 600 MHz Cortex A5 (2009) still seems like- half a decade latter- one of a rare few genuinely low power Linux running SoC available for purchase/use. I'm forgetting what's available in the Cortex A7 line, which is a little higher power but which still has some very low power chips available for it, & at significantly higher performance ranges. A7 has a lot of chips you can't buy, only available in some tablets & or hard to get wearable chips, but I think there are some good offerings about too. ST has the ~$20 STM32MP1, to name one. Yet I just see so much non-materialization, non-availability. It feels like the rule. 2015's Cortex A35, 2016's Cortex A32, 2019's Cortex-A34... none of these chips seem to have really materialized in any genuinely available form. There are some off-brand tablets with A35 chips but generally that's about it. The low power segment has been rather ignored.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  The Pi 3 model A/B have a lot more electronics—check my video and blog post about the Pi for more on power efficiency—the Zero 2 W can run at 0.6W (100 mA) vs the Zero W at 0.4W (80 mA). Both idle a little higher if you're actively using HDMI and WiFi.
- zxcvgm 5y ago
  The processors on the Pis aren't really optimized for low power, and they aren't strictly ARM. These Broadcom chips have a VideoCore that starts up first, which then brings up the ARM cores (geerling goes into greater detail here [0]). I don't think there was any kind of work done to properly suspend both cores for sleep modes. If you're looking for low power ARMs, maybe other boards may fit the bill better. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHwL1_afSn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHwL1_afSn8
- zokier 5y ago
  i.mx8 Nano supposedly can idle at <0.2W, with max power somewhere around 2W. They have also announced ULP version if i.mx but that seems somewhat vaporware at this point. As for the relative unpopularity of Cortex A3x series, I suspect that might partly because Cortex M series has been creeping into similar performance territory, like for example the i.mx rt mcu on Teensy 4.x, which has Cortex M7 running at 600 MHz.
jcun4128 5y ago
side rant: it's annoying how you can't buy these things by themselves, usually bundled with crap I do want this, I think it's taken for granted how easy this thing can connect to a camera. I bought a Teensy/blue/BeagleBone/etc.. thinking "Oh I'll just plug in a camera into it". For the Teensy it won't but maybe the Beagle bone. I was using a single core Pi Zero so it was noticeable doing things like iterating over frames. Granted it can just be poor code on my part/noob in OpenCV.
- avhon1 5y ago
  It seems pretty easy to order just the Pi? I opened the US suppliers, and of the ones that aren't already out of stock, you can: buy directly from Makerbright: https://makerbright.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-.html https://makerbright.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-.html or place an order, which will ship in early November, from: * Sparkfun https://www.sparkfun.com/products/18713 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/18713 * PiShop https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-zero-w-2/ https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-zero-w-2/ * CanaKit https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w.html https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w.html
  - jessfyi 5y ago
    Ah thanks! I also just realized other vendors would likely ship later. Wish they mentioned them in the official blogpost as well.
  - jcun4128 5y ago
    Thanks for that, yeah I saw the two on the rpi site suggested were already out of stock. I do normally buy from Amazon/locker but I just grabbed one from MakerBright. Part of me feels bad whenever I use these so much computing wasted, like I have one taking a picture of an indoor garden/turning a light on/off with a cron job/Apache server and that's it. Oh well, good time for tech anyway.
  - numpad0 5y ago
    Zero WH and Zero bundles are unlimited but bare Zero/Zero W are limited to 1 per customer/account/shipping address. Allegedly sold at loss, that’s also why Zero WH exists.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
koenigvim 5y ago
too bad, no 5ghz wifi.
- _ea1k 5y ago
  Yeah, this was by far my biggest disappointment with it. The Wifi on the old one was a constant problem for me, and this one doesn't seem to improve it.
mikkelam 5y ago
Super exciting! We use the previous gen at my company to run octoprint software for our 3d printer farm and they do tend to run quite slow. This should be a nice needed upgrade. In general the RPI Zero series is really great value for a tiny linux machine.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  According to the OctoPrint Twitter handle, it runs great as an OctoPrint server[1]! [1] https://twitter.com/OctoPrint3D/status/1453608862188249095 https://twitter.com/OctoPrint3D/status/1453608862188249095
  - jrmcauliffe 5y ago
    I can't wait for this too. I've got a Prusa printer that's got the perfect spot for Pi Zero, but its never quite had enough juice to run octopi with all the trimmings.
