Raspberry Pi Zero

> I want reliable and quiet. I have RPis running for more than a decade everyday with not a single crash. I had the original Model B running continuously for 8+ years until the USB contacts rusted-out due to high humidity. The prices in the article are absurd: why would I choose a $260 SFF PC vs a $5 RPi Zero W I got 5 years ago? The comparison may make sense for new purchases with the ongoing shortage.

> I also tried with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2, but 512 MB of RAM were too little to run a modern browser, sadly. I found that the surf browser was efficient enough to run fine on my Raspberry Pi Zero W. YMMV with animations and such, but it's much better than any chromium alternative in my experience.

I have a dozen VR headsets, more of them doing passthrough, I have AR glasses and even a monocle. I prototype in the field. The technology is amazing... but you don't need it to get value. Bring your tablet to the kitchen, add a webcam if you want to try to get visual feedback, display the recipe and... just cook. I think there is a big gap between : - how messy the World is (imagine a "normal" kitchen, not a prop for a demo) - how good existing low-tech solutions are (e.g. just a book or a printed page for a recipe) meaning that to provide marginally more value the tech has to be excellent at handle a messy World. Sure the tech is radically improving but we are vastly underestimating, as we did for robotics for decades now, how challenging seemingly menial task can be and how to do so reliably. I always think of my Roomba in this kind of situation, namely when one tries to imagine a future where tech works outside of the computer. Basically my little vacuum robot mostly sits idling in the corner because... a basic broom or a normal vacuum cleaner is radically more efficient, even if it means I have to do so myself. So... yes I'm techno-optimist but the timescale is IMHO not as close as we hope for. PS: AR setups (glasses or not) do NOT have to be connected to be useful. Do not get footed by Meta slick ads to imply that only they can make glasses, heck I'm taped a pair together 5 years ago with a RasberryPi Zero. It wasn't slick https://twitter-archive.benetou.fr/utopiah/sta…

I use rpi zero 2 as a coding server (paired with my iphone and a splitted keyboard) when I have slow or no internet. It's quite usable if you just mosh/ssh into it and use emacs/vim to code.

I partly agree, the RPi Zero W is my ideal small physical computer with a full OS. Running it only from the overlay filesystem (to keep those terrible SD cards from becoming corrupted). Pi-Hole I run from a docker container on a fanless NUC-a-like. But for anything that needs GPIO, the Zero W is great (nice that this Radxz has a RP2040 built in to cover that).

I've used GPIO on a Raspberry Pi Zero W to talk with DS18B20 temperature sensors, along with an SDR attached with USB tuning in radio traffic and decoding AX.25 packets in software. I've also used GPIO on a Raspberry PI Zero W to build a Stratum 1 NTP server with nearly spooky accuracy with the PPS line. Both things worked very well. They were compact, performant, used an inconsequential amount of power, and were very inexpensive. And both things were very easy for me to implement, largely due to the tremendous amount of software available in the Linux-ey ecosystem. If I were trying to bodge an MCU into performing these tasks without involving Linux, I'd probably have never gotten either of them done.

I have a project for the Raspberry Pi that provides for sound localization via time difference of arrival (TDOA). In a similar manner I suppose as shotspotter. There was a case recently in America where a grandfather was jailed for a significant part of a year based on a shotspotter localization and no other physical evidence such as gunshot residue. If citizens in such areas run their own systems they would have a means to provide counter evidence to that provided by shotspotter. Currently they have no means to do that. Even the times of the shots they have to take shot spotters word for it. Recordings by citizens themselves is an inherently safer approach because their sphere of influence is considerably smaller. Recordings are written to a separate partition on an SD card, it’s pretty simple to encrypt this partition as well if you like, I’ve done that. For those who are interested each node can be made very cheaply. It will run on a Raspberry Pi zero with a 7 euro GPS. It can also run portably on batteries. Here are relevant links: https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru https://hackaday.com/2023/12/30/localizing-fireworks-launche... https://medium.com/@kim_94237/tdoa-sound-localization-with-t...

Interesting history! And while we are in the subject of sound localizing may I take the liberty of introducing my new raspberry pi sound localizing audio recorder. https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru It installs with one command on all Raspberry Pi versions and synchronizes the system time to less than 1 microsecond of error with a cheap GPS. With three of these I’ve been able to sound localize the explosions from illegal fireworks to a specific car park from more than 3km away with lots of houses in between. When I got to the car park I could smell the sulphur from the fireworks. This will even run on a Raspberry Pi zero running of a battery with a 6 euro neo 7m gps and a 6 euro usb mic.

I don't _think_ you need a whole Raspberry Pi 5 kit. It seems like an older Raspberry Pi 3b+ would get the job done for $35 or so. Maybe even a Raspberry Pi Zero ($5) with an micro usb ethernet adapter.

We are starting to see SBCs that bake in an RP2040 to drive some GPIO pins (without needing to tie up a physical usb port), which seems like a reasonable compromise... I do like the RPi Zero size/perf/price combo, but for anything that needs more horsepower it's hard to argue with the bigger NUC-a-likes.

Sorry, but if you're going to write the Pi5 off, do it properly compare it to an intel n100 machine. https://www.amazon.co.uk/TRIGKEY-Lake-N100-Processor-G4-Comp... £165 16 gigs of ram, 500gig ssd. 1957 single core passmark and 5548 multicore. More importantly its 5 watts at full CPU You can run it off 19v DC, and its physically tiny. Yes, it has a fan, but its not that loud, significantly quieter than the HP The second hand HP is just not compelling anymore, unless you need more than one drive, or you need something physically larger. TLDR: the PI isn't great for KVM. The n100 is. I have a mix of n100s, NUCs and Pis. Each has their purpose. If you really want cheap ephemeral linux, then the pi-zero is still dirt cheap. £20 for a linux machine with wifi.

Completely different beast. Raspberry pis are full blown computers. Arduinos are microcontrollers with a little supporting circuitry. Even a pi zero beats a standard arduino out of the water.

> And things like the ESP-32 have reduced the Pi's practicality on the other end where you just need something powerful enough to read and transmit data from a sensor. Especially with ESPHome making it so easy to integrate with common sensors without writing code. That said, the Pi Zero W is pretty cheap and small (similar in size to many ESP32 development boards) so it provides a nice upgrade path if you want to do more processing on device, exceed a few megabytes of ram, etc