Raspberry Pi Zero W, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, priced at $10
raspberrypi.org
raspberrypi.org
1. Raspberry Pi Trading use UK based manufacturing facilities, so yes, it costs a little extra to ship outside of the UK.
2. Raspberry Pi Trading do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront. So supply will always be limited for devices like the Zero, while demand is high.
3. The profits from the sales of all Raspberry Pi devices are used to fund the Raspberry Pi Foundation. We do charitable work to further Computer Science education around the world. The target audience is educators and children, and that will always be the focus. That it happens there are hackers out there that want to use the device is great, but not the priority.
4. The popularity of the Raspberry Pi range is mainly down to the amazing community we have and the huge support available from that community.
It is too bad that this can not be partially remedied in some fashion. Of course you need to ensure you do not over estimate demand, but if you can sell for sure X number of devices in the launch period, you should be able to find capital somehow to be able to pre-made them to ensure reach your potential.
Let some hackers who are willing to wait a bit pay the cost a while before anything ships so they have a somewhat guaranteed amount of purchases before they even start.
Of course that introduces other problems (like making it harder for the "target audience" of people learning to get ahold of), and you still need to do a lot of work to make sure you don't over/under charge, but it's an option that seems like it could work well for them.
Its virtually impossible to find any of these "$5 computers" in quantities greater than 1.
Why develop on a platform that you can never put into production? I don't even mean producing "x million units", I'm saying you won't even be able to buy 30 of them for an internal company project.
I understand that RPI mission is education and thats admirable - however they should be completely upfront on their product pages about this....each should state "DON'T USE THIS IN A PRODUCT" across the top.
Mandate a slightly higher cost-per-unit (5% or somesuch) and sell it as the Raspberry Pi Zero Commercial. With (critically) guaranteed compatibility with the consumer model. I can't imagine there wouldn't be Chinese factories lining up for the opportunity.
Then use the licensing revenue to help fund Raspberry Pi's mission.
I work in electronic device design. On a good project designing a complex device, 2/3 of the work will be iterations of design (software, electronic, mechanical, industrial). When you've finished designing it you've then got another 1/3 of getting it manufactured at a decent cost with a decent yield. And that's assuming that you have an existing relationship in China with a high end manufacturer. Weeks and weeks of trips out, production runs, implementation of QA.
Given that, how would you go about ensuring that what's coming out of a factory in China is actually up to scratch?
And even if you did, the processor on the Pi uses an unusual chip-on-chip technology that most board makers don't have the capability to build.
Why?
What I'm getting at is, while QA might be hard I'm sure doing hard things might pay off some way instead of no way at all.
- Iterating through a project and seeing new functionality implemented can be rewarding
- The chase of business negotiations and inter-personal problem-solving can be rewarding
"Why" just strikes me as an off-topic, unspecific, and weird question to ask.
I apologize for striking you as off-topic.
The difference here is that this is an already proven design? Have a competitive bid process for the right to market under the trademark, eliminate factories you flat out don't trust, then require ability to randomly sample and test on Pi's side.
If pass rate drops below agreed parameters, revoke the trademark and pick another factory. Then let the factory self-QA or face the consequences.
I can't imagine there are no factories in China that can make a profit on a chip that's being made profitably in the UK.
The only argument I can see against it would be that a commercial market doesn't exist in any volume. But I can't imagine there wouldn't be decent profit vs {insert lower priced Pi clone here}.
... The other argument would be if Pi has an exclusivity agreement with Sony UK (who I believe is the majority manufacturer) that precludes this kind of deal in exchange for pricing?
> "unusual chip-on-chip technology"
You mean the package-on-package mounting of the SDRAM on top of the BCM2835? Defer to your experience, but if Raspberry Pi is doing this then how expensive/rare is the investment?
I'm honestly trying to reconcile the following statements: "They're hard to manufacture" + "We make a profit on each one sold" + "We can't afford to make them at commercial scale"
One of their aims was to produce things in the UK. They didn't meet this initially, but with scale managed to bring production at least largely within the UK.
Imagine producing 50,000pc/mo and having to do in-depth quality inspection on an sample size of, say 500pcs. Who is going to do the inspection? That's a lot of Pis.
How do you distribute? Do you ship a box of 50,000 to your warehouse and then mail them out 1 at a time to customers? Do you form retail partnerships?
How do you front the money for a 50,000pc order? Say they cost $3 per board, that's $150,000 up front in capital tied up for, say, 1 month of lead time, 2 weeks of transit time, and 1 month until you get paid by the customer - that's $425,000 at any time tied up in inventory (150k*2.5months). Do you negotiate payment terms with the supplier? It's difficult to negotiate terms without a history. Who does the negotiation?