vletal 5y ago
One thing which I miss on RPis, especially these tiny ones, is a tty exposed via the charging USB.
- Rochus 5y ago
  Or even better USB OTG.
  - guywhocodes 5y ago
    You can do this with gadget mode, the g_serial module.
    - Rochus 5y ago
      Sure, but it has two USB sockets of which one is only used for power supply; if that one could also be used as OTG (instead of just TTL RX/TX as suggested by the fellow) that would be great.
- jiggunjer 5y ago
  I'm not sure how that works? you connect the pi to your laptop and use putty to login? This would also require one of those tty-to-usb cables?
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    No, just a regular USB cable. USB's CDC protocol makes it look like a serial port to the host PC.
alexellisuk 5y ago
I've been running one of these for a few months too and was excited when I saw an ARMv7 CPU. In the open source and container world, many projects have stopped supporting the Zero and RPi1 due to its lack of RAM and slow CPU speed. Even running "go build" can take multiple seconds on a simple program. Starting Node.js was also fairly slow. The RPi zero shines for Python scripts that access hardware - for sensors and camera projects that are low power and cheap to make. It was actually perfect for the GrowLab project that we did over the summer with 20 others from the community https://growlab.dev https://growlab.dev - sensor data and camera images were aggregated to a more powerful RPi3/4 and then either uploaded to a static GitHub Pages site, fed into InfluxDB to create beautiful charts with Grafana. The new Zero 2 means that I can start to run ARMv7 or even ARM64 containers on the zero again, but with the limit of 512GB of RAM. The launch blog post explains why this couldn't be made higher. The first thing I tried out was not K3s, which I knew already suffers on a Raspberry Pi 3, but faasd. Faasd is OpenFaaS but built for pure containerd, no multi-node networking and no Kubernetes. It works fairly well for a few functions, even with NATS and Prometheus being deployed as part of the stack. So whilst you're not going to be building K3s clusters with these, they can run containers - with Docker, containerd, nerdctl and even as a full application stack with faasd. Where this gets more interesting for me, is hosting small applications, integrations or APIs. Perhaps with Ingress via a tunnel that can penetrate NAT/firewalls like Inlets, Argo or Ngrok. I've ordered one of the release models to see how it performs. Look out for a blog post from me soon.
- Already__Taken 5y ago
  found the same experience last night, k3s to heavy but I have faasd going now. just have to figure what to do with it now
- cr3ative 5y ago
  512GB should be enough for most people ;-)
  - bullen 5y ago
    MB
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Yay, another thing i won't be able to find anywhere for a year, then find it for $25 with "only one per customer"and $15 shipping. I understand it's a global chip shortage, but when zero W came out, there wasn't one.
- Jnr 5y ago
  It is currently available (and in stock) from the official resellers, at least here in Europe. Limited to one per order but that kind of makes sense considering the global chip shortage. Get one while you can. :)
- nsteel 5y ago
  Good news: in stock including US shipping at https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w for less than $25. Probably cheaper from US resellers but I'll leave that to you. Yes, one per customer, which is a reasonable policy right now.
- xd1936 5y ago
  Bought one this morning from PiStore.us for shipment to the United States for $15 + $8 shipping.[1] 1. https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-zero-w-2/ https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-zero-w-2/
bloopernova 5y ago
Random thought upon reading the linked announcement: If you stacked multiple Pi boards on top of each other, connected through the GPIO HAT connector, could you network them? Apologies, just woke up and coffee not kicked in. This is probably silly :) EDIT: yes, I should search for this sort of thing before posting: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=127660 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=127660 tl;dr "serial port, RS485 + SLIP of some sort, probably would max out at around 1Mbps, 4Mbps theoretically possible with small MTU's" and "There is no hardware reason why an RS485 network could not be used as the physical layer for at least 32 nodes, and with some of the RS485 driver chips, 127 nodes (they have stronger drivers)"
- MisterTea 5y ago
