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Raspberry Pi Zero review

2016-01-18
hello there my name is Gary Sims from Android Authority now in 2012 we saw the release of the Raspberry Pi a single board computer that sparked an entire computing revolution now in 2015 the Raspberry Pi foundation released a new model this time the Raspberry Pi 2 with a greater level of performance mainly due to its cortex a7 quad core processor and the 1 gigabytes of onboard ram and it amazingly still had the same price tag just $35 well recently the Raspberry Pi foundation have done it again they've released a new computer a new board and this time it's called the Raspberry Pi 0 and here it is the Raspberry Pi 0 it's small its elegant and yet it runs Linux with a desktop gives you a web browser and also allows you to write programs in C Java Python and so on and the amazing thing is it costs just $5 ok there's no getting around it this is just a circuit board there's no consumer-level case here there's nothing shiny you just get a tiny little circuit board however what you can do with this circuit board is absolutely amazing so let's take a look at it when you look at this ball the first thing you'll notice is the system on a chip the black blob in the very center of the circuit board now it's a system on a chip based on the arm v6 architecture you also get a GPU and 512 megabytes of RAM now down towards the bottom of the board you have a mini HDMI connector and two micro USB ports one is for supplying the power and the other is for data connections and to the right of the board you have the micro SD card slot where the operating system is stored and where you'll keep your data now compared to the Raspberry Pi one on the Raspberry Pi 2 there are some big things missing for example there's no Ethernet port also the GPIO pins that were so popular on the Raspberry Pi 1 and 2 are missing instead you just have these 40 holes in the circuit board and if you really want to use them you either have to solder wire directly to these little holes or populate it with a header the other interesting thing about this board is the use of microUSB which means you can't plug in anything like a mouse or a keyboard directly into it you're going to have to use a micro USB adapter and that brings me to the point of hidden costs now although the board itself only costs five dollars you are going to need to spend some more money to get this board up and running at a very minimum you're going to need to buy yourself a micro SD card to put in here because without it you can't boot any of the operating systems on top of that you're probably going to need to use a micro USB to USB connecter converter adapter so you can plug in a mouse and a keyboard if you're plugging in a mouse and a keyboard you're going to need a USB hub you're also going to need a Wi-Fi dongle to give you any kind of network connectivity and unless you actually happen to have a mini HDMI cable at home being a need to buy a mini HDMI to normal HDMI adapter so these are some of the hidden cost now I reckon that on a minimum you need to spend about another $20 to get all the bits and pieces that you need and that would include the SD card and a micro USB adapter you may need to spend double that or even more if you need to buy things like HDMI cables and a might and a mouse and a keyboard and a hub you could spend a lot more but I'm hoping you've probably got those things knocking about at home that you can at least borrow when you're configuring this board now I talked about the hidden cost but let's just remember what you do get for just five dollars you get a fully working 32-bit computer that can run Linux and multimedia software including 512 megabytes of RAM and its own built-in GPU $5 that's pretty amazing the operating system of choice for all the Raspberry Pi board is of course Linux and the Raspberry Pi foundation do provide their own version of Linux and is being actively developed by the community and by the developers there at the foundation and of course with that you then get a full Linux environment including a desktop including a web browser including compilers including Java including Python including Perl including anything really you want including lots of stuff from Wolfram Alpha it really is a complete kit and so the software side of this thing is really done really well if you remember the Raspberry Pi 2 support the Windows 10 IOT core now you don't get that with the Raspberry Pi zero or the Raspberry Pi one you'll need a Raspberry Pi 2 if you need Windows 10 IOT core now in terms of performance the Raspberry Pi foundation with an amazing thing this little board runs at 1 gigahertz now you remember the original Raspberry Pi runs at just 700 megahertz although it could be overclocked but this one comes with a default speed of one gigahertz and it doesn't even have a heatsink on it it's amazing I remember I've got my first 1 gigahertz Pentium 3 I think it was at the time and we were all just so amazed that we could get to this 1 gigahertz barrier and I was running Windows and it was just in these big PC desktop and here I have a 1 gigahertz machine $5.00 on a tiny little circuit board what about that hey now in terms of the performance because it is running 300 megahertz faster than the Raspberry Pi 1 it is faster than the Raspberry Pi 1 if you head over to Andrew Authority comm you'll find a full written article that goes with this video and there I've got some benchmarking numbers I show you the difference in the Raspberry Pi 1 there are 2 pi 1 overclocked at 900 megahertz the Raspberry Pi 0 and the raspberry pi 2 now although the Raspberry Pi 0 is faster than the Raspberry Pi 1 it isn't as fast as the Raspberry Pi 2 and of course it's only a single core computer compared to the 4 cores that you get in the Raspberry Pi 2 now that means the disadvantage is is that the desktop performance is slow it's usable but it's slow let me give an example if you open up the web browser and type in yahoo.com you can wait for about a minute before the page will load and render however if you're doing little projects in Python or in C or in Java if you want to do a little bit of text editing if you want to just learn a bit about computers about programming then that won't be a problem all of those things run seamlessly on the desktop and they run even faster if you run them from the command line a quick bit of command-line hacking you can write little C program you can compile it and it all works absolutely fine now one other thing worth mentioning is because this is using a low power arm v6 core this thing can run from a battery and so here I actually have Raspberry Pi zero connected to a battery external battery pack which I have in my pocket the same kind of battery package would use for charging your mobile phone here is my adapter from microUSB to USB in here at the end I have a Wi-Fi dongle and this is actually on the network if I pick one upstairs to my desktop I'd be able to connect this to it and use it right program on it while it's here running from this back tree so that's pretty amazing that's great if you want to do little projects at home robots or other little mobile projects you'll be able to run this thing from a battery and it will give you full control over everything you do and you can even kicked over the network to update the software compile changes do whatever you like and it's all running off a battery I think that's a really good feature because it's size this will slip much easier into little robots little cranes little things that you want to build because it is much smaller just really dependent how big of a battery pack you want to put on the back of it so what does all this mean well basically it means that the Raspberry Pi foundation done an absolutely amazing job a tiny little board like that for just five dollars now if you want high performance single board computing then really you need to go with the Raspberry Pi to the desktop is much more reactive it's much more fluid it's got 1 gigabytes of RAM equals the quad core processor it runs much nice and it's only $35 which is still an amazing price however if you've got some little products that you want to do around your house and robots home automation anything to do with the Internet of Things if you want to be able to build it'll servers then really for $5 $5 you got to buy a bucket load of these little boards problem is they're so popular at the moment they're all sold out you I look everywhere I can't you can't find them anywhere I really hope that the Raspberry Pi foundation just start cranking these out by a hundred thousand because I'm going to buy another ten or something because they're just so useful for putting into all these little projects and I have in my head up here and I hope you'll find them just as useful my name is Gary Sims from Andrew authority and I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up also I don't use the comments below to tell me what you think about the Raspberry Pi 0 don't forget it only cost $5 when you're talking about it just five dollars tell me what you think about it what projects you have in mind what you think you could use it for also don't forget to subscribe to and royal authority YouTube channel also don't forget to follow me and Android authority on social media and as for me I'll see you in my next video
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