What do you do when your box of 50k has an defect?
None of these issues are insurmountable, but there is a lot of necessary overhead that comes with mass production of anything. Deciding to MP Pis is an organizational decision that requires significant changes to company structure and resource allocation.
Because of the cost? Or do they refuse to deal with small companies?
Rather: originally in support of the mission. :-)
> https://getchip.com/pages/chippro
who comes in question as manufacturer of the SoC (hint: Broadcom is not among them). Also according to
> https://github.com/NextThingCo/CHIP_Pro-Hardware/blob/master...
it uses a Mali400 GPU (not a VideoCore IV as the RPi).
You're far better off going with one of the Allwinner-based boards like the C.H.I.P if you intend to do this at some point in the future.
Their founder and key personnel was/are employed by Broadcom. IIRC, essentially Broadcom thought of the Pi as a fun side project and were completely blown away by the demand.
The other problem is that people have written stuff, and loads of that, specifically for the Pi CPU/GPU - which makes a move away from BCM next to impossible:
- anything involving accelerated video isn't easily portable (e.g. omxplayer)
- anything that relies on a given special function of the CPU mapped to a specific GPIO pin might break with another CPU (e.g. extension boards)
- anything that relies on other rpi-specific hardware features (CSI, DSI) will be hard to port, but then again you don't really have a choice with non-usb/i2c camera or display modules...
Unless I'm mistaken, the Beaglebone Black uses chips that are available for purchase from TI (and from which I think you can get datasheets, even as an individual), boots the mainline kernel, and provides CAD files for the board: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Hardware_Files
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/build-a-custompr...
It's quite possible to get more, if you need to (though probably not multiple ones at the same time). Just use the shops the the RPi foundations recommends and choose to be informed via email when this shop again has some in stock. Then as soon as possible buy one.
Practically the Pi Zero-W would fulfil all our system requirements, it'd probably be better because it's smaller. However, we can't risk it because the supply chain isn't there yet.
I'm not expecting mass quantities on release, but the problem is that you can only buy one which makes development difficult. And if it's anything like the original zero, we'd have no idea when it will be available in quantity. Often it's useful to have more than one board e.g. one bare dev board, one in an enclosure/prototype. Having a month or more lead time for a replacement isn't practical.
Edit: Looks like Farnell UK doesn't sell the Zero or Zero W, and any store that does is limiting themselves to 1 per customer.
It might be different in other countries, but I have to imagine that anyone in the US could get their hands on a Zero if they wanted one.
A zero, sure. But I want like 20, haha. Unfortunately my nearest Microcenter is 600 miles away. If I can't get 20 for $100, they're not really $5 each.
1 at $5.00 each, 2-5 at $9.99 each, 6+ at $12.99 each
because what your saying isn't actually true: https://www.nec-display-solutions.com/p/hq/en/news/dp/Produc... but they aren't the only people
Secondly, have you placed an order with them directly? Have you talked to a reseller?
the point still stands, have they talked to the rpi foundation about it?
Complaining on HN is not the right solution here; if you genuinely want to fill a production run of thousands of devices with embedded Pi, speak to the foundation directly.
Making your own ARM board is fairly expensive for one-off things, but for volume it's not a huge obstacle. There are any number of vendors capable of producing these for you to almost any specification.
Have you considered that the foundation's goals don't necessarily mirror yours?
Secondly the pi line, like the Arduino line, along with everything else of that nature, are 'development platforms.' You don't buy a developer kit in mass intending to resell as an end product...
The pi, Arduino, beagle, etc have an excessive number of Io pins, often a variety of sensors, multiple options for power source and corresponding voltage regulators and other features useful for development. When you take your design to market, you simply draw your own schematic/PCB layout and place an order for a board without the unused sensors, io's, regulators, etc. The schematics provided for the pi and other platforms are quite modular and easy to understand. One can simply remove all the io's, accessories from busses, regulators, clocks, and whatever else isn't required. One can then tweak the PCB layout to fit their form factor, power requirements, component tolerances and whatever else to suit their exact use case, to minimize cost.
Beaglebone black-like system boards are used for both development & production. I almost shipped a system like this personally. With the BBB, you can get slightly modified versions, in bulk, and with enough availability to satisfy purchasing. Even if you couldn't, the SoC on the BBB can be bought from TI. I imagine there are similar things for more modern, powerful SoCs. Many companies like isolating the complicated timing sensitive board design (as needed for NAND and off chip memory) from the rest of their design, and don't necessarily have the skills in house to do that type of layout. Pre-made boards like the BBB provide a lower cost option than a completely custom board.
