Raspberry Pi Zero W Announced

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi Zero W Announced

In celebrating their five-year milestone, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced their latest product: the Raspberry Pi Zero W...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...erry-Pi-Zero-W

[eduperez]

And I am just waiting for the Zero to be widely (Amazon, eBay, ...) available at a reasonable cost (product + shipping).

[macemoneta]

And I am just waiting for the Zero to be widely (Amazon, eBay, ...) available at a reasonable cost (product + shipping).

Yes, I was waiting for the same. But in the mean time, other products have passed the Pi Zero. The Onion Omega2 has WiFi, and costs $5. The ESP8266 has WiFi and costs between $1.50 and $5 (delivered), depending on model. They can do a lot of the tasks I would previously have given to a RPi (control and monitoring).

The RPi is great for it's purpose - education. It has an awesome community. But other SBC and microcontrollers are now available with better functionality (SATA, GigE, USB3, etc.). If you're new to SBC, by all means start with an RPi. There's no better way to learn. But once the training wheels come off... it's a big world.

[orzel]

It's vaporware anyway, i've never been able to actually buy a Zero.

[darkbasic]

Yes, I was waiting for the same. But in the mean time, other products have passed the Pi Zero. The Onion Omega2 has WiFi, and costs $5. The ESP8266 has WiFi and costs between $1.50 and $5 (delivered), depending on model. They can do a lot of the tasks I would previously have given to a RPi (control and monitoring).

The RPi is great for it's purpose - education. It has an awesome community. But other SBC and microcontrollers are now available with better functionality (SATA, GigE, USB3, etc.). If you're new to SBC, by all means start with an RPi. There's no better way to learn. But once the training wheels come off... it's a big world.

Other boards are trash because they don't have mainline FOSS drivers.

[caligula]

Other boards are trash because they don't have mainline FOSS drivers.

Also the other boards are more expensive. RPi Zero is $5 shipped, with VAT. It's cheap. No other computer costs that little. Orange Pi boards have $3 shipping costs and huge VAT and customs duties from China. And the shipping takes 30 business days. NanoPi is hugely more expensive.

Also they don't have any kind of mainline support. RPi Zero has been supported since kernel 2.4 and it runs the fastest ARMv7 or ARM64 instruction set. The cheap clones (which are all ARMv6) won't be supported for 10 years. Also booting the clones requires huge amounts of closed source firmware. Can you imagine their platform is so backwards that there's a GPU booting from a FAT partition with closed bootloaders. No eMMC, no SPI flash, just FAT formatted corruption prone SD. That's ridiculous but that's what you get when you DON'T buy RPi. All RPis use standard U-Boot and mainline kernels (4.10).

[macemoneta]

Other boards are trash because they don't have mainline FOSS drivers.

Except they do. I'm running my PCDuino3 Nano Lite with out-of-the-box Fedora 25, including the unmodified 4.10 kernel. Because it has separate channels for USB, GIG-E and SATA (unlike the RPis which share a single USB interface for USB and Ethernet), it performs very well as a file server, or backup server. And I was able to pick them up for $15 delivered when they were on sale at Amazon.

Like I said, it's a big world. Look around.

[macemoneta]

By the way, I just checked, and my Fedora 25 shows support for 493 ARMv7 boards.

[eduperez]

Yes, I was waiting for the same. But in the mean time, other products have passed the Pi Zero. The Onion Omega2 has WiFi, and costs $5. The ESP8266 has WiFi and costs between $1.50 and $5 (delivered), depending on model. They can do a lot of the tasks I would previously have given to a RPi (control and monitoring).

The RPi is great for it's purpose - education. It has an awesome community. But other SBC and microcontrollers are now available with better functionality (SATA, GigE, USB3, etc.). If you're new to SBC, by all means start with an RPi. There's no better way to learn. But once the training wheels come off... it's a big world.

For the cost of a Pi Zero delivered (from overseas) plus a few bucks more, I get a RPi delivered by Amazon (the next day)... it is just not practical to go for the Zero.
I'm sure there are other SBCs out there, but the RPi I own already meets my needs, and I prefer not having to learn a new platform for my future projects.
ESP's are great, too; I own a couple of them, and are great for their intended use (and more!). But they play in a different league (nothing wrong with that).

[brent]

The Zero is available from a bunch of official distributors. Availability has been pretty good in the last half year or so. If you want a Pi Zero, there are plenty of chances to buy one in Europe or the US.