Pi Zero W - Hands on...

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Just a teaser right now... still digging into this and how to make a DIY Smart Home around Pi's...

With Pi Zero going Wireless, it's much more interesting - and then back things up with a Pi3

For many EE's, and Product folks, one can see how the Pi folks reduced the cost...

Zero W - single side flow, no solder bath - The Pi3 board is two flows with a bath, which adds a bit of cost... (that at the second run at Pick and Place for the items on the backside of the board)

 

[System Error Message]

For many EE's, and Product folks, one can see how the Pi folks reduced the cost...

Zero W - single side flow, no solder bath - The Pi3 board is two flows with a bath, which adds a bit of cost... (that at the second run at Pick and Place for the items on the backside of the board)

I hope you have your EEE station set up. You will need a soldering station, meters and a bench PSU. An oscilloscope can be helpful for debugging and you should also measure the capacitance of your prototype boards too.

You should also consider building your own arduino from the chip rather than the board as its not only cheaper but uses less power and has more options when it comes to sensors and mechanical components not to mention more analog and digital IO ports than the raspberry pi has. Prototype boards that require soldering are much better than using solderless prototype boards as they have more capacitance that can interfere. If you need more IO than adding arduino and connecting it to the raspberry pi is an option. The arduino would add as a dedicated processor that you can program with actions so that the raspberry pi only needs to give commands and receive data rather than having the CPU having to control every step of the action using a raspberry pi as a real time processor for something like balancing a quad copter is considered risky as it also has to run an OS and a CPU spike at 100% can cause a lag and misstep. You can still connect sensors directly to the pi as data gathering is done by taking values many times and it doesnt have to be a fixed frequency so if the CPU misses a reading its not really a problem especially if you have RTC on it as well.

I can suggest brands and alternatives when it comes to EEE tools, there is a forum out there for helping hobbyists.

You should give udoo a try, it combines both ARM and arduino though runs its own debian based OS. It may be compatible with raspbian but i dont know. It has IO but both the host CPU and arduino share it so sensors output can be shared. It also comes with more features like sata but costs more and is very different.

 

[swetoast]

not really a fan of the zero line from rpi want more power in smaller format

 

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Having spent a few days with it - it's Pi in a smaller form factor - onboard WiFi/Bluetooth does make it more useful that the original non-wireless Zero...

For IoT items where a Pi (even a Zero) is overkill - Look at the Espressif ESP8266 devices - they're small Microcontrollers, with WiFi, and they're pretty darn slick - and they are similar enough to Arduino that you can use the same dev environment - good documentation from a SW perspective, and a community that is growing...

SparkFUN and Adafruit are good sources, but you can order direct from China on the various business to customer sites there.

Of course there is the entire Arduino ecosystem - which has gone beyond just AVR over into the ARM's and even x86 with Intel's Quark microcontroller (Quark doesn't do linux however)

 

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not really a fan of the zero line from rpi want more power in smaller format

For the Zero/Zero W - I don't think we'll see a Cortex-A7/A53 based device from the Pi folks any time soon - would be nice, but they wouldn't be able to keep things at the same 10 dollar pricepoint as only the 2835 is POP, the 2836/2837 chips are not packaged the same way, and use a discrete RAM chip instead, and one can see how tight that board is already...

I was pretty surprised at the size of the Zero - pix on the Web don't really convey how small it really is - it's basically the size of a USB thumb drive...

The 40-pin GPIO is standard Pi, so most HAT's should work, and it's basically a Pi model A+ equivalent...

Nice touch with the Zero/Zero W - it supports USB-OTG, and with the latest kernel/firmware, it supports Linux gadget mode - so I can power it and connect over USB-Serial directly (or USB-Ethernet) with a single cable - which is handy at the coffee shop when I'm doing some code work...

If one needs more than a Zero... There's always the C.H.I.P - which is probably the strongest competitor to the Zero/Zero W - and being Cortex-A8, it does support ARMv7 - which is a plus.

Nice thing about the CHIP is that it also has a Power Management IC (PMIC) that can support charging and power from a LiPo battery, which the Pi's can't do.

The downside with the CHIP is that it doesn't leverage into the third-party hardware/software ecosystem that has built up around the various Pi's....

 

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You should give udoo a try, it combines both ARM and arduino though runs its own debian based OS. It may be compatible with raspbian but i dont know. It has IO but both the host CPU and arduino share it so sensors output can be shared. It also comes with more features like sata but costs more and is very different.

Now that Raspian has done an x86 spin - perhaps - Udoo is interesting for x86, also consider both the Minnowboard (insert variants) and Aeon's Up Board - the Up board is what Intel is bundling with a couple of their 3d vision HDK/SDK's, along with their drone platform - and there is always the Edison and Galileo boards... then there's also the Arduino 101 board, which has Quark and a 32-bit ARC core - microcontrollers there - so no Linux, but good support from the Arduino side, and one can leverage into the shields that are already out there.

