The Raspberry Pi family has just received a new member called Raspberry Pi Zero and it costs only $5 (€ 4.5).
Despite the fact that the regular Raspberry Pi 2 costs only $35 (€33), the people who build these amazing mini PCs figured out a way of making them smaller and cheaper. The number and types of mini PCs have increased tremendously in the past couple of years, and they are becoming more and more powerful.
Raspberry Pi Zero is more powerful than the first generation of Raspberry Pi, but it’s also a lot smaller. This makes it ideal for integration in all kinds of devices and projects, and we’ve already seen it used with some gloves. The minute size of the new PC ensures that it’s really attractive for people who need a brain for their robots or other projects.
Raspberry Pi Zero is available now
The Raspberry Pi Zero is already available in regular stores like element14, The Pi Hut, Pimoroni, Adafruit. A few tens of thousands of units have been made already, but they are expected to be sold out pretty soon.
“Even in the developed world, a programmable computer is a luxury item for a lot of people, and every extra dollar that we ask someone to spend decreases the chance that they’ll choose to get involved. At the start of this year, we began work on an even cheaper Raspberry Pi to help these people take the plunge,” the founder of the Raspberry Pi project Eben Upton said.
Given its small size, the hardware specs are pretty impressive, but we have to keep in mind that the Raspberry Pi was never about raw power, it was about flexibility and what you can do with it.
Raspberry Pi Zero comes with a Broadcom BCM2835 application processor at 1GHz (ARM11 core and it’s faster than the original Raspberry Pi by 40%), 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM, a micro-SD card slot, a mini-HDMI port (1080p at 60FPS video output), two micro-USB sockets for data and power, an unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header (the same layout as the Model A+/B+/2B), and an unpopulated composite video header.
One of the novelties is the introduction of that unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header, which means only the contacts are in the board and users can solder their own header in there. The new mini-PC will run the same Linux distributions available for the rest of the models.
The Raspberry Pi Zero will also come with the December issue of The MagPi, but that’s only for the UK.
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Via Softpedia