With the RPis, you can't even buy the SoC. I'm not aware of anyone you can buy slightly modified (ie: unneeded components pulled) boards from in bulk.
That's correct. Autodesk uses a modified Beaglebone Black for its reference "open" * 3D printer design Ember:
https://beagleboard.org/blog/2015-09-29-autodesk-ember/
The Ember retails at $7495, but one can experiment with the modifying firmware with a standard Beaglebone Black.
* "open" as defined by Autodesk.
The number of people who view PCB design as simple is significantly smaller than the number of people who develop for the Pi.
Only true for Pi products. If you're willing to spend $7 you can get esp8266 nodemcu hardware delivered from amazon prime in arbitrary quantity.
Theres a problem where no matter how many times its stated, "you can buy ONE if you pay six times MSRP or live within driving range of the one retail store on the continent selling them or if you import from the UK or eastern europe" vs I need six for an IoT experiment involving micropython and I2C environmental sensors. I can't buy six $5 pi or even six $10 pi but I can have six ESP8266 boards by thursday afternoon for $35 total. Which is less than single pi zero plus "development kit of parts" costs, ironically.
A $5 computer that's impossible to actually purchase is much less useful in practice than a $7 computer delivered in two days by amazon prime in any quantity I'm willing to pay for.
Its interesting that above $40 or so there is an infinite supply of rasp pi 3 and beaglebone blacks. Everything is widely available except for cheap pi.
I'm currently working on an agriculture sensing iot platform and going to try to use rpiZero W with the current spectrum sensor from nanolambda. http://www.nanolambda.net . luckily they have the rPi api,sdk already.
I have to say, somewhere industry must have dropped the ball if a small company whose focus isn't even consumers makes such an impact.
Where are the commercial offerings?
Maybe CHIP will take this space, but electronics industry has really neglected hobbyist electronics. Maybe there's a reason, e.g hostility to the idea of hobby electronics disrupting industry?
There is e.g. the Asus tinker board which is twice the price and out of stock. https://www.asus.com/uk/Single-board-Computer/TINKER-BOARD/
Not too bad for a product that was announced late January.
Still, if there were more commercial players, there wouldn't be such a frenzy around the few offerings..
It's called a BeagleBone Black/Green. I can buy 1000 of those tomorrow off of Mouser. And I can go talk to TI to get a volume discount if I'm buying bunches.
The RPi is a neat toy good for one offs and the community is excellent. The $5 is cool marketing, but it's vapor when you go to fab it.
However, when I need to support something commercially, I need datasheets and customer reps. I get that for the Beaglebone while the situation for the RPi is laughable.
I can get a Raspberry Pi 2/3 for $35. That's a real price that reflects the Bill of Materials.
However, I still can't get a datasheet or support from Broadcom. That's a dealbreaker.
Feel free to use RPi's in your projects or for small volume. But if you need real volumes, use a Beaglebone Black/Green.
This is not true. If it were true, they would welcome a mass payment up-front as this would solve their "do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront" issues which you cite. Instead, I was banned from their forum (forever) despite being a contributor in good standing, for wanting to arrange such an up-front payment with others who were interested, even though I already removed any Raspberry Pi branding from my bid (i.e. the bid would be in generic terms), meaning they would be free to consider the bid but do not have to accept, and even though I greatly limited discussion to just a few posts in their off-topic forum and was clear that they did not officially sanction such a bid from us. (My bid also would have been for lower specifications and a higher per-unit price than the official raspberry pi zero specifications and price, to further make fulfilling it easy.) Their official reason was that I was generating too much mod mail for them to deal with (even though throughout the site they encourage people to message the mods about anything and everything), since hundreds of people were extremely interested in ordering mass quantities. I feel I went out of my way to be extremely fair and transparent, did not make any sort of misrepresentations, or imply they supported me, etc. I went out of my way not to talk in terms of their competitors as well but to support Raspberry Pi in every way possible.
So there is huge demand, but, no, capital constraints are not the reason that the Raspberry Pi Trading foundation does not wish to make x million raspberry pi zero type devices upfront - even if it would further their cause.
I don't have additional visibility than the above and have shared what I know.
