The Raspberry Pi was born on February 29th which means we’re only three years away from its second birthday, and a new hardware release from the Pi Foundation is becoming somewhat of a tradition. This year is no different: a new Raspberry Pi has been announced. The Raspberry Pi Zero W is the latest iteration of the Pi foundation’s tiny and extremely inexpensive single board computer. It’s a Raspberry Pi Zero with WiFi and Bluetooth.

The specs of the new Pi Zero W are nearly identical to the previous incarnation of the non-W Zero. It sports a 1GHz single-core processor, 512 MB of RAM, features Mini HDMI and USB OTG ports, uses a micro USB port for power, features the now-standard 40-pin header with four additional pins for composite video and a reset button. This board, like the second hardware revision of the Pi Zero, also features a CSI camera connector.

Of course, the big feature is the addition of WiFi and Bluetooth. The Pi Zero W adds the wireless functionality from the Raspberry Pi 3B. That’s 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0.

The Raspberry Pi Zero W is priced at just $10.

One marginal difference between the Zero W and Pi 3’s wireless system is the antenna. Where the Pi 3 uses an SMD chip antenna, the Pi Zero W uses a PCB antenna.

Ultimately, a cheaper Pi Zero

From what we’ve seen over the past few years, the best use case for a Pi Zero is a Linux-enabled thing. Something that just sits there, taking in bits from the GPIOs, doing a bit of processing, and sending bits out again. The Internet of Things without the Internet, if you will.

Of course, this makes for a perfect IoT prototyping device.

Instead of five dollars for the Pi, eight for the WiFi adapter, and a few dollars more for the requisite USB OTG adapter, I only need the ten dollar Pi Zero W.

A few days ago we reported on a new product for owners of the Raspberry Pi Zero, a set of solderless header pins that had a novel installation method involving a hammer. We were skeptical that they would provide a good contact, and preferred to stick with the tried-and-trusted soldered pins

It’s obvious this was a controversial product

The plan was to install the pins on a Pi Zero, and then to simulate the life of a typical board in the hands of an enthusiastic youngster by repeatedly plugging and unplugging a HAT.

The pins themselves are just the same as their soldered counterparts at the long end, but the short end that fits into the board differs sharply from its more conventional cousin. Each pin has been flattened and pierced, into a shape something like the eye of a hand sewing needle.

All this brings us neatly to the hammering. Their video shows a succession of light taps with a pin hammer along the length of the jig, so our Zero was put in place and the hammering began. Each set of taps along the length of the connector advances it a very small amount, so I had to have several goes at it, examining the progress between each one.

The hammer action required was a very light touch indeed, more of a tap than a stroke.

When the Zero was removed from the jig, it could be seen that the pins were well seated in the holes

All well and good, I had fitted the pins, and they worked. However the point of a set of pins is that they should work reliably for the lifetime of the device.

After all the repeated GertVGA plugging, the pins were still rigidly attached to the Zero and my python script rewarded me with a square wave as I tried it on the GPIOs. So I’d fitted the pins, and they had survived an evening of moderate abuse with connectivity intact.

In conclusion, it’s fair to say that we’re in for a bit of word-eating here, as the pins have proved to be both straightforward to fit and reliable enough for repeated use. Soldering would probably still be the personal method of choice and their installation requires real care, but these push-fit pins represent a viable alternative. The full kit with the jig weighs in at £6 (About $7.50), which is a pound (about $1.25) more than the Pi Zero

GPIO Hammer Header (Solderless)
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/gpio-hammer-header

One of the features of the Raspberry Pi Zero is that it arrives with no GPIO header pins installed. The missing pins reduce the price of the little computer, as well as its shipping volume. A task facing most new Pi Zero owners has therefore been to solder a set of pins into the holes, and indeed many suppliers will sell you the pins alongside your new Zero.

The British Pi accessories supplier Pimoroni think they may have a solution to this problem, with a set of solderless pins that the user is expected to fit by tapping both pins and Pi with a hammer. Each pin is designed to deform under pressure, and grip the through-plated walls of the hole in the PCB. In reality they are push-fit pins designed to be fitted with a press or a special tool, but since the average Zero buyer will have neither they supply a small laser-cut jig and give instructions to tap carefully with a pin hammer or similar.

