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Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer (raspberrypi.org)
1271 points by MarcScott on Nov 26, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 513 comments



This 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.


This is probably the result of boards like the $9 C.H.I.P. stealing their thunder a little. (Which should actually be able to run Debian, unlike the Pi - Debian Jessie has built-in support for that generation of Allwinner chips.) The Pi has not actually been all that cheap lately compared to the competition. There's no reason they couldn't have done this years ago; like that Allwinner chip, the BCM2835 is an old, slow processor whose R&D costs were probably paid back long ago that they wouldn't otherwise be able to sell. This is especially true of the BCM2835, which is an ARM11 chip that's not widely supported outside the RPi ecosystem.


Olimex alleged[1] that the '$9' CHIP was being sold at a loss (which I guess is par for the course for a Kickstarter project).

>The Pi has not actually been all that cheap lately compared to the competition.

I'm not a big fan of the RPi Foundation & it's relationship with BroadCOMM, but which competition are you referring to? I tried searching for RPi-like boards a while back but only came up with HardKernel & the bananaPi, and I don't think either is a proper competitor.

1. https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/how-to-get-in-the-ne...


The Orange Pi PC is competing fairly directly with the Pi 2, for $15. (Though it does apparently have some thermal throttling issues and isn't yet supported by the upstream Linux kernel without patches.) Annoyingly so in some ways; they haven't bothered to pin out many SoC features that the Pi lacks, like line-in support.

Oh, and that Olimex article smells of FUD. As they themselves point out, the price they were quoted for the SoC in the C.H.I.P. wouldn't be competitive - it's the same as a modern quad core SoC for a outdated single core. It's not a new die either, just another (possibly repackaged) version of the old and cheap Allwinner A13, so there's little in the way of R&D costs to recoup.


This could even act as a custom chromecast-ish device. Still cheaper too!

(Although it lacks WiFi AC that the new chromecast has, and probably way weaker graphics, but a cheap WiFi adapter or ethernet and having most stuff streamed should be workable.)


> (Although it lacks WiFi AC that the new chromecast has, and probably way weaker graphics, but a cheap WiFi adapter or ethernet and having most stuff streamed should be workable.)

This irks me a bit with the new "$5" RPi. Yes, it's $5… For a device without a power cord, without networking, and where you need adapters (and/or solder on a UART) to plug anything into it.


So... you will need to buy a power adapter and an Ethernet cable? That will come to, what, another fiver?


There's no ethernet port. So, also an ethernet adapter. But there's only one USB port (µUSB, too, so you most likely need an adapter to regular USB). So if you want more than just ethernet, you'll need an USB hub. But the RasPi's power supply has always been weak, so better get an actively powered one…

And soon you're paying four times as much for the accessories than for the RasPi.


This is an awesome board for embedded development. Not as powerful or I/O rich as the Beaglebone Black, but add $6 worth of CAN transceiver chips and a 12V->5V switching power supply and you've got an incredibly powerful automotive compute unit. The Pi 1 was a bit underpowered for what I'm doing, and this might hit the sweet spot while dropping $35 off my unit cost for small quantities. None of the issues you mention affect that calculation at all.

Who uses ethernet anymore?


That's exactly what I'm going to use this for, too. Right now I have an original Pi B logging GPS and OBD data, but it's crammed into a small storage spot in the car and is a big waste of space. I'm super excited to be able to cut my project to less than half its original size. I don't need ethernet (other than for debugging), four usb ports, etc. etc. I think this is going to be fantastic for creating homemade embedded devices.


Do you have or did you follow a write up for this? I know I would be interested in reading how you set that up!


I don't right now, unfortunately, but a writeup is next on my list of projects after the carputer is complete. I'll post it here if there's interest. For learning about the OBD protocol, though, these resources have been very helpful:

The ELM 327 data sheet (this is the chip in most OBD devices you'll find on amazon): http://elmelectronics.com/DSheets/ELM327DS.pdf

Wikipedia's article on OBD PIDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBD-II_PIDs

"A complete guide to hacking your vehicle bus on the cheap & easy": https://theksmith.com/software/hack-vehicle-bus-cheap-easy-p...

There's a PyOBD python module out there (my carputer is built in python), but it's a fairly simple process so I just rolled by own using pyserial.


How exactly has the power supply been weak? I've been running three PIs (A+, B and B+) for a few years with no problems with just simple cell phone power adapters. However, I'm not plugging any extra hardware into them...perhaps that's why I haven't run into problems?


Yes, the parent was talking about lacking power through the Pi's USB ports thus often requiring a powered USB hub.

My issue is with the Pi's use of micro USB for power, I'd rather it use a barrel connector, it's not like it doesn't have the space. Yes, I know the choice is based on the presumption that everyone already has a micro USB power adapter from a cell phone. The use of micro USB for power on this Pi Zero makes a lot more sense given the form factor.


> However, I'm not plugging any extra hardware into them...perhaps that's why I haven't run into problems?

Yes. Phone chargers provide plenty of power for the Pi itself, but once you add several USB devices like wifi/ethernet you'll need beefy ones.

But even that is normally not much of a problem, because (especially on the B+) each device has their own port. If you plug several into a hub, however, you'll quickly exceed the hub port's power rating. Hence the need for an active hub.


USB-OTG cables with power supply exist.


Ethernet USB adapters tend to be very flakey. (At least that's my opinion/experience.)


It was my understanding that the ethernet on the Raspberry Pi sat on the USB anyway.


Not just an ethernet cable, I think. From the images it looks like there's no Ethernet port on the RPi Zero.


Would be neat with an ethernet adapter with Power-over-Ethernet plus a simple micro-USB converter/USB-OTG cable. Yes, I'm aware that might raise the price a bit...


Other than hack value, I don't see it as a replacement for a $35 Chromecast. Even then probably better to root a Chromecast due to all the hardware benefits mentioned above.


How rootable are they, and will that break updates?


"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."

I seriously doubt about your first point. Adding the cost of accessories (mouse, keyboard, screen) and a shipping cost, Raspberry Pi costs the same as a decent, used laptop that can be used to install a full Linux distro. Even getting Raspberry Pi Zero with essential kit (cabels + the smallest SD card) to my country rises its costs to 20£, add the cost of accessories, and you can get another working used laptop (and as a bonus Ethernet/WiFi connection which RPi Zero lacks). Don't get me wrong, Raspberry Pi is great for tinkering and home projects, I have much respect for what they are doing, but getting "computer to every home" is not it's strongest point.


It seems awfully silly to argue that it costs the same once you add in the price of a retail monitor. You're just saying that the price of the computer is negligible to the setup. They don't manufacture the peripherals, it's weird to blame them for not magically also dropping the price of those other things that they don't make or sell. Besides, it's pretty easy to get free mouse/keyboard/screen via donations from companies or individuals who upgrade if you're that worried about cost.


To add a fifth point if I may - it was also rocket fuel for getting CS into the (what most here will call 'K12') curriculum.

When I (only ~5 years ago) took GCSE (last compulsory qualification) 'IT' - even though it was the slightly different course for 'more able' pupils - we were learning how to make Flash animations, use MS Office, Windows Movie Maker, and sorry things like that.

Forget "fifth point" - I think it's impact on schools is #1.


Pre-GCSE was even worse. Taking screenshots of each step of copying a folder to show that we knew how to do it.


Are 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.


How 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.


Oh, yep sure! And the visible facts are?

(really, no needs to downvote me. I would love to see this thruth, just sceptical)


Here are some articles in this subject: 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


Personally, I am very much in need of an office suit.


Definitely an impressive feat. I really, really, really wish it had on-board Wi-Fi though. At least that would make it a useful web server.

The way it's designed now, it's kind of unusable for anything useful without making it a 3X larger package. Add a Wi-Fi dongle and the converter from regular to micro-USB is about the size of the board itself. And since it only has 1 USB port, you'll need a full-blown hub to connect any other stuff like sensors, keyboards, or whatnot.


For one I'm glad it doesn't have wifi since that'd add on size and cost. I hope that the ecosystem takes off and shields get created like wifi, bluetooth, gsm, etc. That would be really useful and give everyone flexibility.

From the differences amongst the Arduino, I see the hdmi as a necessary evil. Otherwise it'd be too cumbersome to debug.


I totally agree. One of the reasons I've started using an Onion Omega is because of this reason. IoT is pointless if you can't connect to the I easily, IMHO.


