Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

thepihut.com

124 pointsluxpir51 comments

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022887 (official announcement post from Raspberry Pi Trading)

The TLDR missing from that page—the Zero 2 uses the SoC from the Raspberry Pi 3 with a slight downclock.

Little bit of shame it doesn't support 5GHz Wifi and BLE 5 when even Espressif will soon support both. But still nice package.

And also no antenna connector. My Zero W is nice but the connectivity can be bad so being able to attach a camera without jumping through hoops would be nice.

Curiously the last photo on the site clearly shows an SMA footprint, but the photos only show unpopulated solder pads. I wonder if you can order the board with the SMA socket populated?

Unfortunately it's not antenna. It is actually used for testing purposes. [1]

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/new-raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-2...

It looks like it's set up so you could jump the antenna connection to the connector if you solder it yourself. The Zero W had the same setup (in a slightly different spot on the board), but has never been available with a connector pre-soldered AFAIK.

OT: has 5ghz WiFi been announced for an espressif part?

Fantastic, ordered one to use (hopefully) as a drop in replacement for the GPi case(for context - the GPi case is a Gameboy form factor case with integrated buttons and screen that uses the zero as the "brain" of the system. It's great for emulation, but the Zero could struggle with some games, hopefully this one will work a lot better :-) )

I've been testing it in a Null 2[1], and I can attest to the fact that it is, indeed, much better for emulation. It's rare to have stuttering in any of the NES, Genesis/Megadrive, or PS1 games I've tested. Still has some problems with N64, and I haven't really tested anything else.

The ETA Prime YouTube channel has a video up with more emulation testing.

[1] https://www.null2.co.uk

I’ve never really been happy about power for boards like this.

Is there something much much lighter that can run off a CR2032? For some applications all one really needs is zigbee for access, or something like that.

Or the alternative is a Pi-like with POE. Last time I did that with a Pi it involved a relatively expensive “hat” which felt suboptimal.

Need to go down to the microcontroller level, Pi Pico, or Arduino

Nothing on ARM (and with linux) probably that can run off a button cell. Down to arduino etc microcontroller level.

I am not aware of a linux board that can do this. It'd be pretty sick though, I'd love to be proven wrong.

It seems to me that a microcontroller with an RTOS might be more up this alley (perhaps the esp8266/esp32 platform, but I'm no expert).

If found them both to eat a bit much battery for much, though I was connecting to wifi.

That said, it is incredible how fast they can boot, connect to wifi, send something and shutdown again.

I wish this had more RAM and at least a USB-C to boot off of: it'd be pretty nice for singular use cases.

I'd replace the Pi 4 in my 3D printer controller with one and use that Pi 4 for a bunch of other things since they're impossible to find outside of scalpers in my country now. :/

yeh I'm a bit shocked they stuck with micro-usb. I understand its a little cheaper but I'd certainly be willing to pay a few quid more for it

Why are they scalping PIs? Not much use for mining right?

Scalping is usually to sell back to the market at a higher price. People will do that with anything that is in demand but low supply, which has been the case with the initial release of rPi products in the past. I doubt they'll make much, but they make something.

That sucks. They should limit how many they sell to a buyer.

Unfortunately there are ways around any scheme to limit scalpers, so no matter what you try they will still come and you'll just inconvenience the genuine people who was the product/show/other even more.

We have an official reseller but it’s been out of stock for months unfortunately. The making a quick buck on other people’s misfortune thing is widespread here. PS5s still cost upwards of $1000.

Pi's have always had a lot of resale value, specially in countries where they are not manufactured (no official reseller).

Would it be feasible to build a whole cluster of these for compute power?

The limited data transfer rate makes clustering ineffective, unfortunately.

No, you need a lot of adapters to add ethernet, durable mass storage, etc. over USB OTG. Since these are just Raspberry Pi 3 SOCs effectively you could pick some of those up for the same price as this new board and all the USB dongles and adapters you'd need.