For what's it's worth we targeted between 1 and 10 million units as a one-time bid (without them having to continue to guarantee availability ), and also targeted a ridiculously long fulfillment period, like a year - which would be enough to build any capacity they want, to fulfill that one bid. With the understanding that in the meantime (while the bidders' wait the year or however long) a newer version could be announced, no harm no foul and the bidders would not get that, and also that this is a way for the bidders to support the foundation, without getting support (such as supplier support) in return.
Finally, we thought that Broadcom might not want to flood the market with cheap chips, so we positioned it as a genuine set of orders around 1000 pieces, by entrepreneurs. (For real.) This would then lock these small-time entrepreneurs in with the Broadcom family (there are other ARM suppliers), and Broadcom could therefore upsell them on the rest of their full production solutions, since the small sellers would not have unlimited access to more chips and if their small marketing takes off they will want to place large orders for chips that are actually available, on their custom PCB.
At any rate, whatever the issue was, it wasn't capital.
This is a "loss leader" strategy to get devs committed to the Broadcom platform only to find out "actually $5 computers don't exist, they are really $35".
Go to Mouser / DigiKey and put in the part number for the Broadcom chip, choose a very high number as quantity - look at that price.
Further contact a PCB and Assembly outfit and get a quote from them for a small board with a 100 or so SMD placements. You will see that $5 is complete fantasy.
RPI Foundation could've just marketed this as "cheap development platforms for you to try out your code, but only 1 per customer". Instead they've tried to maintain that this is some sort of "real product" that is commercially available at otherworldly low prices.
> My bid also would have been for lower specifications and a higher per-unit price than the official raspberry pi zero specifications and price, to further make fulfilling it easy.
Higher or lower, different specifications would have meant a lot of overhead in designing, testing and certifying a new design.
> Their official reason was that I was generating too much mod mail for them to deal with (even though throughout the site they encourage people to message the mods about anything and everything), since hundreds of people were extremely interested in ordering mass quantities.
Were you trying to corral hundreds of people into making a single bulk order of a new pi, but without the pi branding? That sounds like an enormous headache with regards to delivery, liability, etc. Also you say hundreds, hundreds of people buying need to be purchasing tens of thousands each before you're talking about x million devices. Were the hundreds of people all realistic purchasers with $100-200k ready to put down in advance?
> This is not true. If it were true, they would welcome a mass payment up-front as this would solve their "do not have the capital to make x million devices upfront" issues which you cite.
That would be just pre-ordering, which has other costs to a community. Letting the first people buy 10 for various hobbies probably doesn't help the community as getting the new device into 10x as many hands.
As long as the sales are one offs, its not a $10 device yet. I hope it will be. There was something decidedly fishy about the "$5" Zero that has never ever been available more than one at a time.
I'm not saying that there was a secret conspiracy, but if you happen to be a distributer who makes his margin on each transaction, not each unit, and your source is chronically short, a de facto Zero situation emerges where you make far more on the limited supply available by forcing extra transactions. Sadly this largely negates the purpose of offering an ultra-cheap item in the first place.
[1] https://smile.amazon.com/Raspberry-Zero-v1-3-Development-Boa...
You can do wireless keyboardless headless setup. You can do it without connecting anything but power.
On the SD card, place a file called "ssh" (no extension) so SSH is enabled, and configure wpa_supplicant with your wifi details. I found this on the RPi Stack Exchange [1](thanks scruss)
...On the full up-to-date Raspbian...
>If a wpa_supplicant.conf file is placed into the /boot/ directory, this will be moved to the /etc/wpa_supplicant/ directory the next time the system is booted, overwriting the network settings; this allows a Wifi configuration to be preloaded onto a card from a Windows or other machine that can only see the boot partition.
>Since the /boot partition is accessible by any computer with an SD card reader, wifi configuration is now much simpler.
>A skeleton wpa_supplicant.conf file can be as little as:
network={
ssid="YOUR_SSID"
psk="YOUR_PASSWORD"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}
--- [1] http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/10251/prepare...
I hope that in future, a proper/official headless image will be provided, to provide more sensible defaults. Until then, I made a little tool to patch the Raspbian images to set things up this way:
It's a quick an dirty hack to enable you to SSH on the local network & avoid finding a screen & keyboard.
SSH keys you can add later...presumably your local net can keep the bad guys out for the 30 mins it takes.
Awesome thanks
I have several at home "in production" doing things like Z-Wave home automation, Proliphix thermostat chat-ops, wifi AP, some web scraping scripts...
But, at the same time I have a bunch of other ideas that I have a hard time finding time for.
My next project will be setting up Pi Cameras for home security and this new platform is looking very promising for that. Very exciting, but I'm dreading not finding time for it.