See my notes above about the ESP8266... and if one's needs are really lightweight, there's Ti's MSP430 family

 

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WiFi performance on the Zero W - pretty similar to the Pi3 - same chipset, same location...

pi@raspy0:~ $ iperf3 -c 192.168.1.20 -Z -R
Connecting to host 192.168.1.20, port 5201
Reverse mode, remote host 192.168.1.20 is sending
[  4] local 192.168.1.131 port 41118 connected to 192.168.1.20 port 5201
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec  4.54 MBytes  38.1 Mbits/sec               
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec  4.80 MBytes  40.3 Mbits/sec               
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  4.79 MBytes  40.2 Mbits/sec               
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec  4.22 MBytes  35.4 Mbits/sec               
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec  3.58 MBytes  30.0 Mbits/sec               
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec  4.57 MBytes  38.3 Mbits/sec               
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec  4.95 MBytes  41.5 Mbits/sec               
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  4.90 MBytes  41.1 Mbits/sec               
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  4.77 MBytes  40.0 Mbits/sec               
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  4.61 MBytes  38.6 Mbits/sec               
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  46.5 MBytes  39.0 Mbits/sec    2             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  46.3 MBytes  38.9 Mbits/sec                  receiver

iperf Done.
pi@raspy0:~ $ iperf3 -c 192.168.1.20 -Z
Connecting to host 192.168.1.20, port 5201
[  4] local 192.168.1.131 port 41122 connected to 192.168.1.20 port 5201
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr  Cwnd
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec  4.87 MBytes  40.8 Mbits/sec    0    119 KBytes   
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec  4.93 MBytes  41.3 Mbits/sec    0    127 KBytes   
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  4.67 MBytes  39.2 Mbits/sec    0    127 KBytes   
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec  4.79 MBytes  40.2 Mbits/sec    0    134 KBytes   
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec  4.91 MBytes  41.2 Mbits/sec    0    134 KBytes   
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec  5.06 MBytes  42.4 Mbits/sec    0    134 KBytes   
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec  4.94 MBytes  41.4 Mbits/sec    0    209 KBytes   
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  5.01 MBytes  42.0 Mbits/sec    0    209 KBytes   
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  5.01 MBytes  42.0 Mbits/sec    0    209 KBytes   
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  5.30 MBytes  44.5 Mbits/sec    0    209 KBytes   
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  49.5 MBytes  41.5 Mbits/sec    0             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  49.2 MBytes  41.2 Mbits/sec                  receiver

iperf Done.

And the common benchmark here - openssl single thread...

PiZero/ZeroW isn't a likely candidate for OpenVPN based on this...

pi@raspy0:~ $ openssl speed aes-128-cbc aes-256-cbc bf-cbc
blowfish cbc     16484.99k    18413.38k    19048.45k    19117.40k    19117.40k
aes-128 cbc      19934.77k    22193.96k    22894.25k    23048.19k    23148.56k
aes-256 cbc      15713.85k    17075.37k    17516.91k    17497.09k    17530.88k

And another one... again, not surprising as this is an ARMv6 core here... single core/thread at that...

pi@raspy0:~ $ gnutls-cli --benchmark-ciphers
Checking cipher-MAC combinations, payload size: 16384
     SALSA20-256-SHA1 18.66 MB/sec
     AES-128-CBC-SHA1 9.56 MB/sec
     AES-128-CBC-SHA256 8.24 MB/sec
     AES-128-GCM 7.76 MB/sec

Checking MAC algorithms, payload size: 16384
            SHA1 38.63 MB/sec
          SHA256 23.40 MB/sec
          SHA512 4.10 MB/sec

Checking ciphers, payload size: 16384
        3DES-CBC 3.02 MB/sec
     AES-128-CBC 12.68 MB/sec
     ARCFOUR-128 39.60 MB/sec
     SALSA20-256 35.31 MB/sec

Some background...

pi@raspy0:~ $ lscpu
Architecture:          armv6l
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                1
On-line CPU(s) list:   0
Thread(s) per core:    1
Core(s) per socket:    1
Socket(s):             1
Model name:            ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l)
CPU max MHz:           1000.0000
CPU min MHz:           700.0000

pi@raspy0:~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor    : 0
model name    : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l)
BogoMIPS    : 697.95
Features    : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls 
CPU implementer    : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant    : 0x0
CPU part    : 0xb76
CPU revision    : 7

Hardware    : BCM2708
Revision    : 9000c1

 

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While it's a fun little unit - and it is... I worry a bit about where the Rpi Foundation is going... ARM6 vs ARMv7 with the Pi2/Pi3 platform...

a good read -- puts things in to place on another platform...

https://www.allenpike.com/2014/the-ipad-zombie/

This is very similar to where we are with the Pi platform... Pi2 is kinda in the middle, Pi3 is the present as suggested by the Compute Module 3 there...

 

[LulaNord]

Hi...i am a new user here. As per my knowledge you should also consider building your own arduino from the chip rather than the board as its not only cheaper but uses less power and has more options when it comes to sensors and mechanical components not to mention more analog and digital IO ports than the raspberry pi has. Prototype boards that require soldering are much better than using solderless prototype boards as they have more capacitance that can interfere.

turnkey pcb assembly

 

[sfx2000]

Hi...i am a new user here. As per my knowledge you should also consider building your own arduino from the chip rather than the board as its not only cheaper but uses less power and has more options when it comes to sensors and mechanical components not to mention more analog and digital IO ports than the raspberry pi has. Prototype boards that require soldering are much better than using solderless prototype boards as they have more capacitance that can interfere.

I agree - there's plenty of microcontrollers out there for fun project - see my post above...

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/pi-zero-w-hands-on.38119/#post-314397