Yeah, I played with an Onion Omega for a while. The downside to it is the horribly limiting 16MB flash (with 64MB RAM, WTF?). When I first read it, I thought it was 16GB and a typo. (We have 128GB micro-SD cards already, and all they could put was 16MB onto it?)

That's where the Pi excels since it has a micro-SD slot (and a much faster CPU of course). But then, no Wi-Fi ...


Not all flash is equal. If it's 16MB of fast NOR flash for direct code execution then it's not so bad.


> I think some Wayland work was also done

Done then abandoned. Doesn't work with their currently shipping hardware/OS.


This is so cool, it's even cheaper than an Arduino. This could turn into a standard embedded development, OS development and learning board for every enthusiast and students.

The cost makes it a great choice for students with less resources.

This is easily my pocket pc now.


Oh 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.


Buy magazine, get a free computer. It's a pretty good time to be alive.


There is a great new USB standard for this form factor:

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.


I 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.


Why 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!


Arduino is popular because it was the first one that got big and built up a community. It's the same reason the RPi is so popular despite not being especially compelling from a pure spec standpoint.

You can get more performance for less money with other boards, but you'll have to figure out a lot more stuff on your own.


IME 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.


I'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. :(


Just as a counterpoint, I have found many, many uses for Pis in my life. One is hosting my home automation software, I have built several information radiators with it, one is acting as a network-controlled media player, I even made one that acts as a faux remote control for the AC with IR diodes attached to the GPIO ports.

By contrast, I have several Arduino boards sitting here, and never found a good use for them. For me the appeal of the Pi lies in the combination of low energy usage, low price, networking, and comparatively high computing power. Once you get over the "woah, wasting an entire computer just for [insert menial task]" barrier, it's simply incredible what this single component enables you to cook up on a whim. The Pi allows me to make things that are not yet (or will never be) available commercially.

However, I would not say this thing is necessarily useful for all hackers or nerds. It's only useful if you have ideas for small, self-built devices that require programmable intelligence. Take note that this is also fundamentally different from the stated purpose of the Pi, as stated by its manufacturer.


I have a Raspberry Pi 2 and would like to buy a digital scale, and somehow tweak it so that it can sync my weight with my myfitnesspal account anytime I weigh myself, how do you suggest I get started with this? I don't have much of an electronics background.


Why not use bluetooth and a Wii balance board? eg. https://github.com/damariei/wiiscale



I have been searching for the same thing, ideally I'd like to buy an electronic scale with a digital I/O port. You may have more luck finding these in the US than I had in the EU, but in any case I wasn't able to find anything that hooks up to a computer in a non-proprietary way. As with home automation, all products seem to sync to the cloud, most of them in a one-way fashion.

I lost track of this idea a few years ago, so the situation may have changed. But if it hasn't, I see the following options for you:

1) find a cloud-synced scale that offers an SDK or at least some way of retrieving the data from the cloud.

2) buy a low-cost digital scale, take it apart and see what you can do with a voltmeter and a soldering iron. At the very least, you should be able to hook into the raw analog weight data which you could feed to a Pi with an A/D board. The nicer solution would be to siphon off the digital value. Even in scales where one chip does everything you could still try to pick up data going to the LCD. However, that might require some epic cabling and soldering, not sure it's worth it.

3) cheesing it: hook up a networked camera and point it to the scale's display. You can do this with any old android phone and a remote webcam app. Have the software on the Pi (or some other computer) pull the image when you step on the scale, run OCR on it, write the value out to wherever you want.


What about option 2.5? Rather than hack the hardware, hack the software; buy a cloud-synced scale and sniff the traffic it sends out with the pi.


Wouldn't that be option 1.5? ;)

Yes, in principle. If they are not obfuscating and/or encrypting their data, which is a big if. And you'd be bound to keeping that packet sniffer online forever, piping matching data to where you need it.


Mmmm.

I had a conversation the other day about side projects. People would ask me what I did for side projects, since I have experience in software, electrical engineering, control systems, mechanical assemblies, etc.

My answer was generally that at my day job I got to write software to control electromechanical systems with a budget in the millions. What am I going to do on the side to compete with that?

Sound familiar? I'm guessing that a lot of your "I don't know what to do with it" is because even a cheap laptop, desktop, or tablet is so much easier to work with and has pretty much greater capability than the RPi that the latter just sits and gathers dust.

Oh, and if it helps, in addition to my RPi gathering dust, I also have a BeagleBone and about a dozen flavors of Arduino :-) At least I do some consulting work with Arduino code, so they get used a bit.


It used to be called a "hobby", but now it's a "side project"?


The pi was an odd thing. Out of the box it was 'suited' for GPIO from python. For any better project you'd need to know electricity. Or going below and learn the SoC weird architecture...

But recently I used one as an IRC bouncer, and another as a XBMC host.

Before that I just wanted to see how arch+dwm+emacs would feel on a 700MHz prev-gen. ARM CPU. Acceptable. I tried to underclock it down to my first desktop computer freq (p75), I've never seen linux run on such slow freq.

I also enjoyed the pre-compiled cross compiler so I could write factorial on my x64 machine and then deploy it on my rpi cluster of 2. None of this is amazing and no hard requirement on a pi (I could have done the same in VMs or with MIPS emulators but ... it would be more setup and less toying).

Impulse buy for most.

ps: One more major downer for me, hardware compatibility, too frail. SDCard would fail, usb would fail, first psu would not push enough amps ... It made you realize how the ATX desktops shielded you. And now I was at the point where I couldn't be sure of anything without researching wikis for hours. Again electricity.


Build them out as dummy media boxes and sell them for a markup. I've had people knocking my door down after they saw my Kodi setup but I simply pointed them to the how-to guides and told them to learn for themselves. I'm sure there's a few people out there who'd take one for $50 or so.


Probably. But at $50 each you're not really making a profit.


There is a "Dragon Box" on Amazon that sells for $270ish and appears to be a lower-powered Android Kodi box. I imagine that a second generation Pi could perform just as well.


chinese seem to do just fine at that price point

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Streaming-Med...


I set mine up with a camera to do timelapse.

https://simonswain.com/day


This is cool, did you follow a guide to set it up, or just wing it?


Mine is collecting dust, meanwhile I have a list I wrote while waiting for it to come in the mail of all the things I was going to try on it:

* ZNC for IRC connectivity * connected to backup server for incremental backups * connected to backup server for bittorrent downloads * media server streams bittorrent downloads to macbook * test web server * git server * owncloud or ftp server for sharing files * controls light switch via http->gpio * nes emulator through hdmi to tv with usb nes controller * ddclient for dynamic DNS of c1.jrcii.com on afraid.org * Run printer jobs/server * snort + snorby * web SDR * WPA2 cracker * in-room temp humidity to menubar and blinds * pet feeder/waterer * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXmCiaRc9XU * piphone


Familiar stuff... at the end of the day, I just end up doing the software side on my macbook. Like running a server, or some old console emulator. Media boxes are useful, but it's a bit like buying cakemix and making a cake, it's so trivial at some point you stop caring about the process and just buy a cake.

As for hardware projects... I've never had an idea for one I'd actually want or care for. Things like a lightbulb that flashes when you get a tweet, and that reads it out loud when you wave your hand infront of it... pet feeders... etc I can do without. Would be fun to build but I'm so busy these days I can only motivate myself to make time if I like the end product I'm building, too.


I hear ya. One of my Raspberry Pi's sat around for a year or two. Then I got this idea to connect my sheet-fed scanner to it and scan pages directly to Dropbox. That worked nicely. My 2nd RPi I got 2 Canon Selphy Printers and setup a gmail account where I could send pictures to. The RPi picks up the images and send them to the printers in a round-robbin fashion. ... I guess what I'm saying is the sky is the limit... So how do you follow-through? The idea needs to have some practical purpose. In my case, I use both those setups regularly.


What brand of sheet feed scanner?


I used my first Raspi to build one of these - got me interested in other music projects like DACs etc.

http://www.pimusicbox.com/


The real fact is the Raspberry Pi are massive in the IoT arena. Just because Joe Average tinkerer doesnt know what to do with them this size reduction is a big deal for industry, Easy money.


I suppose it's good these sold out so fast. I probably would've bought six or seven, used one, and left the rest to collect dust.


I hear ya, I've been "lucky" and got my order in on every model of Pi on the day of release - even the original. I went through the same process of "ooh, shiny thing!" when I saw this announcement, then thought back to my other RasPi's sitting on my desk doing nothing and decided to leave it for someone who might actually get some use out of it. I'll be getting a Zero when they're more generally available though, if only to complete the collection!

