The setup for the Raspberry Pi Zero W is a little more complicated than on other Pis. Quite frankly, this Pi is about four times faster that the original Raspberry Pi and is only a fraction of the cost of the current RPi3.

The Pi Zero W has been designed to be as flexible and compact as possible with mini connectors and an unpopulated 40-pin GPIO, allowing you to use only what your project requires.Īt the heart of the Raspberry Pi Zero W is a 1GHz BCM2835 single-core processor, the same as the B+ and A+, with 512MB RAM. With the addition of wireless LAN and Bluetooth, the Raspberry Pi Zero W is ideal for making embedded Internet of Things (IoT) projects. Otherwise, it just hums along doing what it does quite happily.The credit-card-sized computer has become even smaller! The Raspberry Pi Zero W is still the Pi you know and love, but at a largely reduced size of only 65mm long by 30mm wide and at a very economical price. Upgrading pegs the CPU at 100%, so it needs to be done during periods of light load and it does take a while. If it's not covered in the browser interface, then one needs to use ssh and the command line. Just don't think about using VNC and playing with pictures. And it does so comfortably with an average CPU of about 33% and temperature of 48'. Not to mention the web server for the browser interface. This board not only runs PiHole with AdBlocker but also is running a DHCP server and an NTP server for my network.

So, since 2011, this board mostly sat unused. The USB implementation was a little wonky in some of the first boards. It didn't want to work as a web camera server either. It was no better with music distros like Volumio and the like. It sort of worked but there was often dropouts and/or buzzes that made it unfit for use. The desktops that came with the early distros ran miserably slow so I tried using it as a headless mpd client. I am not familiar with the details of the RPi family tree, but the board I am using was the first B type that went to manufacturing.

Raspberry pi zero w wireless setup