Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

6owners with an opinion

80%of verdicts positive

4/1positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for value and reliability; criticized for battery.

What owners 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.

Likes it

i built my own camera out of a Zero 2W (happort.org/camera) and by disabling Picam2 and letting the OS (Debian Bullseye) idle, i can get 2 days of shots and some videos while i walk around the city/hiking out of 3 18650 batteries... bringing 3 spare batteries in my backpack never put me needing battery in any situation! starting Picam2 takes a fraction of a second

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!

Likes itHasn’t owned it

I'm sure you're aware, but for the record the Pico has state. That's one of the best things about it. You have a very fully featured Python environment (or rust, or C) with a read/write filesystem. The WiFi SDK is also super useful. They can make HTTP requests (and HTTPS without full CA validation), host an HTTP server, even host an access point.

Likes itHasn’t owned it

This stuff all already exists, Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Board is slightly bigger than a Pico but has a full blown Linux system, 4 core arm64 cpu, 512MB ram, SD card slot, wifi, no ethernet though (add-ons are available). Or you could use a larger Pi.

Recommends itHasn’t owned 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.