One project that I've thought of was to use an SDR to monitor Z-wave traffic for security. This is very low on my list at the moment.
Another thing I would like to do is set another pi up as a DNS server.
I've spent the past 2-3 months slowly learning about hardware with cheap ESP8266 boards. So much fun wiring small wifi-enabled boards to random sensors and output devices.
I suspect I'll graduate to using PIs in the future, I used to own one that was solely used for emulation, but it didn't survive my international relocation.
There are so may projects doing the same things ala https://xkcd.com/927/
I think some real initiative to standardise common projects, and make them explicitly communal, with the creation of tutorials as the main focus, would do wonders.
I see sites like hackaday.io, for example, and it is all descriptions of personal projects (most unfinished, or early on), and the problem is rife.
A better medium is perhaps "instructables", where the focus is obviously to instruct, and the average quality (result over finesse) encourages sharing, even of unrefined instructables.
incidentally, do you have a project space? Some of those ideas you are working on are interesting, I'm working on a few myself, in collab with local hackspace.
> The ultra low price point makes it very easy to go out and buy one
Which is exactly why I don't feel bad if my project is not some amazing thing that will change my life.
Adafruit has lots of cool stuff, but it charges at least $40 for shipping. Not worth it for a casual buyer.
- 1GHz, single-core CPU
- 512MB RAM
- Mini-HDMI port
- Micro-USB On-The-Go port
- Micro-USB power
- HAT-compatible 40-pin header
- Composite video and reset headers
- CSI camera connector
- 802.11n wireless LAN
- Bluetooth 4.0
Source: http://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-ze...
Hold on there landlubber!
When we said one Pi Zero per order we meant it!
Since we're not completely heartless pirates,
just firm on our policies, we'll let you go
back to your cart and fix this "unfortunate
oversight".
We won't tell anyone if you don't.
- the Pimoroni Crew
p.s. We always announce new Pi Zero stock on
Twitter so it may be worth following for the
latest information!I've been considering rolling my own around a Raspberry Pi, but I'm not sure how dependable they are. Does anyone have any advice on that front?
More generally, if you're looking at POS systems, the new hotness is to just use a tablet. Solves the display problem quite easily. USB barcorde scanners usually work as keyboards, so it's not hard to get set up.
If you're looking to do it with a Pi, there are small screens for the device, but I think the parts total will quickly get higher than a low-end Android tablet.
You can get an Amazon Fire tablet for around $50. Offbrand Chinese ones are even cheaper.
Think about having a custom linux setup compared to Windows. There's some extra stability in one angle, but your wifi stops working every full moon and your keyboard layout gets randomized on reboot.
Though the advantage of building it yourself is that you can replace more specific parts.
This is all just spitballing though. I'm literally just considering it.
I did purchase an industrial USB Hub though because there were too many USB peripherals drawing too much current.
When we first looked at the market, we realized that no-one really knew how it worked because it's still very young. So we decided to compete on price and reliability. Instead of lock-in contracts and up-front hardware purchases, we charge a small month-to-month rental and the hardware remains ours.
All they were used for was displaying a webpage that showed the schedule for a given room in the building so the Cisco boxes were always overkill (and the browser built into it was terrible to boot).
So I put together a test setup on a RasPi that just boots LXDE in kiosk mode, opens Chromium with no...er...chrome on the windows and with no mouse cursor, etc, loads the page for that room, and the page itself handles refreshes. Set a cron job to reboot every morning at 4am in case there was any scheduled maintenance done on the server delivering the webpage overnight. Can SSH in to change things and also set up a node.js script I found that allows me to open a URL in my browser and trigger a reboot or shutdown.
All of this was new to me but in the end, I replaced twenty $1500 boxes with twenty $55 kits and it was an excuse to learn/brush up on some things. The best part is that they look even better now because the Cisco boxes could only go up to 1366x768 and now the displays are running at native resolution. The down side is that this isn't a private company (state university) so I don't get any sort of bonus for saving them almost $30k :(
If you expect this in the private world, you are going to have a very bad time :)
Other things you will probably want are a programmable keyboard, NCR 78 or Datalogic 9800i, coin dispenser & an integrated pinpad for processing credit/debit.
Yeah, I'm looking at having a printer controlled cash draw. I don't need a bar code scanner. A Raspberry Pi touch display. And some sort of pinpad hardware and payment processing service I can integrate with. I think that's "all" I need for what I have in mind.
Eh, that is really vague, if you could be more specific I could help ya more.
