Raspberry Pi Zero W

In the past, I have used a Raspberry Pi 400 as my main home computer for more than two years without any problems. I am currently using a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a wireless security camera. It has been running continuously for over a year without a single crash.

Familiarity, I think. Like: I suck at code. But I've known how to walk around in *nix systems and use things like bash to chain together commands like awk, grep, and sed for ~30 years. Maybe I'd even toss in some badly-cooked perl or python (or both!), when that seemed necessary. For a very long time, I've been able to get some things done, but my skillset was focused on doing these things with real computers with live filesystems and real user interfaces, not MCUs. So, some years ago: When I wanted to turn a window fan on and off based on some network-retrieved weather conditions, I didn't even consider an MCU. I didn't want to learn a new way of doing things; I just wanted to get some data and decide whether to turn the fan on and off. And I wanted that done sooner instead of later. So I accomplished this with a Raspberry Pi Zero W -- with the whole OS. I didn't cross-compile anything. I didn't have to target some weird-looking external environment, or learn a new way of doing things. Setting up the dev environment was very familiar: Dump a binary onto an SD card, boot it, get it onto the network, and use. After that I just SSH'd into that tiny little computer like I would any other Linux box and wrote my stupid little cobbled-up scripts right there, in-situ, on the final device that would be performing the work, using an interactive shell. The end result worked very well. I'm not ashamed of any of this at all. --- Later, I switched from networked weather reports…

They'll do whatever they do. Maybe a tick-tock release cycle (one with new features and some speed, the next with the ~same features and more speed) is where they're headed, and maybe that makes sense. They wouldn't be the first. I'd love to see even-lower-RAM versions, though. Most of what I use Raspberry Pis for at home for is not RAM-hungry at all. My Pi4 network router has 2GB because that was the smallest/cheapest version at release when I got it, but the system itself consistently only uses about 64MB of RAM. It'd do perfectly well and have a ton of breathing room with just 128MB of RAM (which will never happen, but if it did happen...). I suspect the Pi4 that I use as a set-top box with Kodi would be fine with 512MB. I've used Zero Ws for all kinds of things over the years and never felt RAM-starved with their little 512MB of RAM. So I'm learning towards 512MB. But sure: 1GB options would also be fine even if it does double the price. Our comments serve to demonstrate that there's room in the marketplace for different SKUs with different memory capacities. :)

There are so many companies that I am sure countless individuals have come along and have solved a problem for themselves that many other customers probably have. These solutions hardly ever surface. I for one was upset when I bought a HiFi amp from Cambridge Audio (CXA-81) and it came with an IR controller. The only way to be able to control that amp through the app is by means of a DAC which costs another couple of thousand dollars. I refused to accept this as my solution. I wrote a web server that used a Raspberry Pi Zero W and an IR transmitter along with a rudimentary Android app that had a series of buttons which corresponded to the functionalities I needed. If anyone is interested the web server (written in Go) that the Android app talks to is located here https://github.com/ozfive/CXA81-IR-Remote-Server I will upload the the Android app source in the next week.

Raspberry Pi Zero (W) are still great. There will be millions of them around in use for decades to come. I will probably always have a few in some drawer. Sad to hear that anyone even considers deprecating support for that hardware. Not to mention all other ARMv6 hardware still around. We need some baseline hardware types that just will always be supported, to add some friction to software rot and bloat in general.

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.

For those that love the pi and electronics I’d suggest checking out the raspberry pi pico which is not a full os but a microcontroller with tons of features including WiFi that runs Python or c scripts. Replaced the pi for me in the projects I was working on, especially paired with a nice LED matrix display. My favorite combo at the moment is this led matrix with presoldered pico w: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/cosmic-unicorn

> that doesn’t die because of low/high temperatures or humidity or the like. The Raspberry Pi is engineered to a higher standard This can't be overstated. I've continuously run a few fanless Pi Zero W cameras w/motioneye in the Mojave desert for years now, none have failed.