  RS485 is just an electrical standard for serial transmission that includes multiple devices on the same bus. It is not a network or transport protocol. I doubt SLIP would function on an RS485 connection as 485 is typically used in master-slave configurations where only one master unit sends messages and listening "slave" devices only respond if addressed. You'd have to write a protocol layer to handle the transport of packets over 485, even in four wire full duplex setups. The issue with "stacking" is the pins on each board are not part of a bus but individual programmable io pins. Any stacking would require an intermediary board to isolate all these pins safely while adding the necessary TTL serial to 485 interface chips (e.g. Maxim max485). CAN is similar to 485 where it's a 2 wire bus though it has smarter hardware which enables full duplex communication and any device can listen or transmit. Unfortunately it is pretty slow compared to Ethernet but plenty fast for its intended use.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    If the RPi SoC supported being an SPI slave (it doesn't) you could do something similar to a token ring network at up to - theoretically - something like 100 mbit/s.
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    or just use the standard rs485 protocol that all industrial hardware has used for decades and has preexisting nice libraries - modbus. Built in CRC, dirt simple, reliable.
fomine3 5y ago
It's great that finally it no longer use armv6.
jonpurdy 5y ago
I ordered one, then quickly cancelled because of the lack of pre-soldered header. Looking for a drop-in replacement for my Pi Zero WH due to time constraints (new baby). I presume they didn't make the pre-soldered header available at launch due to high demand and the ongoing chip shortage. Much easier to produce one less complex package. Despite having just 512MB RAM, I think it's perfect for the its common use cases. For me, the CPU increase will be helpful for getting it set up and installing software (especially if it needs to be compiled), not so much for when it's actually being used.
LeanderK 5y ago
How long before cutting edge hardware trickles down to stuff like the Pi Zero? I think a usb-c port would be more useful for these small form-factors, but it's probably a long way of considering there's only usb 2.0.
- hadlock 5y ago
  Yep lack of a USB-C power port is a no-go from my perspective. I only have a handful of micro usb cables left in the house, not interested in adding more at this point. Even the cheap terrible LED mini projectors, and high end Kindle e-readers have all switched over to USB-C for power. Strange to see micro usb on a Brand New Product in Q4 2021.
- oblio 5y ago
  Apparently this has it: https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550 https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550
f311a 5y ago
> a micro USB port, and a micro USB power port That's pretty sad.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  I can think of a half dozen reasons to justify going with micro B but I feel the same.
luegen 5y ago
Surprised nobody has mentioned or compared it to the Radxa Zero.[0][1] Spec of the Radxa Zero ($15): CPU: Quad Cortex-A53 1.8 GHz, 12nm process GPU: Mali G31 MP2 RAM: LPDDR4 512MB/1GB/2GB/4GB Storage: eMMC 5.1 8/16/32/64/128GB and uSD card HDMI: Micro HDMI, HDMI 2.1, 4K@60 HDR Multimedia: H265/VP9 decode 4Kx2K@60 Wireless: WiFi4/BT4 or WiFi5/BT5 USB: One USB 2.0 Type C OTG, one USB 3.0 Type C host GPIO: 40Pin GPIO, ADC/UART/SPI/PWM Others: Crypto Engine, support external antenna, one button Spec of the RPi Zero 2 ($15): CPU: Broadcom BCM2710A1, quad-core 64-bit SoC (Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1GHz) RAM: 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM Storage: None, MicroSD card slot HDMI: Mini HDMI port Multimedia: H.264, MPEG-4 decode (1080p30); H.264 encode (1080p30) Wireless: 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2, BLE USB: 1 × USB 2.0 interface with OTG GPIO: HAT-compatible 40 pin I/O header footprint Other: OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 graphics, CSI-2 camera connector, composite video and reset pin solder points The Radxa seems to be better value. I'm looking for a backup device for my RPi Zero W v1.3. The Zero has been such a amazing companion for me. I use it as Wi-Fi repeater on campsites such that we can all have internet simultaneously. Over the years I added temperature sensors, light sensors and an entire cooling system for the photovoltaic system. It now keeps track of the ambient temperature in the tent and fridge and sends me an SMS if the gets too high. Endless fun. [0] https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550 https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huAKEbyPcBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huAKEbyPcBc
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > The Radxa seems to be better value. The Radxa is a better value if pure performance is the only criteria. But the real value of the Raspberry Pi products is the ecosystem and code support. It will be much easier to find tutorials and software support for the Pi Zero 2 W than the Radxa and the Pi will be supported for a long time after the Radxa has been discontinued.
  - scottlamb 5y ago
    > But the real value of the Raspberry Pi products is the ecosystem and code support. Also in availability. I just clicked buy and will have a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W shipping to me in two days. I looked on seeedstudio for Radxa products; literally nothing is in stock.

