The big news in Raspberry Pi circles yesterday was the release of the new Raspberry Pi Zero a higher clocked, updated, smaller version of the original Raspberry Pi.
Exciting as that is, what seems much more news worthy is that the price point of just £4 means that they can include 10,000 of them on the Mag Pi print magazine available on sale yesterday.
In this video run down of the features done by The Raspberry Pi Guy YouTube you can see it happily run Minecraft: Pi Edition and is reported to run most software without issue.
The only down side with the new Pi appears to be the micro connectors. Various companies willing to set you up with kits to fill the void.
Also beware of the P&P (postage and packaging) from various retailers, a £4 Pi Zero with triple the carriage.
[Specs provided after the break.]
At that price, I'd be tempted to get a baker's dozen of them and make my own little Beowolf cluster.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday November 27 2015, @07:10PM
Ok, poked around this one a bit more. Mixed bag but generally good idea.
I suppose they just assumed that due to their yuge marketing muscle that this problem will get fixed but as of now this thing doesn't exactly make sense. If you want to use the hdmi port you probably want a user interface. (Although for signage you could just stuff the ad material on the boot microSD) So that either means a USB hub which blows the size and cost out of the water or you need a WiFi + BT dongle. None appear to be available with a microUSB OTG plug so you need an adapter bigger than the dongle. At any rate the dongle will cost more than the Pi0.
If you are doing microcontroller things with it you won't need the HDMI but the one USB port limit is probably something you will be running up against. Along with the only number for power consumption I have seen is 140ma@5v so while lower than the original Pi it still isn't in microcontroller territory by a long shot so except for robotics (already needs a big ass battery) that is a problem. Hope we get more details and find there are ways to better manage power consumption. For example the chip is basically a GPU with a CPU to feed it, if the GPU could be entirely powered down after boot it would probably help a lot since it draws more power.
Overall I am convinced the final iteration of the Pi need to just be a CPU + RAM and boot microSD on a carrier with an inexpensive edge connector to mate with carriers to break out various useful subsets of i/o for different markets. But ultimately the Pi is limited by the selection of an SoC with zero networking: No WiFi or Ethernet means most users have to pay an upcharge to get a network connection which at these prices will cost as much as the CPU itself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @07:47PM
You mean like the Raspberry Pi Compute Module [raspberrypi.org]?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday November 27 2015, @08:16PM
No. It costs more in quan1 than the larger boards and they did a silly thing by replacing the microSD with a fixed 4GB flash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @09:59PM
Is the 4gb flash faster than a microSD?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @08:58PM
I tend to agree, its like they were going to make it an embedded device, but didnt fully understand what that means and blew it.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27 2015, @10:15PM
their yuge marketing muscle
OMG, he's been completely Trumped!
-- gewg_