> I'm looking at having a printer controlled cash draw.
No reason not to use the printer to control the cash drawer, every receipt printer you look at will support 1 if not 2 cash drawers.
> I don't need a bar code scanner.
Do you only have a few items which you intend to have on a touchscreen?
>A Raspberry Pi touch display.
How big/how high resolution?
> And some sort of pinpad
Look at the Pax Px7 or Dejavoo, we wrote PHP bindings for Pax's API. Would recommend you avoid Datacap, most semi-integrated credit/debit offerings are a pretty penny besides the two I mentioned.
Sadly its extremely hard to buy any Pi Zero at the sticker price. Its always out or not available - and even if you can get em you only can order a limited amount (in the case were I got lucky it was 1).
The Pi Zero W seems to continue the trend as far as my local distributor is concerned. I get the overpriced USB hubs its where the profit is at but MAN stop frigging teasing its annoying if you can't buy it at that price.
I don't want the adapters - I solder to the board directly and while the sandisk sd card is not terrible its far from the fastest you can get for a similar price.
</rant>
sorry about that I am calm now.
the pin spacing is just as large as with the "grownup" RPI
just don't use lead-free solder - no good reason for it and it makes soldering harder than it need be.
Common rules are: Work in a well-ventilated area, don't eat while working, don't use your soldering iron to heat your coffee. But those apply while using lead-free solder as well.
edit: so, it's the frequent repeated exposure to lead (i.e. in paint and as a sugar added to wine[0]) which is harmful, not any single individual (non-acute) exposure.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate#Sweetener
itching
vertigo
dizziness
tingling in extremities
loss of balance or coordination
slurred speech
temporary blindness
profuse sweating
or heart palpitations.
Why bother make disposal hard for the sake of easy soldering?
https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/fitting-hammer-he...
Is the Raspberry Pi Foundation just coasting on branding at this point to sell products?
Edit: On another note, will the Raspberry Pi Foundation stick with this very limited SOC ad infinium? It seems like a poor choice for a single board computer, you really want I/O and low power usage, but it doesn't deliver on either.
I don't believe beating competition by selling more products was ever part of the RPi Foundation mission statement. The way how I see it, existence of competing products primarily benefits a minority technically-oriented community, not their intended primary audience.
http://hackaday.com/2016/02/28/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-...
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/28/10-raspberry-pi-zero-w-the-w-...
If you need a raspberry pi, just buy a raspberry pi.
Not worth it.
The WiFi on the OPi Zero and Neo Air are awful; borderline unusable. (You're talking ~3Mbit in a non-noisy environment with poor range).
The Pi Zero W has the same chip as the model B which has an excellent reputation.
Max order quantity is 1, though.
However the price for the 30x is so high that it must include every single extra component 30 times.
I did get tripped up with the camera connector being a different size to normal Pis though, darn it.
[1] www.thepihut.com (I am not affiliated with them in any way)
Shipping to Germany from the same UK seller would be £4, or £5 for the US. That's a total of £13.60 / €16 / $17 for Germany and £14.60 / $18 for the US.
You can stop pretending that shipping is $30 now.
Only covers regular pi zero though.
$10 shipping. CanaKIT. Nope.
4-12 pounds shipping for PiHut.
5.50 - 8 pounds shipping for pimoroni.
Aaaand you can't even get a bare Pi Zero from Adafruit. Of course they're "out of stock" for the "W"'s... But they're glad to sell you a overly inflated price of $24.95 for a Zero kit. bah.
Your real problem is availability. You see a product launch, want 10, 100, 1000 to use in everything from the sprinklers to the toaster and then hit a website where 200,000 other hackers have had exactly the same thought. They're ferociously popular...
So what would you rather? They hold off sales and announcement until they have a million units rotting in warehouses around the world (like a console release)? Perhaps they should spend twice as much ramping up production to burst in the first month (and charge more). Or pre-orders? Kickstarter? Serious here, what option is better (on price, fairness and convenience to you) than what they're currently doing?
In a month or two you'll (again, slightly dependant on geography) be able to order a hundred of these without an issue. If you really are putting in a big order, talk direct to the distributor and they can adjust their order (and maybe their price to you).
Ultimately you don't have to pay more, you just have to be patient.
The German distributor seems to be selling only 30x items and the French one doesn't have an Add to cart button for the W, maybe still out of stock. It's in stock at Pimoroni. I didn't check any distributor outside EU.
I've been happy with SanDisk microSDHC UHS-I 8 GB cards so far. They are cat 10, advertised up to 48 MB/s. Which SD cards do you recommend?