That said, they have been used in the past for various things - a simple SSH server, a networked webcam, a serial interface for my Atari ST, and I've even done some tinkering with a breadboard and the GPIO, so I have had some use out of them at least.


I'm new to tinkering and discovered you can build an SNES emulator out of a Pi, so that's one Xmas gift right there! I have 2 more Pis on the way. Not sure what I'm going to do with those yet, but maybe a NAS for my Dad?


why not build a htpc or an arcade box? very straight forward and you'll have more to talk about when your friends come over!


Can you actually build an HTPC? My understanding is they can't really handle video, except from the purpose-built camera module.


That'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.


My phone doesn't ever play 12GB blu-ray rips; and the rpi hardware is older than current phones (which use armv7 and armv8). Given the speed of the cpu, it's surprising it can decode a full H264 stream.

But It's good to know. The down-vote seems unnecessary.


It's not so much software running on the CPU doing the work here. It's hardware support for decoding via the GPU that enables it.


I'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


Been running OpenElec on mine for years now. Works great and does 1080p output without transcoding or anything like that.


There are several HTPC implementations (eg. RaspBMC). They're all pretty nice, but personally, I just use omxplayer, which is the command line package that powers RaspBMC under the hood. It's a command-line-only media player, but it plays anything I can throw at it, including live-streaming 1080p YouTube videos.

The command-line interface for omxplayer is a bit verbose, so I wrote a basic wrapper in BASH, so all I need to do is type "play <url>" and the video will begin streaming after a 10-second buffer. I keep a Screen session open on the Pi so I can drop in and command it from anywhere. At any given point, that little Pi can be simultaneously playing 1080p video, while downloading another two videos in the background. Incredibly capable little devices!


Nice idea. 70s era arcade games running on a processor with more MFLOPS than an early Cray at ~1/1000000 the price.


This 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-comp...


The 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.


I can't really see that — neither the circuit board header nor the cables are proprietary.


Doesn'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.


Arduino 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.


Even more awesome: Skip the extra Arduino and use the ESP8266 as your Arduino.

https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino


I realise how silly this question may seem but here we go:

If I get an ESP8266, I can have something that run code, sit on my home network wirelessly and use it to do things like report on sensor inputs? Am I missing some larger expense that would be required as this seems very cheap compared to other options I've seen.


The cost is $4 for a NodeMCU, $2 for the sensors, $1 for a breadboard to stick them on, and $1 for a microUSB cable to power them from. You can power the sensors from the NodeMCU's Vin, since that's the 5V from the USB.

I have done exactly this, it sends values to an MQTT server on my NAS every second or so, which the NAS then adds to Graphite and plots them in Grafana. It also has some logic to act on these values and send commands back, like turning lights on and off, etc.


All that terminology at a really low cost, awesome.

I feel like this comment could be turned into a popular blog post.


I can write up the sensor setup I have at home, if you want. It has motion, temperature, humidity, light sensors and IR/RF remotes for controlling devices, and a burglar alarm.


Please do write about it. Personally, I'll be happy to steal as many ideas as I can for my upcoming home installation :).


Great, I'll give it a shot tomorrow. I also have a mini-ecosystem of Python scripts to communicate with the sensors over serial and to read values, etc. I'll post that as well.


Great! :). Will be refreshing /new/ tomorrow.


Hmm, it looks like I open-sourced most of it a while ago (way to go, past me!):

https://github.com/skorokithakis/ArduiRC

I'll write up the details, but this is a good chunk of it.


I JUST started this exact functionality to communicate with a wireless scale, thanks for sharing!


You're welcome, I'm working on some NodeMCU-based designs now, with IR as well.


So, where's the Show HN? ;).


Man, I spent all day yesterday trying to reimplement the sensor for the ESP8266, as I thought it would be better to have it report over MQTT, but the damn thing keeps crashing in seconds. I literally cannot keep it working for more than a few seconds, no matter what I do.

I'm pretty disheartened, I'll try some more and either succeed or go back to an Arduino over serial... Do you have any experience with making it not crash?


Sadly, my ESP8266 experience is only about to start next week, I'm still abroad. But from the experiences of some of my friends, consider replacing the firmware on the ESP - some units were apparently sold with buggy one that made the module crash after short time.

Good luck!


Yeah, I've tried flashing the Arduino firmware (I think it gets flashed every time regardless). I'll keep trying and let you know, thanks!

By the way, if you don't want to keep checking the comments, you can follow me on Twitter at @stavros and experience my frustration first-hand. I'll be posting about it there.


I'm using HN Notify, so I generally get replies straight to my inbox (except some weird bug once that made the service not work for me for like a month or two). But yeah, maybe Twitter is a better place to have real-time updates. Will be following. Thanks :).


I just got it to run, yay! Things are going well, and MQTT functionality has been working well for the past hour. Just checking in :P


Copy that!


Perfect, thanks, I'll have a look at the NodeMCU, looks like exactly what I'm after.


The nodemcu is definitely the sweet spot. It saves you the trouble of power management, is breadboard friendly, and integrates the programmer. It's way easier to work with than the base ESP-01.


Simply put ESP8266 & Co. are awesomeness incorporated.

http://www.instructables.com/howto/esp8266/


Brilliant, I'll have a look through those. Thanks for the link.


The only other part needed to get this running is a programming cable. The ESP8266 does not have a USB port but a serial one, so you need an adapter to connect and programm it. e.g.: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12977

Just be careful not to connect the 5V VCC to the ESP8266, it will probably kill it.


That's fantastic, thanks :)


The SparkFun ESP8266 Thing Dev Board [0] has a USB-to-serial so you can use a micro USB cable. They're obviously more expensive but ESP8266 breakout boards like SparkFun's Things and Adafruit's Huzzah are more breadboard-friendly an generally easier to work with.

[0] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13711


Yes. At least for limited values of yes.

You need to run it on 3.3v which means 3.3v versions of your sensore or external level shifting. You've got limited IO compared to, say, Arduino.

But of you've got 3.3v sensors - yeah - all you need is an ESP8266 and some way of providing 3.3v. (And probably some pulldown/up resistors and decoupling caps...)


I'm pretty sure the digital I/O on the ESP8266 is actually 5V tolerant according to the datasheet, though this isn't widely advertised and there's some inaccurate information drifting around from back when the specs weren't fully known. (The same isn't true of some official Arduino boards which should not be exposed to 5V on the I/O pins.) It's a very nice little chip.


to makomk: No first-hand experience, but entotheteeth on reddit, says that 5v data on the I/O will kill your device in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/esp8266/comments/3bm061/5v_board_wi...


Fantastic, thanks for the info :)



Good one, thanks!


While I agree completely with what you're saying, I think it's almost unfair to be comparing this to an Arduino or NodeMCU - this is orders of magnitude more powerful.


At this price point, for many projects it doesn't matter; you can now use Raspberry Pi as a throwaway SOC for powering little stuff. I wouldn't, for example, put an $35 RPi 2 in charge of a bunch of sensors over my doors, but with $5 RPi it is an option.

EDIT:

And given the power, you can start offloading computation on what would otherwise be "dumb" control/data acquisition units. Hell, with that much compute you can start running serious DSP on it, which opens some additional use cases.


The only case where it matters for me is that this runs Linux, which means that I'll have an extra computer to secure against intruders. An Arduino can't do as much damage to the rest of the network if it gets hacked.


Linux also isn't a real-time OS which is often important when dealing with motors and sensors.


However, you can get very far with the built-in real-time capabilities. If your software stack can deal with occasional jitter in sensor updates (and normally you have to take that into account), you can compile a stock kernel with PREEMPT_RT and can use C to build software that has to do IO every 1ms. In POSIX. That is huge.


What would be a real-time OS? I'd be interested in hooking up a bunch of independent boards that could interact with each other, and have as quick as a response to sensors as possible... Do you have any advice as to where to start with this type of project?


Sensor latency will be measured in milliseconds in Linux. A real time OS is more necessary when you have feedback loops, inverted pendelum problems, bitbanging protocols, etc. Not being a real time OS just means that when you say "ping me in X time" it might ping you in X +- Y. Y tends to be too big for critical applications, but generally small enough that it won't matter.


Don't plug an ethernet adapter or wifi dongle into your Raspberry Pi Zero if that's your problem.


How would it communicate?


It could run RiscOS instead, with a very different attack surface?


