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I'd gladly pay another $2-3 extra for someone to do that for me with some automated manufacturing process, and sell me "Pi Zero with Wi-Fi" boards. Soldering mini-USB can be a bear, let alone doing it 10+ times to get a room full of mini-robots or drones or something else to do interesting things. The true value in a cheap computer is really that I can buy a huge number of them at a reasonable price. But a huge number of mini-PCs is terrible if you have to mod each board. If I only needed one, I'd be okay paying $100 for it.

Even better if it's a "Pi Zero with USB Hub and Wi-Fi" for, say, $15, so that I can actually add something else useful besides Wi-Fi, such as a camera or sensor or something else. Sure, there are GPIO pins, but there are a lot of super-useful things out there that come in USB.

I use an Arduino Yun for a lot of basic tasks such as having a sensor report values over Wi-Fi, or putting a couple servos on Wi-Fi with as little work as possible, but the price is steep at $60+ and not much computing power.



I take your point; soldering individual boards scales badly (although the pitch for the USB+power contact points only looks a little worse than for the GPIO pins: http://hackaday.com/2015/11/28/first-raspberry-pi-zero-hack-... ).




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