If they're already for sale at brick-and-mortars then the listings won't be far behind (I don't see any yet, though).
Here's a cool link for you pointing to some new mitochondria research, http://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(16)00...
How long do you think it'll be before i can safely hook up powered electronics into a system like RasPi? I'd like to make my home "smart", but i don't want to have random IoT vulnerabilities in my home. So a simple network of tiny linux machines powering desk lights/etc will be plenty for me. However, hooking electronics up is dangerous, so i'd rather wait until a professional makes it accessible to someone like me.
Thoughts?
[0] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/AEON-AEOEZW090-C-Z-Stick-Gen5/dp/B0... [1] - https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant
Apparently there's already an open source project called Home Assistant for this purpose.
It was such a pain to do USB networking on the old zero. But its a great size and form factor for projects
Adding in Bluetooth and Wifi will make it much easier to work with
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/28/10-raspberry-pi-zero-w-the-w-...
It is unbelievable how Apple is missing this train. They could put 100 million soapbars in all homes in the world without even making a dent in their main products. All aluminum case, just like an Apple TV.
This would be intended for the 6 billion thirld-worders like me that don't have access to the internet, not for the one billion that can afford a $1000 iMac.
Plug it to any TV via HDMI, attach a keyboard with trackpad and there you have it, instant knowledge at your fingertips. You can't imagine how much I have learned about carpentry, electric motors, water wells, metal foundries, solar, agriculture, stuff that is really life saving in less developed countries like mine. I dug my own water well watching videos from youtube using a 2" PVC pipe and a hose and found water just ten feet under the ground so never again will suffer a drought like past years.
Youtube, Wikipedia and sites like Khan Academy are a godsend and if only more people in the world could have access to them imagine all the knowledge and productivity that could exponentially grow from that.
The more people has access to information the better the whole world will be. And while the Raspberry Zero W is cool for playing and automating stuff, it is not enough for providing internet access to a third-worlder like me. Just upgrade it a little more and sell it for a little more and let people do the rest. America can continue enjoying their expensive toys while we catch up and help you build better toys.
I tend to avoid shields in projects as they are more expensive, take up more space, and not as flexible (can't be used as easily with another board e.g. teensy 3.0 vs arduino uno)
I'm looking for a fun project to scratch my engineering itch. I've been a non-engineer for too long.
I have an amazon echo for voice recognition functionality if that opens any doors. But I can't rewire my apartment since it's not mine, so I can't do much home automation.
If you're willing to pay some, that's not that much of an impediment. Something like the Phillips Hue bulbs are self-contained inside of the bulb (at least as far as powering it goes) which means you don't need to mess with any wiring.
Hope that helps.
In about getting sick of how they're handling supply issues and pricing. Yeah 10$ ? Bullshit.
The built in ethernet port, full size USB port and ability to easily add POE support are just gravy on top to make it easily usable, rather than have a dozen dongles and a USB hub hanging off it needlessly.
Edit: Added kernel version, clarified POE support.
> I can actually use an M.2 SSD with the HATs available for it
The NAS hat costs $7 extra plus shipping ($4 to EU for me). [0] And to my knowledge there is no case for the Ornage Pi Zero which can accommodate the NAS hat.
> and POE support
It doesn't support POE out of the box, and it's not 802.3af/at compliant. [1] You can use a passive PoE injector, but 5V in a CAT5/6 cable won't get you very far. You can use a higher voltage, but then you need to add a DC/DC voltage converter and unsolder some resistors from the PCB.
In short: it's a lot of work to get POE working. It's not really worthwhile.
Also the WiFi on the Orange Pi Zero is a piece of shit. [2] Performance is crap and there's high packet loss. Allwinner's driver is a steaming pile of shit and no one from Xunlong or Allwinner is working to make it any better. The stock images from Xunlong are using kernel 3.4!
Several people from Armbian are trying to improve the driver, but there's no public datasheet and the firmware of the wireless module is pretty crash happy.
Also it's 2.4GHz 1T1R (same as the Raspberry Pi W) so the performance is always going to be bad, even after (or if) Armbian manages to fix up the driver.
- *Does the Orange Pi Zero outperform the Raspberry Pi (Zero, W, 1, 2)?* Yes.
- *Should I buy the Orange Pi Zero for my project that needs WiFi?* No.
- *Should I buy the Orange Pi Zero for a project requiring USB and Ethernet?* Yes!
