The smallest Raspberry Pi yet might be its biggest: the charitable foundation behind the UK's best-selling computer have launched their latest model, the Raspberry Pi Zero, for the absurd price of just £4 ($5 in the United States).
The miniaturised Zero features a core that is 40 percent faster than the Raspberry Pi 1, with 512MB RAM, a MiniHDMI port and two Micro USB ports, including one for power.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation said that the Zero, which will be made in Wales and runs full Raspian as well as applications including Scratch and Minecraft, was as revolutionary as the first Pi. "It is about as big a change as the original Raspberry Pi was," Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton tells WIRED. "Really everything we've learned has been packed into this one device."
As before, users will have to supply their own power, keyboard, mouse or input device, and screen. But many of the Pi Zero's components have been simplified or otherwise removed in order to keep the cost of the board as low as possible. "Every single component on that board had been made to justify its existence," Upton tells WIRED.
But getting the Zero down to the bare-bones price of £4 was not just about cutting features -- it is to some extent a result of the Raspberry Pi's massive success as the UK's most successful computer in decades. Selling and making more computers has enabled it to cut costs where it was not able to before, and be even more ambitious with the price. "There are economies of scale that weren't available to us when we started," Upton admits.
For that reason the Zero was made with components on just one side of a circuit board instead of two. "Being physically small makes it physically cheaper," Upton added. "It's fairly hard to imagine taking much more cost out. You're talking about the cost of moving a physical product around that has atoms, that has metal in it -- you get down to the point where the cost of the metal connectors makes an impact."
The necessities of cost and space have resulted in an engineering solution with an extraordinary aesthetic. In person -- WIRED was granted an early hands-on -- the Zero is extremely beautiful and precise; it is compact, symmetrical and, like the original, naked, exposing its inner-workings to anyone with an interest in tinkering with its possibilities. "It's nice when things look attractive because they are functional," Upton tells WIRED.
The size and simplicity of the board makes many more types of projects, from robotics to Internet-connected devices, easy to build. The creative possibilities are massive. "There are places you can take this that you can't take the original Pi," Upton tells WIRED.
Small it might be -- and cheap it definitely is. But the Pi Zero is still a fully-featured computer, and will be capable of some powerful functionality. For the price of a single latte, Upton says, the Zero will provide somewhere between the raw power of the original Pi and its second generation.
The Zero gives the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which recently merged with Code Club, the chance to reach many more young people and give them a route into computing -- which has always been its principal goal. At £4 it is conceivable that the Zero will become a genuine impulse purchase, or even a freebie for an enterprising school or retailer. Around 10,000 Zeroes will be attached to the front of the Raspberry Pi magazine Magpi shortly after launch, Upton said. But imagine if a Zero was given away with every copy of Minecraft -- or The Beano? The launch plans for the Zero are aggressive: tens of thousands are ready to ship Upton said, and with around five launch partners it is expected that demand will far outstrip supply.
The Zero will be launched alongside the existing range of Raspberry Pi computers, which now start at around £16, Upton said. The plan is not to replace the larger machines with the Zero, but to launch them as complementary products. "I don't think this is a change in direction for Pi, it augments what we were doing," he tells WIRED. Neither does he see any immediate way the Zero could be even cheaper -- at least not in 2016. "Certainly nothing has happened yet [that would make that possible] and I probably can't see it on the horizon," he said. "I think we are basically done [for now]."
Which is not to say the Pi does not still have a long way to travel. In the next few weeks that will include about 300 vertical miles, in fact, as two Raspberry Pi machines are due to travel aboard an Orbital Sciences Cygnus spacecraft atop an Atlas V rocket to the International Space Station, where British astronaut Tim Peake will conduct 'Astro Pi' experiments designed by UK schoolchildren.
Upton jokes that it took about two years of "basically filling out paperwork" to get the Pi signed off for space travel, but for a generation of young engineers the experience of seeing their work in orbit will be invaluable. As has been the case before in the story of Raspberry Pi, and is true again for the Zero, it is the seemingly mundane things -- cost, paperwork and economies of scale -- that can sometimes have the biggest impact.
The full specs of the Raspberry Pi Zero, available via element14, The Pi Hut and Pimoroni, include:
Broadcom BCM2835 application processor
1GHz ARM11 core (40 percent faster than Raspberry Pi 1)
512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM
Micro-SD card slot
MiniHDMI socket for 1080p60 video output
Micro-USB sockets for data and power
An unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header
Identical pinout to Model A+/B+/2B
An unpopulated composite video header
"Smallest ever" form factor (65mm x 30mm x 5mm)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