501 points by jwoglom 5y ago

Now the Pi ClusterHAT can go to 20 cores of pure arm64 performance!

Tangential but important : supply :) Here in Australia, seems like it is available from Nov 8 at Core electronics [0] [0]https://core-electronics.com.au/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-wireless.html https://core-electronics.com.au/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-wirele...

justin66 5y ago
When you're talking about the Zero, supply isn't a tangent. There has never been a strong enough supply of them.

boondaburrah 5y ago

Welp, excited to not be able to buy one of these. One thing that's been interesting is that despite the 2x markup of anything pi related where I live, the pi pico was available almost immediately at about $6. I guess I'll be going a bit lower level then.

sebbul 5y ago

Pi Zeroes always looked like a scam from Canada, as the approved resellers limit you to 1 unit and shipping was more expensive than the unit. Now at 15USD, it's the first time shipping is cheaper than the unit, but I can't get it below 35CAD (28USD) shipped to Toronto.

geerlingguy 5y ago

I've been testing one for a couple weeks, and a quick rundown on it: it has a quad-core A53, same CPU/SoC core as the Pi 3, with 512 MB of RAM. This means it can run 64-bit Pi OS, but it is memory-limited and even some of the benchmarks I ran needed extra swap space to complete. But for anything that does run in the 512 MB of LPDDR2 RAM, it is at least twice as fast as the Zero/Zero W, and sometimes 3-8x faster, depending on how things handle threading (4 cores is better than 1!). My biggest concern is overheating—even at the base 1 GHz clock, it will start to throttle after a few minutes in a case with no airflow or heat sink. You can overclock to 1.2, 1.4, or even in some cases 1.5 GHz, but it starts throttling a lot more quickly unless you have really good cooling.

vbezhenar 5y ago
Does it overclock/throttle automatically like Intel? E.g. if I put some good cooling, will it run on faster frequencies?
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  have you tested lz4? it's probably a little worse ratio, but it is ridiculously fast to decompress.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  I could get it to run stable at 1.2 GHz in open air. 1.4 required good forced air cooling and still was a little unstable. Someone got it to run at 1.5 GHz but it was a bit unstable at that clock (overvolt of 8). Inside a case, it quickly heats up under load! In all cases, the CPU frequency starts stepping down when the temp hits 80C, and on the default clock it will go to 800 MHz until the temp is 79C. If it reaches 85C, it will throttle severely, all the way down to 400 or 600 MHz, I believe, until the temps get back down to 84C.
jwoglom 5y ago
Definitely seems a bit disappointing that 5-6 years after the original Pi Zero there's still only 512MB of RAM. Regardless, I'm excited to see what new projects will become feasible with the extra CPU performance. I just finished watching your YouTube video, so thanks for providing all of this insight. A new Pi Zero will certainly make small handheld emulators a lot more promising...
- tehbeard 5y ago
  512mb probably means the power budget it's designed for doesn't get completely stomped. If you need more memory just get the pi4 and a suitable power brick for it
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    According to the launch post, they also couldn't find a single-die 1 GB RAM module, so they couldn't physically install more unless they upped the complexity of the design significantly.

rektide 5y ago

Original RPi0 supposedly can idle at 0.4W, where-as the 3 (whose cpu this is based on) idles at >1.5W. It's cool to have this great small package, but this is a very different offering than the first RPi0W. It's felt really weird seeing so little progress in available low power ARM over the years. Atmel/Microships SAMA5D3 / SAMA5D2 with it's 600 MHz Cortex A5 (2009) still seems like- half a decade latter- one of a rare few genuinely low power Linux running SoC available for purchase/use. I'm forgetting what's available in the Cortex A7 line, which is a little higher power but which still has some very low power chips available for it, & at significantly higher performance ranges. A7 has a lot of chips you can't buy, only available in some tablets & or hard to get wearable chips, but I think there are some good offerings about too. ST has the ~$20 STM32MP1, to name one. Yet I just see so much non-materialization, non-availability. It feels like the rule. 2015's Cortex A35, 2016's Cortex A32, 2019's Cortex-A34... none of these chips seem to have really materialized in any genuinely available form. There are some off-brand tablets with A35 chips but generally that's about it. The low power segment has been rather ignored.