GPIO Hammer Header (Solderless)
https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/raspberry-pi/products/gpio-hammer-header

PoisonTap – siphons cookies, exposes internal router & installs web backdoor on locked computers
https://samy.pl/poisontap/

a 3D printed portable computer with a QWERTY keyboard

My main goal for this is to have a QWERTY keyboard on a portable device that will be able to program Arduinos in the wild or hack around with the console and look all weird in public places and stuff. I’ve watched enough episodes of Ben Heck to feel safe to build this

The Raspberry Pi Zero is small enough that it could almost be mistaken for a USB gadget, rather than a standalone computer. Maybe that was the inspiration that drove [Novaspirit] to completely “donglify” his Zero.

First, he attaches the Raspberry Pi Zero running Pixel OS to his main computer as a USB network device, and then configures it to be useful. He sets up VNC on the Pi so that you can log into its desktop in a window, sets up networking on the Pi so that it can connect to the wider Internet through the laptop, etc. He installs OwnCloud so that the Zero serves as a cloud storage solution, only the “cloud” is plugged into your laptop’s USB port. The point of all this is getting the maximum benefit out of a Pi Zero without having to lug around any cables: just plug it in and you’re networked.

Raspberry Pi Zero USB Dongle
https://www.novaspirit.com/2016/10/18/raspberry-pi-zero-usb-dongle/

NextThingCo, makers of the very popular C.H.I.P. single board Linux computer, have released the latest iteration of their hardware. It’s the C.H.I.P. Pro, an SBC designed to be the embedded brains of your next great project, product, or Internet of Things thing.

The C.H.I.P. Pro features an Allwinner R8 ARMv7 Cortex-A8 running at 1 GHz, a MALI-400 GPU, and either 256 MB or 512 MB of NAND Flash. The Pro also features 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.2, and is fully certified by the FCC. This board will be available in December at supposedly any quantity for $16.

The GR8 module includes an Allwinner R8 ARMv7 Cortex-A8 running at 1 GHz, a MALI-400 GPU, and 256 MB of DDR3 SDRAM. Peripherals include TWI, two UARTS, SPI (SD cards support is hacked onto this), two PWM outputs, a single 6-bit ADC, I2S audio, S/PDIF, one USB 2.0 Host and one USB 2.0 OTG, and a parallel camera interface. This isn’t really a chip meant for video out, but it does support TV out and a parallel LCD interface.

The Smarter Way to Build Smart Things

Scalable Hardware, Software, and Infrastructure for only $16.
Available Dec 2016. Dev kits on sale now.
https://getchip.com/pages/chippro

Some of the more interesting consumer hardware devices of recent years have been smart glasses. Devices like Google Glass or Snapchat Spectacles, eyewear incorporating a display and computing power to deliver information or provide augmented reality on an unobtrusive wearable platform.

Raspberry Pi Zero Smart Glass aims to provide an entry into this world, with image recognition and OCR text recognition in a pair of glasses courtesy of a Raspberry Pi Zero.

Raspberry Pi Zero Smart Glass
https://hackaday.io/project/13332-raspberry-pi-zero-smart-glass

Pi Zero Smart Glass can help you identify objects using image recognition technology.
Easily make your own smart glasses with the Raspberry

Make your own smart glasses easily with the Raspberry Pi Zero! Affordable and easy to build, retro-wearable 3D Virtual Stereo Digital Video glasses are around $75 along with the Pi Zero. This display uses composite video to connect the Pi Zero’s video out pins and are easily customized. There are many applications for image recognition, which allows computers to translate written text into digital text. The PiGlasses can help with the field of machine vision, recognizing people and objects. Add a battery pack and your PiGlasses are ready to go!

creating a variety of Raspberry Pi cluster configurations, the most impressive of which is a stack of 32 Pi Zeros mounted together with stand-offs. The plan was to network it via USB, for which he initially considered building a backplane, but was put off by the cost of vertical USB connectors and instead went for a wired approach

The stack of Zeros is pretty impressive, but so what, you think. It’s still not working properly. But the Zero cluster isn’t his only work. He’s also created a set of very nicely executed Ethernet clusters using the larger Pi boards

MyCustard.com
Documenting my clustered pi zero adventure
http://www.mycustard.com/