TEST RASPBERRY PI ZERO W1
220 hours with the
Pi Zero WGood
Meh
Evil1min 5mins 35mins 40mins 45mins 1hr 3hrs 6hrs 7hrs
There’s enough processing power
here for a wide range of tasks......and there are no analogue audio or
composite video outputs...A Pi with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for
under a tenner? Bargain!It’s slinky enough to make my debit card feel self-conscious.Hmm, I’m soon going to run out of
ports for bigger projects......but you can easily add them if you’re handy with a soldering iron.And there’s a CSI interface for the
official Raspberry Pi camera kit.The USB ports are clearly marked for
power and data, just to be sure.The miniHDMI port isn’t quite flush to
the case, and my cable’s come loose.[ Words
Tom Morgan ]
The Raspberry Pi Zero W adds Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
to what was already a brilliant mini-puter – and
amazingly, the price of freedom is still under £103 Pi in the sky
Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11n Wi-Fi
(on 2.4GHz only) might not be
cutting-edge, but you won’t
notice that here – just having
it all built onto the circuit board
is great. You’ll need to add an 8GB
microSD card before you can start
experimenting with code.2 Pi-eyed
As with the original Zero, there’s
not a lot of room around the
edges for connectivity – you
get two microUSB ports and
one miniHDMI, but that’s about
it. And one of those USB ports
will provide power, so you’ve only
got one free to use.1 Pi crust
For an extra £6, the official case is
compact, holds the board in place
firmly and protects the ports.
There’s even a choice of case
lids, to keep your connectivity
options open. You don’t have
to buy the case, but it feels like
a more cohesive kit if you do.Things you can buy for a tenner:
two pints of beer (or three if
you live outside of London). One
month of Netflix. Two copies of
the world’s greatest gadget mag.
A whole computer, though? Yep,
it’s possible.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation
has been pumping out tiny DIY
micro-PCs for half a decade now;
and after surprising the world
with the shrunken-down Pi Zero
in 2015, it’s gone one better for
birthday number five. Enter the
Pi Zero W – the W is for Wireless.
It’s just as tiny as the original
Zero, only now it has Wi-Fi and
Bluetooth built-in. And that’s a
very, very good thing.
At a minuscule 65x30mm, you
shouldn’t struggle to squeeze
the Zero W into whatever DIY
project you have in mind. Yet that
board still has room for a 1GHz
single-core CPU, 512GB of RAM
and a wireless chip.
And don’t be scared by the
whole coding thing – there’s
an answer to every question
somewhere in the friendly online
Pi community.from £9.60 / stuff.tv/PiZeroWFree as a board