I can't really disagree with what you're saying about Pis often being overkill, but I've been using Raspberry Pi Zero Ws for more projects where I might have used ESP32s, and I've been very happy with the choice. Basically any project I have that isn't battery powered or timing critical, I'd prefer to use a Pi. Zero Ws have a $10 MSRP (of course, huge shortage at the moment). I think they're pretty cost competitive for DIY IoT. Buildroot makes it really easy to create a custom Linux OS with your software preinstalled, any kind of custom kernel tweaks you want, and an impressive amount of software packages available. If you strip unneeded functionality from your kernel you can boot a lot faster too. Here's a list of some stuff I like about a Pi Zero W vs an ESP32 * Ease of programming. Flash an SD card and swap it out, without having to hook the device up to a programmer. * Extremely solid TCP/IP stack. * Multitasking with real process isolation. * Program organization (related to above). I find the OS abstraction very useful for enforcing cleaner designs. * Access to Linux software packages. I can easily add nginx, apache, or lighttpd to my rootfs. It doesn't involve mangling any of my other software packages * Interactive access. I can debug the applications by sshing into the Pi and looking at logs. I can scp new files onto the Pi.

The reason for this port is that I'm using PicoVGA as a VGA terminal for an 8bit retro computer. I'm using USB host mode on the Pico for keyboard and mouse input. I found a Pico W for sale for a reasonable price + shipping so now I can add wifi support.

I paid £5.90 each. >>At that price point, you can get a full power chip. You see, this is the problem right here - you got it in your head that this isn't a "full power chip", whatever that even means. It's as "full power" as any microcontroller that has ever existed. Once again ,it isn't meant to run an OS. The price is more than justified by the rich development environment with plenty of support(both official and community driven) as well as good connectivity options implemented directly on the board. The closest thing I can think of is a cheap ESP8266 board like a D6 Mini, but cheap chinese clones of that sell for £4 on ebay, barely any cheaper than the Pico W - an official D6 board is about £12, so not only it costs more - it actually offers less functionality and power. If you know what this chip is for and what it's competing against, you'd see that in fact the value here is outstanding.

USB ethernet and tethering on Android is certainly one way. Keeping the phone powered can present interesting opportunities, but it works well. There's also other ways. Like USB tethering. Plug the computer into the Android phone with a regular USB cable that is already kicking around. No ethernet adapter required; the phone behaves as a network adapter in and of itself. The computer keeps the phone charged. This worked at least as far back as the OG Motorola Droid, in 2009. (Drivers may be a fun thing to get working depending on the OS, but that's just a software problem.) Or: Other hardware that is already laying around. That the old home network router that has been hosting generations of spiders for over a decade, in a dusty cardboard box at the back of a closet next to the favorite pair of shoes that are simply too nice to ever get worn? There's a good chance that it's hackable and able to run custom firmware. Stuff a period-correct copy of OpenWRT or DD-WRT or Tomato or [something] into it, and turn it into a wifi client bridge so your old Ethernet stuff can chat on the wifi network. (I've had the big, color HP laser printer at the shop connected this way with a hacked Linksys WRT54G for very nearly two decades so far. Part of me says I should upgrade that box one of these years, but it still works fine and I find this amusing.) Or: Rube Goldberg minimalism. The Raspberry Pi Zero W that is in the drawer next to the extra key for the Ford that got sold a de…

It's more like an Arduino in the sense that the code you write is more like firmware. It's way more powerful than a common Arduino, though. It has two 32-bit (ARM Cortex-M0+) cores, 264kB of RAM, and 2MB of flash. The Pico W also has a wireless chip that can do WiFi and Bluetooth (the standard Pico is exactly the same without the wireless chip).

That’s apples to oranges, more comparable would be a pi pico w, which is like $6, has better documentation, and is more likely to be available when you need one. I have a bunch of pine devices, but if you think raspberry pi’s are difficult to come by, finding a pine device in stock over the last few years has been a challenge at least for me personally. Things have started to get much better though, it seems.