Hacker News Reader

Comment by rythie | Hacker News Reader

Surely with the Pi Zero selling at $5 there has got to be way to do this without Philip's locked in, expensive system?

Even more relevant is the ESP8266 at $2. The Pi Zero doesn't have WiFi, and has _way_ more computing power than you would need to run a few RGB LEDs.

The Pi Zero might be able to do some additional interesting things through with that computing power, including transmitting information over those LEDs at imperceptible modulation frequencies and such. Perhaps it could even be a Ethernet-over-Power to Li-Fi bridge, with some additional circuitry. No Wi-Fi sucks though. And putting Wi-Fi into a Pi Zero requires a micro-USB to USB dongle and then another USB Wi-Fi dongle, thus the Pi Zero as big as a Pi after that cable and dongle mess. If it had on-board Wi-Fi it would be ten times more useful.

I've seen some cool mods where someone took a USB hub or a wifi dongle out of its case and soldered the pins directly to the USB pins on the Pi itself. That gets around a lot of the mess.

I'd gladly pay another $2-3 extra for someone to do that for me with some automated manufacturing process, and sell me "Pi Zero with Wi-Fi" boards. Soldering mini-USB can be a bear, let alone doing it 10+ times to get a room full of mini-robots or drones or something else to do interesting things. The true value in a cheap computer is really that I can buy a huge number of them at a reasonable price. But a huge number of mini-PCs is terrible if you have to mod each board. If I only needed one, I'd be okay paying $100 for it.

Even better if it's a "Pi Zero with USB Hub and Wi-Fi" for, say, $15, so that I can actually add something else useful besides Wi-Fi, such as a camera or sensor or something else. Sure, there are GPIO pins, but there are a lot of super-useful things out there that come in USB.

I use an Arduino Yun for a lot of basic tasks such as having a sensor report values over Wi-Fi, or putting a couple servos on Wi-Fi with as little work as possible, but the price is steep at $60+ and not much computing power.

I take your point; soldering individual boards scales badly (although the pitch for the USB+power contact points only looks a little worse than for the GPIO pins: http://hackaday.com/2015/11/28/first-raspberry-pi-zero-hack-... ).

You can even pair the ESP8266 with the Pi Zero to do the wifi on it!

http://www.esp8266.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=7053

Where can you buy a ESP8266 for $2? SparkFun has it for $6.95.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13678

Basic: http://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-esp8266-esp%25252d01.h...

Fancy: http://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-nodemcu-v3.html?spm=21...

Nice, thanks!

I understand that in order to pair with Zigbee devices, you need the Zigbee Light Link master key which is only given to licensed manufacturers of ZLL-based products. I also understand that said key leaked a while back and is all over the internet.

That depends how this is enforced. If it is something like [1], you might need to device's public keys signed by Phillips.

[1] http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/security-ic/device-au...

Philips uses ZigBee, so you'll have to add the cost of an expansion board.

https://www.dresden-elektronik.de/funktechnik/solutions/wire...

This one works with Raspberry Pi 1 and 2 (not zero)

Have u had success coding for this? I bought one and it is on my shelf .. Didn't find any high level language bindings. The docs didn't seem friendly. Would love it to hear cases of success.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com