As a programmer who used to like taking things apart and playing with solder in school seeing these kinds of things fill me with enthusiasm and joy - and then I remember I need a wired power supply or a battery and suddenly enthusiasm is gone :( I wish we had wireless power transfer - for these kinds of things losses wouldn't even matter.


Yeah, powering stuff sucks. With ESP8266 you've pretty much eliminated the need for a data line for home automation, but you still need a power line.

My current solution (to be deployed in a week or two, after I get home): $2 Chinese fast charger with 4 USB ports (2x 2A, 2x 1A). I had a chance to test them personally before buying; they're decent enough for the task and cheap enough to buy a bunch. You can then use either an Arduino ($2-3 with USB cable) and ESP8266, or NodeMCU + $3 USB cable.


Got a link to the fast charger?


It's this model:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/4-Port-2A-USB-Fast-Charger-Mo...

The price on Aliexpress is stunningly high though; I bought it for something like $2-$3 in person. I guess this is one of those cases (I've noticed a few), where Chinese just leave the same price numeric value but change the unit from CNY to USD.


You can even flash Espurino (JavaScript runtime) on ESP8266/NodeMCU boards. It's a crazy world!


> Arduino Uno for $2

Are you sure about this? It doesn't sound... legal.


I meant Chinese clones. Arduino is Open Hardware, it's perfectly legal (that's kind of a point of Open Hardware movement). It's equivalent in form and function to the genuine Arduino made in Italy.


Oh okay okay, I see now. Yes, it's perfectly legal (as long as they don't use the Arduino (or Genuino) name).


Do you have a link? I was just about to get started on a project and getting a $2 Arduino would be great for tinkering


Just a little bit more: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Best-prices-UNO-R3-MEGA328P-f...

But if you are not planning on using shields you can get arduino mini for ~$1.3 or nano for ~$1.8


Go to AliExpress.com and search for "pro micro" or "pro mini".

You can get a Pro Mini clone for less than $1.50.

A full-size Arduino R3 clone (with a cheaper USB chip, the CH340G) is less than $3 with free shipping.


I'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.


raspberry avoid this by using chips only supplied to them.


Where are those chips actually made? ;).


What does it matter? broadcom wont sell you them. and you cant legally import them yourself.


Just 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


"So Broadcom may not sell you their chip, but the lady on the first floor of SEG building in Shenzhen just might."

And she will also happily affix a holographic "genuine" sticker to the part and package it in "original" "tamper proof" packaging. Just like brand new!


I've seen the stickers today. You can get quite a lot of them for less than a dollar :).


or you get the broadcom+ chip. which kindly breaches your entire network and sends the content of everything it finds to a Chinese ip address...

don't have any data on that either. but I'm guessing it is more likely than getting what you ordered.


Love 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.


There 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.


Same 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.


I 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.


These are not well suited for Tor. No built in networking and a serious lack of CPU power needed for processing encryption.


How much CPU power do you need to process encryption in TOR?


No wifi, no Ethernet. You need to use a USB adapter.


Most 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.


upnp is a thing at least some of the time.


There are also economical implications. Bandwidth isn't free. Now if you also could charge for your service with micropayments, we have a winner.


I believe the implication is that these would be placed in locations that have free wifi available, without necessarily having permission to do so.


McDonalds would be perfect


The 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.


Plus standardisation (linux, usb, arm, etc) which I understand was one thing lacking in the 80s.


The standard was pretty simple in the 80's, > 3 V = 1, anything below that counts as a 0.


Lacking because we were building it.


Amazing. 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


Two 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/, works like a charm.

I ported the web interface for pi-hole to Go single executable (https://github.com/girishso/pi-hole-web)

Now looking for something interesting to do on my second pi!

Edit: Added pi-hole-web link.


That'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...


> * 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


Yes, 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).


You have to overclock to about 900 to get the resposiveness up.

Both of mine are perfectly stable at that speed.


OSMC is actually the successor of Raspbmc (And Crystalbuntu)

http://kodi.wiki/view/OSMC


My frequently asked question: if I want to watch and record DVB-T television, what media centre solution should I be using?


I have been running the Pi since 2012 from the early days of Raspbmc to OSMC and sometime in 2013 starting watching and recording television using it.

I have ATSC (North American Over-The-Air TV) which is similar to DVB-T. I use an HDHomerun Network TV tuner. I watch using my Pi running OSMC and an Add-on for DVBLink, and when I select record, I use DVBLink software which runs on my Synology NAS. DVBLink however is paid software that can run on the Pi, as well as many other platforms (Windows, Linux, Asustor, Netgear, QNAP, Synology, Western Digital).

I tried using TVHeadend but found the interface and support of DVBLink to be better.

My other Pi currently runs Volumio (https://volumio.org) for music streaming.



How does it do performance wise? I can only imagine that DNS + Blocklist checking is already a big task for a PI. I always wanted to have something like this, and am on the search for something like a PI but a bit better since then.


It works pretty well, in fact page loading times have significantly reduced for me, may be because it caches the DNS records locally. I think PI is good enough for this purpose.


How much RAM does it take? I mean if it runs with less than 250 MB of free RAM I can deploy this right away, without using a dedicated RPi (I have 2 RPis on my network, the one is doing some heavy lifting, the other one has many cycles to spare).


Not much, currently it's using 1.6% RAM of 512MB. Even CPU usage seems negligible. After all, it's just acting as a DNS server, only resolving the DNS queries.. not to mention blocking the ad domains!


I just love the idea.I may finally put my Pi for some good use. I am hoping enough people have looked at it to trust this with my network.


looks like a great idea but doesn't it significantly slow down your network? I think I would rather install an ad-blocker on a tomato/dd-wrt/open-wrt router...


What is the difference between this and privoxy with an ad blocker?


Same here. Had them laying around for two years before I dusted them off to port Processing to it (shameless plug: https://github.com/processing/processing/wiki/Raspberry-Pi).

Still haven't done anything truly original, but I learned a lot about the hardware and the kernel writing the scaffolding and plumbing - and hoping that this will make the curve less steep for the ones that do.


Lol...I'm the same. I have four of the sodding things (Pi#1-B, revised Pi#1-B and two of the model 2 B's) complete with PSU's...all sitting in a box. So many plans, so little time.


I wonder if the problem for most of us isn't the money, but just the time. A cheap computer probably doesn't give us any more time/ease than an expensive computer (which we probably already have 1+ of)


Find a local makerspace and pop in every once in a while. A bit of time spent with others doing things rubs off.


I live in rural Scotland, there is no such thing, and sadly I don't have the time available to start one.


Amusing that most people I speak to (including myself) fall into this category.

Great deal nonetheless, especially when considering the bit where he mentioned being much faster that version 1, which is considerably slow if you ask me.


They're cheap enough to be a "cool, I have to play with this" impulse buy...

At last count I've got about 7-8 different devices like this sitting around that I've aspired to play around with at one time or other, all of them have seen way too little use.


I know what you mean.

I have a Tessel here (Nodejs base micro controller) and never used it...


Didn't know about Tessel, the plug and play modules look very tempting!


Yes, everything works out of the box with npm install. It's really nice.

But I have no idea what I should do with it, haha


This 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.


With shipping (and the fact that Pis are currently hard to get) Pis can go up to $40 or $50.

In countries like India, that's expensive. Not prohibitively, but you think twice before using a Pi for a project. I'm currently studying at a tech institute and have been part of the group trying to get folks to do more tech. Generally we focus on Arduinos for freshmen because they're 3x/4x as cheap as a Pi and easy to get your hands on. I'd love to have more folks doing projects with Pis, but it's just too expensive.

Peripherals? They're lying around. You can find an old monitor or TV anywhere, or just share one with an existing machine. A lot of projects with Pis don't even need peripherals.


There 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.


Right? 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.


Physical space, noise, and running costs are also important considerations for many people.


Yes, running this as a useful network device (storage, irc bot, etc..) off a small solar panel is pretty neat side project.


While this is not enough to run a latest MS or IntelliJ IDE and Chrome with 100 tabs open, 512 MB is adequate to run vim/emacs, some Ruby / Python / Go / Node.js / Rust / you-name-it code, and a moderate browser session. Quite enough to gain some highly marketable skills using hardware that costs a couple of cups of coffee to nothing.



Looks like your link broke walmarts website. Don't expect that from larger companies...


Working for me. Could have been a hiccup due to Thanksgiving/Black Friday shopping traffic.


As useless as walmart's website is, I doubt that HN could break it by simply visiting. As the other poster said, if it's broke, that's probably due to black Fri/holiday traffic.