geerlingguy 5y ago
The Pi 3 model A/B have a lot more electronics—check my video and blog post about the Pi for more on power efficiency—the Zero 2 W can run at 0.6W (100 mA) vs the Zero W at 0.4W (80 mA). Both idle a little higher if you're actively using HDMI and WiFi.
zxcvgm 5y ago
The processors on the Pis aren't really optimized for low power, and they aren't strictly ARM. These Broadcom chips have a VideoCore that starts up first, which then brings up the ARM cores (geerling goes into greater detail here [0]). I don't think there was any kind of work done to properly suspend both cores for sleep modes. If you're looking for low power ARMs, maybe other boards may fit the bill better. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHwL1_afSn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHwL1_afSn8
zokier 5y ago
i.mx8 Nano supposedly can idle at <0.2W, with max power somewhere around 2W. They have also announced ULP version if i.mx but that seems somewhat vaporware at this point. As for the relative unpopularity of Cortex A3x series, I suspect that might partly because Cortex M series has been creeping into similar performance territory, like for example the i.mx rt mcu on Teensy 4.x, which has Cortex M7 running at 600 MHz.

jcun4128 5y ago

side rant: it's annoying how you can't buy these things by themselves, usually bundled with crap I do want this, I think it's taken for granted how easy this thing can connect to a camera. I bought a Teensy/blue/BeagleBone/etc.. thinking "Oh I'll just plug in a camera into it". For the Teensy it won't but maybe the Beagle bone. I was using a single core Pi Zero so it was noticeable doing things like iterating over frames. Granted it can just be poor code on my part/noob in OpenCV.

avhon1 5y ago
It seems pretty easy to order just the Pi? I opened the US suppliers, and of the ones that aren't already out of stock, you can: buy directly from Makerbright: https://makerbright.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-.html https://makerbright.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-.html or place an order, which will ship in early November, from: * Sparkfun https://www.sparkfun.com/products/18713 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/18713 * PiShop https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-zero-w-2/ https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-zero-w-2/ * CanaKit https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w.html https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w.html
- jessfyi 5y ago
  Ah thanks! I also just realized other vendors would likely ship later. Wish they mentioned them in the official blogpost as well.
- jcun4128 5y ago
  Thanks for that, yeah I saw the two on the rpi site suggested were already out of stock. I do normally buy from Amazon/locker but I just grabbed one from MakerBright. Part of me feels bad whenever I use these so much computing wasted, like I have one taking a picture of an indoor garden/turning a light on/off with a cron job/Apache server and that's it. Oh well, good time for tech anyway.
- numpad0 5y ago
  Zero WH and Zero bundles are unlimited but bare Zero/Zero W are limited to 1 per customer/account/shipping address. Allegedly sold at loss, that’s also why Zero WH exists.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

koenigvim 5y ago

too bad, no 5ghz wifi.

_ea1k 5y ago
Yeah, this was by far my biggest disappointment with it. The Wifi on the old one was a constant problem for me, and this one doesn't seem to improve it.

mikkelam 5y ago

Super exciting! We use the previous gen at my company to run octoprint software for our 3d printer farm and they do tend to run quite slow. This should be a nice needed upgrade. In general the RPI Zero series is really great value for a tiny linux machine.

geerlingguy 5y ago
According to the OctoPrint Twitter handle, it runs great as an OctoPrint server[1]! [1] https://twitter.com/OctoPrint3D/status/1453608862188249095 https://twitter.com/OctoPrint3D/status/1453608862188249095
- jrmcauliffe 5y ago
  I can't wait for this too. I've got a Prusa printer that's got the perfect spot for Pi Zero, but its never quite had enough juice to run octopi with all the trimmings.

vletal 5y ago

One thing which I miss on RPis, especially these tiny ones, is a tty exposed via the charging USB.

