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Boards and maker kit · Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

11owners with an opinion
67%of verdicts positive
4/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for ease of use and value; criticized for software and reliability.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it
Small anecdote on the mobile/robotics part, two years ago I was tasked with a small research sensor/timelapse platform. I reached out for the Pi Zero 2 W, the new Pi camera, and the largest USB battery I could buy. Perhaps I had unrealistic expectations, but I was surprised how much power it draws, even at idle. The napkin math said about 6 days (0.5 W idle, 2 W loaded), in reality it was only 1-2 days. In comparison, my older laptop idles at around 5 W, even with multiple applications open. Similar experience more recently when looking at setting up a small home lab, the new Pi 5 seems to idle at around 5 W. A friend told me he has an Intel-based mini PC that draws less power. I'm tempted to try re-purposing an old phone, that should in theory do better.
Neutral
Author here. I ported Claude Desktop's Hardware Buddy to a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W with a Pimoroni Display Pack 2.8. Context for people who haven't seen the new developer mode feature, Claude Desktop recently added Developer Mode → Open Hardware Buddy, which exposes a BLE protocol so an external device can show Claude's activity and prompt you to approve or deny tool calls with physical buttons instead of an on-screen dialog. Felix Rieseberg wrote the original firmware for an M5StickC. The build guide and custom 3D printed case are all there for you to play around with and download. This was mostly a weekend side project but hope it's something fun for some else to build too.
Likes it
I recently built a Plan 9 cluster of 8 raspberry pi zero (2w). From my supplier (digikey) the 2W was the same price and has 4X the cores! I think it looks quite cool: https://x.com/andreer/status/2007509694374691230 Instead of having to use lots of dongles and usb ethernet, I just wired them all up using brass rods, a small 5V power supply in the base, and boot them over WiFi (just the kernel and wifi config on the sd card). Raspberry pi's are cheap, easily available, and there is an absolutely massive trove of information about them on the internet. And the scale means that the linux implementation is very stable and "just works" to a degree that is extremely hard for other SBCs to match. Sure, VMs are the logical choice, but not everything has to be logical. Real hardware does feel more real :-)
Likes it
> I've often wondered how (in)expensive you could make something with a better built-in screen, the ability to play VP9/AV1 video and opus samples and Bluetooth to connect to mouse / keyboard and PC as a net and storage device. I’ve been doing this, and the answer if you have a 3d printer is $10 US(pi zero 2 w) + the cost of whatever display you want to use. This won’t do AV1 but it’s good enough for my use cases. I’m slightly cheating on the cost as I have plethora of LiPo batteries in reserve.
Likes it
Been working on a small temperature and humidity sensor using cheap components and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Using https://gokrazy.org/ to turn it in to a little appliance. I've gotten quite carried away with a web interface and custom on-disk (on-sd card?) storage format based on Facebook's Gorilla paper. I've realised that where it'll be deployed it will only have access to a public guest WiFi, so a remote server hosting the dashboard makes sense. So now it sends the compressed time-series over a TCP connection to a server component, hoping to bypass WiFi captive portals. Might need to use UDP to make it look like DNS or perhaps NTP. I haven't tested it on-site yet. It has been a very fun and rewarding project so far. Looking forward to deploying it and getting remote updates working if I can get it to work with Tailscale on the guest WiFi. If anyone has any tips on circumventing captive portals and sending really small amounts of data through, I'd love to hear it!
Doesn’t like it
The problem I have with the zero 2w is that building anything on it seems to knock out the wifi. I've got a couple on the local network as terminals and if I try to build (e.g.) a recent python interpreter, the ssh connection dies to the extent that I have to power-cycle them. I presume they're just going into swap, but they never come back. Now that's not your use-case if you've got a remote server and all you're using them for is a thin client, but they aren't exactly usable as general purpose devices. I do like the sound of that setup, though. Portable monitor plus powerbank is neat, and I can't help wondering if that plus a wireguard network wouldn't be the right way to do things away from home. There are more efficient SBCs but if the screen is the big drain that's exactly the choice I'd make too.
Likes it
I'm with you on this. I have the Pi Zero W and Pi Zero 2 W. These are IMO the ideal devices in their lineup. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for when computers had limitations but I love them. I have the old one running PiHole, (so DNS stays up if I reboot my server) and the other doing monitoring. I've had zero problems doing everything over wifi, and actually being wifi is a benefit for my internet monitoring since wifi going down on my mandatory AT&T router wouldn't be captured by an ethernet connected device.
Likes it
Do you understand that these boards are the size of a credit card? Those mini PCs are far larger than these. I can take a Raspberry Pi and stick it inside a picture frame, for instance. I actually built an e-reader using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Even a full size Raspberry Pi would have fit in the case...an x86 'mini-PC' would not. Sure, I could probably get something x86 that would, but I'd have to spend a ton of money (like hundreds of thousands or millions)
Neutral
>"...should began this July..." Seriously? Should? How. Many. Times. Have we heard it already? In the timeless words of George W Bush Junior "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice... Wait, I can't be fooled again!" No way I'm going to get hopeful here and then pi locator will show one pi zero 2 W in entire Europe, in the one shop in Belgium the owner of refuses to ship out of his country... How many cool open source projects could we have by now on other boards that remained available throughout this time if the liers at the Pi foundation (and people that believed them) didn't tell us every few weeks for last X years "it's only few weeks. We're making millions, this will all resolve the next quarter the latest!" All Bull**! I've been saying it since year 2 of the shortage. Those Pis are not coming back. If your favourite project uses raspberry pi encourage them to support another board. If they(the foundation) was honest from the start and said "look guys, we've burned through all the charitable donation money and this business model is unsustainable, we have to pivot" I would have some respect for them, but not this. Having said that I also have to submit some self critique. In my own projects it has been oh so much easier to just pull one of my remaining rpi zero 2w from the drawer (it has to be zero because I'm mostly doing RC stuff) and put something together in a day vs developing software for months. Still Rockchip has gotten a lot better with their documentation. It…
Recommends itDoesn’t say they own it
I was just looking what it would take to have a local LLM assistant and ended up on ReSpeaker too. I am just wrapping up another Pi Zero W audio recording project ( https://github.com/pseudosavant/ps-audio-recorder ). I used the first-gen Zero W since I had one already lying around. I'd strongly recommend using the newer Pi Zero 2 W though. The Zero W CPU is just so slow. It can barely (e.g. 1.05x) do real-time MP3 encoding, and the single core makes it prone to being interrupted by background tasks. It couldn't even do SMB/Windows file sharing faster than 0.5MB/sec without disabling encryption in Samba. Encryption kills this CPU. I have a couple of Zero 2s coming in the mail.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
The Pi 5's PCIe implementation has a lot of fixes—to the point where after only a few days of work, Coreforge over on GitHub has Minecraft rendering through the GPU (only at x1 speed so far). The CM4 uses the silicon from Pi 4, which was never really a fully-baked PCIe implementation, so I'll forgive them a little there. But it opened up a huge number of possibilities that I think will be realized on Pi 5 (and hopefully a CM5 eventually). And regarding power consumption / efficiency, don't forget about the usefulness of a full Linux computer running at less than a watt (like the Zero 2 W); or with the Pi 5 you can use the watchdog timer to boot and shut down now, going from idle at 2-3W to power off at 0.01W if you need a remote 'edge' device. But the hardware and efficiency were never the primary drivers for Pi. It's the fact you can buy one (well, sometimes...) and use it. You don't have to spend a few hours getting the right OS, figuring out the right tools to flash it reading sparse forum-based documentation...