- *Should I use the images from Xunlong for my Orange Pi <whatever>?* Please no! Use Armbian ( https://www.armbian.com/ )
[0] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Orange-Pi-Zero-NAS-Expansion...
[1] http://linux-sunxi.org/Orange_Pi_Zero#Powering_the_board
[2] https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/3243-orange-pi-zer...
Sure, but your gonna be able to max out the ethernet port on an OrangePi Zero, whereas none of the Raspberry Pis can even fill half of a 100Mbps ethernet port. Printing a case isn't all that hard, or you could always build it from thin plywood, cardbord or something else if you want a case.
> It doesn't support POE out of the box
No, but you can wire it for any type of POE you want, whether that be 5v, 12v to 24v, or proper 48v POE. The traces are already there on the PCB, and at that price point I doubt anyone could fit in a buck converter to make it do 48v POE without increasing the cost by a few bucks.
> WiFi on the Orange Pi Zero is a piece of shit.
That and every other SBC, I've got a Raspberry Pi 3 on the shelf that I wrote off due to poor wifi performance. SBCs with small integrated antennas just aren't gonna have amazing wifi. Most of what was in the BSP is now mainlined in kernel 4.10 by the way.
Armbian is decent, I've been quemu-debootstrapping my own images though since I'm not a fan of all the modifications they make to Debian.
So, you can buy an extra buck converter^ and solder it yourself --removing additional resistors on the PCB-- and it still won't be 802.3af/at compliant, or you can just buy a proper PoE adaptor for $10. [0]
^ Please show me a buck converter that does 48VDC->5VDC for "a few bucks"
[0] http://www.tp-link.com/us/products/details/TL-POE10R.html
Edit: Guess I'm just unfamiliar wrt POE, since I usually use 5v frankenPOE on these boards.
Yes, you do if you're using a voltage higher than 5V. Read the wiki page:
If you plan to use a buck converter at higher voltages, remove R135/R136 (75 Ohm) as they will dissipate a lot of heat and may burn out! See the picture on the right and below in the gallery for which resistors to remove. [0]
Sorry, but I beg to differ
slau@cakec:~ $ wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.tele2.net/1GB.zip
/dev/null 100% [================================================================================================>] 1.00G 11.1MB/s in 93s
slau@cakep1:~ $ wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.tele2.net/1GB.zip
/dev/null 100% [================================================================================================>] 1.00G 8.25MB/s in 2m 5s
Edit: SNMP data during that download test: https://s22.postimg.org/rgsrkru8h/2017_02_28_131858_1257x291...
Doubtful. It's a race to the bottom for any SBC which isn't a Raspberry Pi or ODROID.
It's highly unlikely someone will make a board that costs $15 and has great WiFi, because everyone blindly buys the $8 board (because cheaper = better!) with shit WiFi and then complains about how crap all these Chinese SBCs are.
Especially when websites post stories about these board releases never bother to update their articles and essentially just give the manufacturer free advertising. [0] [1]
Hell even Intel tablets running Windows 8.1/10 are using shitty 2.4GHz Realtek SDIO based WiFi that still isn't supported in Linux.
In the race to the bottom, good software support is sacrificed first.
[0] http://linuxgizmos.com/headless-orange-pi-zero-sbc-has-wifi-...
[1] http://hackaday.com/2016/11/07/orange-pi-releases-two-boards...
You got my hopes up, but it's not even passive "PoE", they just exposed the unused pairs on solder pads....
Something Pi-like with proper PoE would be great, but that is just to exotic a feature it seems.
Any links/photos? Thank you!
Hope it helps you! =)
Wrt community, linux-sunxi and Armbian are both in better states than the Raspberry Pi community on their forums or on Reddit, if I google for dhclient issues with the Raspberry Pi I'm gonna get nowhere fast on fixing said issues.
How is libmmal for the Raspberry Pi's camera libre by the way? The license looks to be proprietary, definitely the opposite of open.
Literally, once I got my Pi, I got a DHT22 from my arduino box and in less than 3 minutes I could read it.
When I say 'working' - i'm talking about the reviews of the alternatives that almost always talk about how hard it is to download the software and get them working, there's always some snag.
So have bought a Wireless one just now too :D
My comment caused quite a few follow up comments from people who had probably similar feelings checking out the Pi Zero so I don't think I entirely missed the mark here.
I appreciate how frustrating ranty comments can be, especially when they rank higher than they deserve—which is nearly invariably, as steaming indignation always gets lots of upvotes owing to some bug in human firmware. But it would have been better not to take the thread in a personal direction.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13752546 and marked it off-topic.