Rochus 5y ago
Or even better USB OTG.
- guywhocodes 5y ago
  You can do this with gadget mode, the g_serial module.
  - Rochus 5y ago
    Sure, but it has two USB sockets of which one is only used for power supply; if that one could also be used as OTG (instead of just TTL RX/TX as suggested by the fellow) that would be great.
jiggunjer 5y ago
I'm not sure how that works? you connect the pi to your laptop and use putty to login? This would also require one of those tty-to-usb cables?
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  No, just a regular USB cable. USB's CDC protocol makes it look like a serial port to the host PC.

alexellisuk 5y ago

I've been running one of these for a few months too and was excited when I saw an ARMv7 CPU. In the open source and container world, many projects have stopped supporting the Zero and RPi1 due to its lack of RAM and slow CPU speed. Even running "go build" can take multiple seconds on a simple program. Starting Node.js was also fairly slow. The RPi zero shines for Python scripts that access hardware - for sensors and camera projects that are low power and cheap to make. It was actually perfect for the GrowLab project that we did over the summer with 20 others from the community https://growlab.dev https://growlab.dev - sensor data and camera images were aggregated to a more powerful RPi3/4 and then either uploaded to a static GitHub Pages site, fed into InfluxDB to create beautiful charts with Grafana. The new Zero 2 means that I can start to run ARMv7 or even ARM64 containers on the zero again, but with the limit of 512GB of RAM. The launch blog post explains why this couldn't be made higher. The first thing I tried out was not K3s, which I knew already suffers on a Raspberry Pi 3, but faasd. Faasd is OpenFaaS but built for pure containerd, no multi-node networking and no Kubernetes. It works fairly well for a few functions, even with NATS and Prometheus being deployed as part of the stack. So whilst you're not going to be building K3s clusters with these, they can run containers - with Docker, containerd, nerdctl and even as a full application stack with faasd. Where this gets more interesting for me, is hosting small applications, integrations or APIs. Perhaps with Ingress via a tunnel that can penetrate NAT/firewalls like Inlets, Argo or Ngrok. I've ordered one of the release models to see how it performs. Look out for a blog post from me soon.

Already__Taken 5y ago
found the same experience last night, k3s to heavy but I have faasd going now. just have to figure what to do with it now
cr3ative 5y ago
512GB should be enough for most people ;-)
- bullen 5y ago
  MB

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

Yay, another thing i won't be able to find anywhere for a year, then find it for $25 with "only one per customer"and $15 shipping. I understand it's a global chip shortage, but when zero W came out, there wasn't one.

Jnr 5y ago
It is currently available (and in stock) from the official resellers, at least here in Europe. Limited to one per order but that kind of makes sense considering the global chip shortage. Get one while you can. :)
nsteel 5y ago
Good news: in stock including US shipping at https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w for less than $25. Probably cheaper from US resellers but I'll leave that to you. Yes, one per customer, which is a reasonable policy right now.
xd1936 5y ago
Bought one this morning from PiStore.us for shipment to the United States for $15 + $8 shipping.[1] 1. https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-zero-w-2/ https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-zero-w-2/

bloopernova 5y ago

Random thought upon reading the linked announcement: If you stacked multiple Pi boards on top of each other, connected through the GPIO HAT connector, could you network them? Apologies, just woke up and coffee not kicked in. This is probably silly :) EDIT: yes, I should search for this sort of thing before posting: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=127660 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=127660 tl;dr "serial port, RS485 + SLIP of some sort, probably would max out at around 1Mbps, 4Mbps theoretically possible with small MTU's" and "There is no hardware reason why an RS485 network could not be used as the physical layer for at least 32 nodes, and with some of the RS485 driver chips, 127 nodes (they have stronger drivers)"

MisterTea 5y ago
RS485 is just an electrical standard for serial transmission that includes multiple devices on the same bus. It is not a network or transport protocol. I doubt SLIP would function on an RS485 connection as 485 is typically used in master-slave configurations where only one master unit sends messages and listening "slave" devices only respond if addressed. You'd have to write a protocol layer to handle the transport of packets over 485, even in four wire full duplex setups. The issue with "stacking" is the pins on each board are not part of a bus but individual programmable io pins. Any stacking would require an intermediary board to isolate all these pins safely while adding the necessary TTL serial to 485 interface chips (e.g. Maxim max485). CAN is similar to 485 where it's a 2 wire bus though it has smarter hardware which enables full duplex communication and any device can listen or transmit. Unfortunately it is pretty slow compared to Ethernet but plenty fast for its intended use.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  If the RPi SoC supported being an SPI slave (it doesn't) you could do something similar to a token ring network at up to - theoretically - something like 100 mbit/s.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  or just use the standard rs485 protocol that all industrial hardware has used for decades and has preexisting nice libraries - modbus. Built in CRC, dirt simple, reliable.