Being on the front page of HN is worth about 20,000 hits a day in my experience. My $5/month VPS running every single page load through the incredibly slow BeautifulSoup parser handles it no problem. A link in the comments is probably an order of magnitude less traffic than that.


A lot of people already own TVs that would work as a display for this. My local Microcenter (which sells this new RPi too) has mice for $1 and keyboards for $4. You probably need to spend a few more dollars on cables and storage but I think you could easily walk out with a functional system for less than $20 total, maybe less than $15.


At thrift stores they can barely give away mice and keyboards. Just checked craigslist, keyboards and mice were $5 each and a monitor was $20. So a few hours work at minimum wage and you have a computer.


> This is great, but for people who want to "get started in computing", don't they also need a display, a mouse and a keyboard?

Who are you quoting there? It's not the article.

Is Raspberry Pi being marketed at beginners, or for conventional desktop use? That wasn't my impression.


That may not be the goal of this particular model, but it was the point of making the Raspberry Pi in the first place, yes. It was meant to be a modern equivalent to the BBC Micro; a way to give every kid affordable access to a computer with an aim towards teaching them computing (as opposed to using an office suite). They'd need a keyboard of some sort, but they could use a television as a monitor (as most of us once did). Languages like Scratch were part of the project. That seems to have gotten lost among the possibilities that a small, cheap Linux machine offers to the grown-ups among us.


Good point although remember that the (full size) Raspberry Pi has composite video output that can be used with the cheapest of TVs.

IMO the Raspberry Pi Zero is more of a reaction to the C.H.I.P $9 computer on Kickstarter and not a cheap computer for people who cant afford a full size Pi.


There are pin headers on the zero for composite out - should be cheap+easy to bodge a jack, but it would pretty much weigh as much as the zero itself...


True, 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.


Commodore 64s, ZX Spectrums, BBC Micros and the like never came with monitors, you just used your TV. This board has HDMI out on it, or composite if you solder in a connector, so you can use it with your existing TV or monitor.

A mouse is optional too, you can do everything you need to from the keyboard.

So really, it's only a keyboard that you need.


I'd be more interested in a cheap LCD+keyboard plastic thing with batteries. I hope raspberry is considering this option, or that somebody is trying it.

To be honest the cheapest android phone costs 60 bucks, so I wonder if there should not be some attempt to have a development suite that can be usable with a touch screen.


I'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.


This sort of stuff is great for setting up some kind of automation. Places where you would want a small computer, without all the peripherals.

The use cases for such a device go as far as one's imagination.


Ah 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)


Well, 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.


Or 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


Next 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.


You 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.


hm, I probably should check now, but were I live (non US), the last time I've checked zigbee prices started from 19$ :(

But still the best thing will be that:

- you will not need any dongles

- can embed your project immediately

- better compatibility with hardware and software (hopefully) :)


The 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.


Have you heard of this? http://vocore.io/


I have read of many alternatives, though RPi has one feature, nothing can beat it today - community support.

99% problems you'll see on your RPi, you can find a solution to them in 5 minutes with Google.

Maybe it will sound like nitpicking and also RPi has versatility and extensibility for rapid development. Want add camera? No problem. Connect to screen? No problem. Few USB devices? No problem. GPIO control? No problem.

Probably it's just a rant with possibly very long discussion, but if you do not know what crazy or fun thing you going to do tomorrow, RPi probably got your covered, whereas others - not so much. So if RPi (let's say the 'normal' one, not the Zero) had builtin WiFi and BT, personally I would be covered in any way I need and would not need any dongles at all.


Wifi is a game changer IMO. I've just found out about esp8266, and its a mini revolution on the Arduino world.



Wow, 2x CPU, better Wi-Fi and they even managed to add BLE into this? I have just one question: how? :O.


Too 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.)


Yeah, I had hoped for that as well. But connectors cost money. Could the camera module be attached via the header?


> 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.


Interestingly 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).


Correct. 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.


I 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.


its not the connector, I have a suspicion Zero is 2 layer pcb


That's a shame. I was wondering if I could use a Pi0 with an old USB camera as a cheap IPCam.


You can. Just get a USB webcam. The GP just said you can't use the CSI webcam.


I 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.


The Pi foundation being good friends with Broadcom also helps.


Broadcom 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...


It's £4 in the Pi Hut (disabling the extras): http://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero


Nice 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-OLin... [1]: http://nanopi.org/NanoPi_Feature.html



On 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 :)


€9.61 EUR from PiHut in the UK, shipped to Ireland.


£5.99 if you can still find the MagPi magazine with one on the cover. I picked up two on my walk in to work this morning.


The 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-ze...


Don'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

And if you're into shader programming, the GPU has a 24 GFLOP shader unit.

https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv-qpu

Only suitable for very specialised purposes, but astonishingly fast.


You 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).


I'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...


Same 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/1406847600/140933...


Google 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.


Neat. Not exactly what I imagined but probably a lot more practical OTOH. I'd just like a standardized high speed interconnection port with power supply and a shared router of some form.

Probably would be more plausible when high speed optical links becomes cheap and ubiquitous enough so that a single thin cable can be drawn from each module to an PoE equipped router, so there's not a large mess of wires. Then the on-chip pinouts could be used independently of the networking.


"Optical" and "PoE" do not go together?


One cable can hold both fiber and copper wires. I think some thunderbolt cables do that.


What's this stack for? I'd be very surprised if it beat PC hardware + GPU for MIPS or FLOPS per $ or watt.


Agreed for a supercomputer design it would be awful, but for a stereotypical 99.9999% CPU idle applications, the big win would be total cost of ownership / capex.

On a long term view from many decades of observation, the digital world is bifurcating into one world thats 100% utilized all the time in data centers or real time control or video gaming, and another world that's 99.999% idle but when its active the users want it infinitely fast. And the two worlds don't talk or cross pollinate and are gradually using separate hardware.

Having spent some time in electronics labs, given experimental results with smoke emitting diodes, and given the GPIO ports, there is minimization of the total cost of hardware experiments. If you assume 5% of boards will be destroyed per PID/motion control lab, then minimization of board cost is key to minimization of cost of running the lab. Implementing a PC that costs 20 times as much but provides 100 times the performance would only result in increasing the cost of the lab by 20 times.

There is also a total wattage ecological argument. I have a pi running a 3-d printer and it works great and only draws a couple watts, but the web application is extremely fat and pointlessly featureful "because the cycles are there so may as well use them" and its not like installing a 100 watt PC would make better prints, it would just make an even more elaborate UI to use all available CPU cycles thus burn more coal. A 300 watt tor node doesn't really do anything a 3 watt tor node does, other than burn 100 times the coal.


Most of this is the case for using one Pi, but not a stack of Pies. Unless you have some sort of micro-AWS which turns off the 99% unused ones. Ten boards drawing 100mW at idle are the same as one board drawing 1W at idle.


Except that when one board fails out of 10, there are 9 others still alive whereas in the other case you are toast.


I would expect the complexities of distributing a workload over 10 boards would result in downtime far exceeding that of a single more powerful machine left doing its thing, for all but a few highly battle tested applications.

A fair accounting includes the fragility of software, not just hardware.


Mainly experimentation.

Reference: https://www.parallella.org/


- 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/


I 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".


Just placed an order on PiHut for £6.50 (~$9.82) incl. delivery outside UK.


PiHut has the board for £4, with various add-on packages (cables, sd-card) up to £18 (all cables + 16 Gb SD).

S+H is £2.50


The 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.


Don't be ridiculous. $5 will get you 80% of these peripherals from eBay. Especially if you're on the budget.


Sure 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.


I'm not sure that low voltage 0.5-2amp power supplies can short that badly to cause fire, but heck anything is possible. That said you can find lots of old original cellphone chargers on Ebay or just get them at yard sale or thrift/goodwill stores for about a 1$ each easily. Even if it's not a micro/mini USB power adapter most of the old Nokia chargers have pretty much the same voltage output as USB, those that are close enough can still be used (normal USB power isn't overly reliable and it's heavily rectified on the consuming end any how), worse case you'll need to add a resistor but even that's not an issue. I've powered USB powered devices with 5.5V power bricks and none of them failed on me ever (due to power supply issues any how).

Yes most Chinese cheap power supplies are very dodge indeed, but unless you are using them to charge a device with power-sense and fast-charge that drives much higher current through than USB would normally provide it shouldn't be an issue, the normal USB power specifications are very dirty and lose, in many PC's USB is grounded to the case itself which makes it a very noise power source, but considering it's only 5v and 0.5amp usually it's easily rectified with cheap solid state components so it's not an issue.