Maximum network bandwidth is ~220 Mbps, and that's with a massive USB Ethernet dongle hanging off each Zero 2. WiFi is a pretty anemic ~35 Mbps.

So unless your clustering needs are very low-performance and don't need much in the way of networked bandwidth, I would stay away from trying to cluster Zeros.

The Zero 2 is slightly less-bad than the original Zero W (I actually built a tiny K3s cluster with it way back when...), but still not a great idea. It's extremely slow and the 512 MB of RAM limits what you can do a lot.

There are companies being built around raspberrypi-in-a-server-farm, for ex balena.io

Most of those tinkerer boards spend too much power on low-bandwidth connectivity and use too old cpus to ever be practical for compute. Outright wrong orders of magnitude.

For learning about clustering, sure, go wild. Or maybe use the latest and greatest Pi (is that Pi4 ATM?) to avoid issues with extremely low end stuff (e.g. even disregarding applications, can you run a "cluster stack" on this without OOM etc.?).

For "real work", nope, not worth it. For that, look into what e.g. the giant IAAS providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) or the top500 list are running on.

> look into what e.g. the giant IAAS providers

How do you find that out?

Well, occasionally they give presentations describing their hardware infrastructure. And you can deduce something from their documentation about available VM types.

Anyway, the idea wasn't to give an exact recipe but rather to give a glimpse on what is generally considered a cost-effective compute platform.

I build a Hadoop cluster with 5 Raspberry Pi-2B in 2015.

It works, but the ratio of power consumption to compute performance was worse compared to using a standard PC.

edit: with the huge increase in performance, Pi-4 models may now be competitive.

That's awesome, I did the same project when I was working for Hortonworks. I had 8 nodes and it was really limited by memory. I got a few MR jobs running and some benchmarks, but not a great cluster overall.

There's already reviews out there: https://youtu.be/Jm8RiqAdHQE

"...had it in my possession last two weeks.."

The US vendors linked on the official site sold out in less than an hour...really wish they enforced a limit per person like pihut did. Anyone else starting to notice that buying any new tech on launch with enthusiast levels of hype (the past 2 years, even prior to the supply chain slowdown) requires spinning up a bot?

Yeah, I don't know what it is. It's like the entire market has turned into one giant speculation machine, where everything and anything that could potentially have some broader interest has to be immediately bought out and resold at higher prices.

I don't know what the solution is, but yes, I've noticed it absolutely everywhere.

Inflation? More money chasing the same amount of goods

I’ve used Raspberry Pi to build an always-on midi recorder for my electric piano (in Rust), which was super useful. Having to have a power supply is the ugliest part, I would say, otherwise it has been a fantastic help.

Does anyone know if this model supports USB boot? The previous ones did not, and since there’s no info about it in the official post, I assume that’s the case with Zero 2 as well.

It's a downclocked Raspi 3 cpu so it might.

I haven't tested it out, but I will in just a moment.

Edit: Out of the box, it doesn't seem to do anything at all without a microSD card with a valid bootloader inserted. Checking if I can set program_usb_boot_mode

Edit 2: I set `program_usb_boot_mode=1` in /boot/config.txt, rebooted, and verified `vcgencmd otp_dump | grep 17:` output `17:3020000a`, but the Zero 2 W just sits if I don't have a microSD card inserted. No HDMI output, no attempt to run off USB (tried with two different flash drives).

With the microSD card and USB both plugged in, it boots off only microSD and the USB volume shows up as sda.

That’s a shame, but thanks for your (super-fast) investigation!

What's the supply situation for Raspberry PIs? Not just this one but the other models.

Very tight.

Eben Upton's been mentioning how hard it's been to keep up with demand this year, and it looks like next year won't be better (but hopefully won't be worse!) [1].

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/20/raspberry_pi_supply_e...

incredible. i spent the last 2 weeks trying to overclock my rpi zero. amen

will these work with the Turing pi @geerlingguy

No, it's not a compatible form factor. Also I don't think mentions work like that on HN ;)

2 minute response time indicates otherwise ;)

touché

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