fomine3 5y ago

It's great that finally it no longer use armv6.

jonpurdy 5y ago

I ordered one, then quickly cancelled because of the lack of pre-soldered header. Looking for a drop-in replacement for my Pi Zero WH due to time constraints (new baby). I presume they didn't make the pre-soldered header available at launch due to high demand and the ongoing chip shortage. Much easier to produce one less complex package. Despite having just 512MB RAM, I think it's perfect for the its common use cases. For me, the CPU increase will be helpful for getting it set up and installing software (especially if it needs to be compiled), not so much for when it's actually being used.

LeanderK 5y ago

How long before cutting edge hardware trickles down to stuff like the Pi Zero? I think a usb-c port would be more useful for these small form-factors, but it's probably a long way of considering there's only usb 2.0.

hadlock 5y ago
Yep lack of a USB-C power port is a no-go from my perspective. I only have a handful of micro usb cables left in the house, not interested in adding more at this point. Even the cheap terrible LED mini projectors, and high end Kindle e-readers have all switched over to USB-C for power. Strange to see micro usb on a Brand New Product in Q4 2021.
oblio 5y ago
Apparently this has it: https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550 https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550

f311a 5y ago

> a micro USB port, and a micro USB power port That's pretty sad.

cptskippy 5y ago
I can think of a half dozen reasons to justify going with micro B but I feel the same.

luegen 5y ago

Surprised nobody has mentioned or compared it to the Radxa Zero.[0][1] Spec of the Radxa Zero ($15): CPU: Quad Cortex-A53 1.8 GHz, 12nm process GPU: Mali G31 MP2 RAM: LPDDR4 512MB/1GB/2GB/4GB Storage: eMMC 5.1 8/16/32/64/128GB and uSD card HDMI: Micro HDMI, HDMI 2.1, 4K@60 HDR Multimedia: H265/VP9 decode 4Kx2K@60 Wireless: WiFi4/BT4 or WiFi5/BT5 USB: One USB 2.0 Type C OTG, one USB 3.0 Type C host GPIO: 40Pin GPIO, ADC/UART/SPI/PWM Others: Crypto Engine, support external antenna, one button Spec of the RPi Zero 2 ($15): CPU: Broadcom BCM2710A1, quad-core 64-bit SoC (Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1GHz) RAM: 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM Storage: None, MicroSD card slot HDMI: Mini HDMI port Multimedia: H.264, MPEG-4 decode (1080p30); H.264 encode (1080p30) Wireless: 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2, BLE USB: 1 × USB 2.0 interface with OTG GPIO: HAT-compatible 40 pin I/O header footprint Other: OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 graphics, CSI-2 camera connector, composite video and reset pin solder points The Radxa seems to be better value. I'm looking for a backup device for my RPi Zero W v1.3. The Zero has been such a amazing companion for me. I use it as Wi-Fi repeater on campsites such that we can all have internet simultaneously. Over the years I added temperature sensors, light sensors and an entire cooling system for the photovoltaic system. It now keeps track of the ambient temperature in the tent and fridge and sends me an SMS if the gets too high. Endless fun. [0] https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550 https://forum.radxa.com/t/introduce-the-radxa-zero/6550 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huAKEbyPcBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huAKEbyPcBc

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The Radxa seems to be better value. The Radxa is a better value if pure performance is the only criteria. But the real value of the Raspberry Pi products is the ecosystem and code support. It will be much easier to find tutorials and software support for the Pi Zero 2 W than the Radxa and the Pi will be supported for a long time after the Radxa has been discontinued.
- scottlamb 5y ago
  > But the real value of the Raspberry Pi products is the ecosystem and code support. Also in availability. I just clicked buy and will have a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W shipping to me in two days. I looked on seeedstudio for Radxa products; literally nothing is in stock.