I always dismount cheap power supplies, to see their quality for myself. I check for creepage, clearance distances, noise filtering circuits, transformer quality, grounding quality if appropriate, build quality, circuit sophistication, appropriate wire gauge, protection fuses, etc.

Some of those I checked had none of the above.

I enjoy understanding electronic circuits.

But it is also important, I believe. Just reading the list of unsafe banned products from EU markets, a lot of the time it is these cheap power adapters. And I can absolutely understand why.


How 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.


I used to think that until I read these articles:

http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pr...

http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and...

Yes the articles are about fake and counterfeit power adapters but I expect these el-cheapo units have many of the same design and safety flaws due to cost cutting. Personally I'm taking no chances.


For 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-ap... for some horror stories about crap USB chargers.


Mine[0] has CE on the back, but this is China, they print anything and everything on the back...

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10632118


I guess there's a market for importing Chinese USB chargers from Europe into China then ;)

But yep, the CE mark is related to the importing paperwork so only signifies something inside EU, would be interesting to know if it's a positive or negative quality signal inside China...


CE stands for Chinese Engineering :D


Close.. I believe it actually is 'Chinese Export' when you ask but the goal is the same, to imply certification (o;


CE is worthless, what you want is a proper certification such as GS, TUV, UL or CCC (possibly others).


Anecdotal, but I replaced my eeepc's charger with a cheap compatible charger from ebay and about a year later, I heard some buzzing on the speakers at my desk followed by a bang at my feet. The caps blew the wall wart's case right open. :\


I just ordered the magazine with the Pi for 5.99GBP(~$8). Should be arriving tomorrow.


Fantastic 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!


Not 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/ker...


Updating 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.


I wouldn't call it FUD. Embedded devices tend to get updated less frequently than PCs. Connecting them all to the internet is not helping.


If security is an issue set it up to run a system cron job to update.


And thank God for that. I'm totally fine with securing critical infrastructure, bank/e-mail accounts and such, but infosec has a magical tendency of sucking joy out of everything. That insecure DIY light controller at my neighbours', you know what it is? Fun. :).


I 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.


Can the HDMI port be abused for some kind of networking?

There are a whole bunch of extra features tucked away inside HDMI. I know the Pi doesn't support Ethernet-over-HDMI, because it's missing the necessary PHY, but apparently it does support I2C-over-HDMI. I2C isn't very fast (tops out at 3.4Mbit, if you're lucky); is there anything else which could be used hidden inside somewhere?

One interesting thing about I2C, though, is that it would be cheap and easy to build a chassis with a whole bunch of these $5 modules wired together via I2C. It's almost certainly not cost effective in any way, but would be interesting, particularly if you could get useful work out of it...


The networking on the other Pis is attached via USB. It's a very easy and obvious thing to drop.


Yeah 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".


Exactly. If you need Ethernet, a USB-to-Ethernet adapter is $1.50 on AliExpress including free shipping from China.


And one kind person suggested PPP over serial in comments to the Make article: http://elinux.org/RPi_Serial_Connection#Network_connection_w...


I set up ppp between a pair of RPis a few years ago - you can crank up the speed quite a bit past 115200 baud.


I agree, if this would include an ethernet port it would be the cheapest embedded linux board with wired networking. I would really like such a device and am kinda sad it doesn't exist. Like a ESP8266 but wired.



There's a USB port.


Plug a wipi into it via the USB OTG cable. Done.


No. 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.


Nope, we have hundreds of Pi2's with two wipis in them, yeah it's fine.


You don't need a hub, you need a smartphone charger (one that gives you more than 500mA at output).


  The 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.


For 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-adap...)


I 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.


You are right, the next Raspberry Pi should have a AC or N wireless, it would be of huge value and those AC/N wireless chips are small or can even be incorporated into the SoC. I wonder how much cost there is for these AC/N wireless chips?

It seems like a no brainer.

Given that you can get a 150Mbps Wireless N usb dongle for $4, just buying the IC should be crazy cheap: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/150Mbps-USB-Wireless-Adapter-...


> "You are right, the next Raspberry Pi should have a AC or N wireless"

There are other single board compuers with WiFi built in, you don't have to wait for a new Raspberry Pi.

http://linuxgizmos.com/ringing-in-2015-with-40-linux-friendl...


I can think of plenty of interesting projects¹ where the Zero is perfect as-is. However, you can just add WiFi or Ethernet via USB if you need it.

Remember, on the first Raspberry Pi, the Ethernet port was connected via USB internally, too.

¹ One example https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1985705009/piplay-deskc...


This one has micro-USB ports, which mean the usual slim USB wifi interfaces will need a cable. Are there micro-USB wifi interfaces? (Is it even possible to make a similar form-factor interface that fits mostly inside a micro-USB plug?)



Has anyone tried this adapter with any of the Pi variants?


Nano OTG adapters help a bit, but they're not perfect. :/

[1]: http://www.dx.com/p/multifunctional-micro-usb-male-to-usb-2-...


It's easy to imagine multiple simple designs. You can couple it with an ESP2866, for example, using a number of attinys to access their analog inputs, or with a CAN-SPI head collecting data from multiple sensors, processing and then reporting through an ESP2866.


The ESP8266 is quite slow, network wise. You could hook up the sensors to the Pi Zero directly using the GPIO ports and use a cheap USB WiFi adapter to upload the data.


In the context of the device the parent comment describes the ESP8266 being quite slow doesn't really matter that much, it just needs to be fast enough to push whatever telemetry its collecting on a regular basis, which an ancient modem could probably manage. Not everything requires the ability to push data at 10s of Mbps.


I guess it would be harder to power an USB WiFi adapter. And it's not going to be cheaper than ESP2866.


Actually a 802.11n USB adapter costs $1.55, that's cheaper than a ESP8266.


The cheapest I could find was around £2.50. I could never run one with RPi without a powered USB hub, so add at least £5 more.


Wow. Can you provide a link to that?


The ESP2866 is perhaps something to consider. Something like it really should have come built in though. (IMHO)


So you're basically saying you're not getting enough value for $5?


No, but like the Op, I would gladly pay double the price for some sort of onboard network connectivity.


There'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!


Should 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.


I paid $5 for shipping[1], i'm not sure where you are getting $10-20 from. (I was charged $14 total)

And i'd rather they try not to roll shipping price in with the actual component.

[1]http://i.imgur.com/x5rQ73y.jpg


There's nowhere to put it! And if you want bigger and more connected, just get the mainstream Pi.


I'm saying that adding a few dollars worth of wifi would make it go from something that I can't think of many uses for to something excellent.


You may be interested in CHIP. 8 USD (this Monday only), and includes wi-fi as well as integrated flash storage.

http://getchip.com/


And it has an armv7. But no builtin display adapter?


It only supports RCA on-board, but adapters for VGA and HDMI are coming out a few months after launch. Unfortunately, due to licensing costs, they cost $15 (which is why they aren't on-board in the first place).


media player with an external HDD for content.


Yeah, that's basically all I could think of as well. I'd gladly swap the HDMI port for a wifi chip.


This is great for any application that benefits from being airgapped.


Could powerline networking not work for this?


Raspberry 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.


Same, in Tunisia a B model (with no SD or anything) will go around 70$. This is mainly due to state imposed taxes on "luxury products".

I tried importing one, but customs ended up charging me almost double the unit price just to let it through. The only cheap solution to get one in Tunisia is to have someone buy it for you in europe and then bring it back in his luggage.


Can you send something like this via lettermail to your country?


Customs will check the package and if it contains any goods that they think should be taxed they'll call you and give you a quote. If you pay then you can get your package. If you don't it will sit on a shelf for-ever.


Sounds like a big market opportunity (if a market exists!) - import a couple of thousand and resell them at a nice markup.


Markup + import tax (as another commenter remarked) would not really allow a competitive price range. Only way to get around that would be to assemble it in the country itself (assuming the components can be imported without those taxes)


Why the huge difference in costs..? International shipping..?


I 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).


I know Brazil has prohibitive import duties on electronics, does this also apply to Chile?


But books, magazines, etc. don't pay taxes. That's why this free Rpi with MagPi #40 is awesome: you don't have to pay taxes at all.


> But books, magazines, etc. don't pay taxes. That's why this free Rpi with MagPi #40 is awesome: you don't have to pay taxes at all.

I assume you mean in Brazil? Books and very expensive in Chile, compared to other things. And I believe it's because they are heavily taxed. I don't know about magazines, though.


Yes, I meant Brazil.


Tax is not just based on the price. If the fact that you were getting it for free were good enough to avoid import taxes, everyone would just have friends in other countries send them 'gifts'.


Well, in Brazil books are exempt and stuff that gets shipped gratis along with them doesn't get taxed. Usually, it's CDs and once I did see software shipped as Manual+free CD in order to evade taxes. I was quite surprised (and a tad disappointed) that it worked, but I don't think it would work with larger products.


> I know Brazil has prohibitive import duties on electronics, does this also apply to Chile?

To be honest, I'm not sure. VAT here is 19%, so if you are assessed duties on things you bring, you'll often pay that rate. However, I don't know what the rates are like for merchants importhing goods for sale.


It's almost nonexistent in the market, so people having it, take advantage and sell it for imaginary prices compared to the original prices.


If 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.


It is so sad that when it comes to India price is increased to $18 http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-79263


That's because they're throwing in a HDMI cable as well as an OTG cable.


Quick 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


Free 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).


$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-experienc...

[2] http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html


That'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.


Just as CHIP was announcing their $8 computer: http://getchip.com/ . It has wifi and bluetooth though. Same as Pi, watch for high shipping costs.


And 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.


I 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.


Not 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.offensive-security.com/kali-linux/raspberry-pi-l...


The 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.


Arch will definitely run on a Pi:

http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi

So will Win10 IOT core, Ubuntu, and several other things:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/


Win10 IOT core needs ARMv7. The latest Ubuntu with ARMv6 support was karmic (9.10) Forgot about arch Supporting ARMv6.


I have run Arch on RPi1, not sure about this one.


Those 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).


That is Raspberry Pi 2 I think.


I 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.


Love 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!!


Somewhat 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).


$19.29 over here in SGD :<

wished it had wifi tho


Yeah, just paid AU$20 for it. So it's $5 in theory, right?


Indeed. 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.


By 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/

Feedback appreciated!


Someone made this nice comparison over on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3uc55k/58_years_on/


This is awesome. I wonder what the next iteration will be? Will they eventually start giving out Raspberry Pis for free?



It's out of stock :(


It'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.


6 quid is not quite free - but reasonably close.


The 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.


And it's the first computer magazine to come with a computer (right?) Just that makes it worth getting


Alas, sold out :(


The "$5 computer" is, of course, £4 in the UK. http://pimoroni.com/zero



Indeed, I just purchased one from https://shop.pimoroni.com/ for £3.33. Alas, it was £3.00 for shipping.


The reason is somewhat irrelevant, no?


Amazing 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-875c...

* Code to write to LED Sign: https://github.com/metral/led_sign

* Code to pull the scores: https://github.com/metral/scores

* The LED sign itself: 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!


That'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.


I'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?


Yes 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-raspbe...

And there's plenty of other results on 'raspberry christmas lights'.


Even 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-m...

It’s amazing what you can do with $5.


> 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.


It'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.


It'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.


If 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".


The $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).


I was only considering buying it myself because it was only $5. I've been needing a new computer. Lol.


I got on the notify list and was able to get a PiZero and the case for it on Saturday. I had other things on my shopping list, spreading the $9.12 shipping across other items.

They packed it today (Sunday) I got the ship notice and it will be here sometime on Tuesday.


Lucky!


To what degree are the power requirements on their faq still valid for the pi zero ? 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 ?


Your 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.


He most probably meant 1.2Ah


Reportedly 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


Blown 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...

- https://www.adafruit.com/products/2885


Do 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.


I just received "Black Friday promo" from chip (http://getchip.com/) which claim to sell s/$9/$8 computer. I wonder how they fare with this new RPi.


A 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.


It will buy you hours of virtual computing power somewhere...


Yes, but how will you interface that virtual computing power to an led, a switch, a relay or a ntc?


$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-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-motorol...


This is neat, but I'd rather see a $10-$15 board with onboard WiFi.


I 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/imag...) none of then lights the green led to indicate power on.

Someone have a different experience or can tell something about this ?


I 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.


Yes I also did connect to my linux laptop and it also detects the Broadcom BCM2708. I was expecting to be able to connect it to a linux box via usb as it is and open a ssh connection through tty but they didn't made it that easy it's a shame.


Solved the problem was the sdcard image was not correctly saved to the sdcard.

sudo dd if=2015-11-21-raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/sdb


Make sure you are connecting the 5V power supply to the PWR IN port, not the USB port.


Yes 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) ?


On 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.


Hi, 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.


Hi 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


Hi kgs42,

the already mentioned ESP8266 is definitely the way to go. Have a look at [1]. for some example circuits. [2] shows how to connect multiple sensors.

[1] https://www.aisler.net/projects?query=esp8266&src=hn_1 [2] https://www.aisler.net/projects/7890


How 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.


but I have to connect ESP8266 to something (Arduino?) or is it standalone device?


standalone :) some inspirations for you http://hackaday.com/2015/09/05/esp8266-web-server-farm/ 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 :)


ok, thanks :)


Be careful with that "Instructables" article. The author powers the ESP8266 from the Arduino's 3.3V power out pin. The ESP8266 can want to use more current than the Arduino is rated to supply.

I've looked at a few "Instructables" articles on ESP8266 and Arduino, and a large fraction of them seem to have this issue.

Another issue many of them that use a 5V Arduino have is that they ignore the difference between the logic levels of the 5V Arduino and the 3.3V ESP8266. For the connection from the ESP8266 UART Tx to the Arduino Rx, that's probably fine. The ESP8266 will drive the line to 3.3v, and that is high enough for the Arduino to recognize it as high on the Rx line, as long as you are powering the Arduino through the USB port or through the barrel jack (I'm using Arduino Uno for my examples, so some adjustment may be needed for other models).

If you are powering through the 5V pin, which bypasses the 5V regulator on the Arduino, then you could have a problem if your voltage is high. The minimum voltage seen as a logic 1 on the input pins goes up as supply voltage goes up, and since you are already near the edge when hooking an 3.3V ESP8266 up directly, you have to be careful.

For the connection the other way, Arduino UART Tx to ESP8266 UART Rx, you are putting a 5V signal on a pin that's supposed to only take up to 3.3V. The ESP8266 has built-in protection against over-voltage which probably will save you, but this is not good practice.

Simplest fix here is to use a 1k and 2k resistor to make a voltage divider for the Arduino Tx -> ESP8266 Rx signal. Note that this only works for going from the higher voltage side to the lower voltage side. That's fine here, since on the Tx->Rx connection only the Tx side drives the line.

If you have to hook different voltage I/O pins together and both sides can drive, you need something more elaborate. There's a cool solution that uses two resistors and a MOSFET. That, and some others, is given here [1].

[1] http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/97889/is-ther...



I am doing something similar to this. My setup includes multiple temperature sensors in addition to a Raspberry Pi thermostat which controls my heating system. The thermostat also acts as a HomeKit server, and so can be controlled using Siri - which is really just a fun party trick more than anything else.

(I know Nest and Ecobee can probably do all of this out of box -- my reasons for building this were just to tinker and learn)

Here's what I use:

Sensors:

Since these are likely to run on batteries, you'll need to choose a platform with allows for low enough power consumption that you aren't draining the batteries too quickly. This is suitable for the microcontroller-based options (Arduino, ESP8266, NodeMCU, Particle), but not for R-Pi (due to too-high power consumption). In addition to the platform, your code will also need to take advantage of power saving opportunities, like going to sleep and disabling battery-draining radio services like WiFi, waking up periodically to take a measurement, enable WiFi and emit the metric before going back to sleep.

For my temperature sensors, I chose to the $19 Particle Photon [1] for the following features:

  - Built-in WiFi
  - Built-in REST API (goes through Particle's cloud REST API)
  - Add a temperature sensor like TMP36 [2] to it and your sensor hardware is done.
Thermostat:

For this I use a Raspberry Pi (plugged into wall power) + a relay breakout board to interface with my heating system. My thermostat needs to periodically do things like access google calendar, keep a log of temperature data, to run a HomeKit server [3] [4], and to be ever-ready to respond to REST requests from the internet (eg. IFTTT). So, it's more like a real server, for which RPi was much more appropriate.

Data Storage:

Many options here. Take a look at Phant [5] from SparkFun form something quick and simple.

[1] https://store.particle.io/collections/photon

[2] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10988

[3] https://github.com/KhaosT/HAP-NodeJS

[4] https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge

[5] https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/pushing-data-to-dataspa...


All sold out!

Wanted the MagPI Magazine with a free RPi Zero but its sold out!


When 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/). 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.


For 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.


This 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.


I 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-Displa...


That's really cheap compared to where I got mine along time ago. Very Cool!


If 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 :)


The 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.


Any place where could I find this magazine, guys? Tried in Liverpool Street / Moorgate (WHSmith / Waterstone) with no luck.


Couldn't find it in those places in two other locations in outer London. Would be nice to have a list of stockists!


Does 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.


Like 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.


I am no Rasberry expect, so I need to ask: Is it possible to connect Rassbery Zero to some network in some convenient way?


Something 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-por...


Micro USB to ethernet dongle or USB dongle to Wifi Dongle


What 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?


> 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.


Thanks!


Certain 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.


Is there any way to buy these from Europe?


The article mentions three vendors in UK. I just ordered mine from http://pimoroni.com/zero (they accept Bitcoin).


Thanks! Just ordered mine. Looking forward to learning with it.

Do you have any good bookmarks that You could share with a complete beginner?


It's also my first Pi, more of an impulse buy. Have to find out what to do with it.


You can get one with a subscription to the raspberry pi magazine, I haven't seen anywhere else to get them.


Checkout Farnell, they offer next day delivery to most of EU countries.

(Just ordered three of them)


I 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).


What 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.


Jack 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


So for the price of a $1000 pc I could get 200 of these. What would be great experiments for them?


>What would be great experiments for them?

Donating them to school computer clubs and seeing what teenagers do with them.


Well, 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!


It would be nice if there was an interface to solder on one of these dirt cheap wifi modules. SPI?


There are serial-to-wifi modules for the Arduino; surely one of them would work on the RPi header, though you might need some new software to forward the network packets to it.


USB?


Why solder? A 150mbps USB Wifi stick is $1.55 from China.


I was really hope they refresh the R-Pi compute module at a pricepoint like this.


Cute form factor, let's have pizero hats (battery, lcd, foo).

ps: too late, they're call phats http://pimoroni.com/zero (stupid me)


Beside 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.


Nice. Interesting design choice to not have ethernet on it.


Ethernet 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.


A logical omission. Something so small is likely to be mobile anyway.


I 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.


It'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


Awesome 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.


Like the RPi compute module?


The Pi is a wonderfully disruptive thing. I think it's a quiet stalking horse for the second personal computing revolution.


Jack 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...


I picked one up because why not but now I need to also buy several adapters so that I can use it.


I'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.


That raises the CE certification costs considerably.


but if they make like a B2 model + WIFI and just add 10$ to the unit price. That would cover it.


Highly 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.


This seems now like a first world problem, a nice guide to find would be like "Cheap Wifi dongles that work on raspbian".


Why does it need embedded WiFi when you can get micro sized USB WiFi dongles? The engineering and certification will surely raise the overall cost quite a bit. Let the companies that make WiFi equipment shoulder that cost. Sure, maybe you can bundle a low cost WiFi dongle if you like.


There's also power... a wifi module will probably double the power draw on this thing. Lots of projects don't need it.


Very interesting! Still loving my early Raspberry Pi boards.


For $5, I'm in. Now: What the heck can I do with it?


Just 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.


That 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.


The 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.


Still lacking: USB Device Mode support... :(


The Pi Zero is like the Model A, so device mode should be possible.

See https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=7409...


Interesting.

> 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


Is it not powerful enough to do this in software through the GPIO pins?



Really need a full-sized USB host port, so you can hook all kinds of gadget/dongles to it without an odd adapter dangling.


Does it still require proprietary blobs to function at all? A $5 ARM computer sounds great, but not if it needs blobs.


You can try without a blob: https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv

(booting directly from Broadcom VideoCore IV)


Even 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.


This is great, truly impressive.


for me this is my chance to build a cool digital synth with csound at the core


Pretty awesome price point.


Sold out at Adafruit which is really the only place to buy it in the US. Life is sad right now...


I want to buy 10.


Go for it!


To 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=N82E16813157...

or this for $59 (includes CPU):

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=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=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.


I wish down-voters would take a moment to explain why they think a $5 crippled computer is better than a $39 full-featured board.

The context is that, in order to make use of the $5 crippled computer you have to spend, at a minimum, $100 in a keyboard, mouse monitor and power adapter.

I'm sure someone will say you can build little sprinkler system controllers and LED light blinkers and all all manner of other little projects.

Well, here's the problem: Why aren't we teaching our kids to do just that with little $0.50 microcontrollers? Why do we need a HUGE operating system running a gigahertz to teach or build the simplest things?

Here's a over 1,000 microcontrollers from $0.55 upwards with peripherals ranging from CAN, I2C, SPI, UART, USB, USB-OTG, A/D, D/A, Timers, Counters, PWM, WDT, Motor Control, LCD, etc.

http://goo.gl/Lc5gP6

What I see on my end, working with lots of kids, are a bunch of Pi's being bought only to collect dust. The idea of a super-cheap computer on a bubblegum stick might be interesting and heart-warming but the reality I see is that the vast majority of them are bought because of the novelty factor and they set aside and ignored.

I've had far more success with the kids by adopting a simple little 8 bit microprocessor and then teaching them how to do all kinds of interesting things with them in assembler at first and C later.

Their eyes and minds really open up and they gain an understanding that simply cannot be had by having a bubblegum computer with Linux that comes up to a command prompt. Worlds apart. And, oh, yes, none of my kids will ever be confused about pointers, stacks, memory management and a whole host of topics that confuse those who's first contact with computing is running Python on a stick computer of some sort...to turn on a sprinklers valve using a bunch of libraries and megabytes of coder running on a GHz processor.

It's a lot more work as a mentor, but if you really care about the kids and want them to learn and engage their brains, you can't throw a "done for you" solution at them.


Bravo. Even more infantilizing are the electronic kits from http://littlebits.cc.


The weak link is always curriculum. Without a "plan" and mentorship kids learn very little. Sure, they can follow step by step instructions, click things together but they are learning very little.

Most kids learn nothing about strength of mechanical shapes by clicking together lego blocks. However, a curriculum that explicitly teaches how different structural shapes behave under various loads does teach them a lot. Ergo, the vast majority of kids only learn so much by following lego assembly instructions kit after kit.

That's not to say that these toys are not useful. They are. What I am pushing back against is that the cost of the educational toy or tool is directly related to the level of learning it can provide.

BTW, I do think that "little bits" can be useful with the right curriculum. Yet, we are talking about $200 again. This only strengthens my argument that a dive for the bottom it utterly meaningless when it comes to delivering usable value, either for education or for other applications.

In the case of poor countries or really poor people, yes, of course, lower cost could be the difference between access and no access. Yet, that's not the whole story because they need to spend at least $100 to play.

Is that the primary argument and mission of the various Pi boards? To serve the poor? Because, if it is, then I'd like to understand why it uses a video interface that requires fairly recent monitor that will cost somewhere around $80 and $100 in the US. Anyone who can spend that kind of money can afford something much better than a Pi. And far more useful...

Something like this:

http://goo.gl/QnkvrS

or this:

http://goo.gl/Mrgatw

Most Pi's end-up off in a corner collecting dust or in landfills. They are neat, but I have yet to find them useful. They are not the best financial investment in terms of education. And they are certainly not good enough to be used in commercial or industrial systems. I think their popularity is more of an emotional reaction than a rational decision. You can buy a fully functional Windows laptop for $100. And, if want to run Linux you can dual boot or install a VM.

I just don't see it. And I am talking out of experience with kids from ages 9 up to 17.


Do you recommend any sources on kid-friendly electronics curriculum development, either for homeschooling or as a hobby?


It's hard. I've done my own over the years. I'll look around and see. Products like SnapCircuits seemed to hold great promise yet they become horribly disappointing once you see a kid go from circuit to circuit without learning a thing. Such wasted potential.


First thought: Is this an April Fools Joke? :-)

Second thought: This is G-R-E-A-T!!! :-)


I'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.


The 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.


I 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 :).


I 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.


If 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/raspber... should be quick to write to the SD-card and quick to boot. Raspbian may be a bit heavy.


If your use case is comparable to a desktop machine, maybe the RPi isn't the best choice for you. You'd get a lot more power from an old laptop, though obviously in a larger form-factor.


I found the Pi1's to be unusable as a desktop but thought the Pi2 was pretty good. Which Pi are you talking about?


I have a B+. Is that a 1 or a 2?


A 1




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