Pi Zero Cluster

Yes Andy stick 30++ PI Zeros which are either unobtainium or £30 ea from Cool components then stick them in an expensive carrier board then you too can have a cluster with the same compute power of an 5 year old Atom CPU

Nice toy but Clusters of RPIs are a joke and merely noise to stop us looking at any number of much better boards out there!

Or have a 'Zero amnesty. Because maybe a whole load that were purchased are lying unused!

Mine is unused but (like many others perhaps) it is there for a "rainy day" - not really for any educational use.

(despite the amount of rainy days here.. wonder when I will finally use it.

My zero is being used to make a small robot and a private roadtest

My zero is being used to make a small robot and a private roadtest

Hi Andy,

I think we're the exception though. If there were ten thousand Pi Zero's sold and being used, maybe there would be more noise - instead the projects I'm seeing reported on the Internet are by people we know, standing out of the noise. I don't know 10 thousand people : ) probably the Zero's are thinly spread since most people can't purchase more than one or two at a time.

For example, this recent post shows about 10 interesting Pi Zero projects: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-zero-projects/

Yet of the 10, I have heard of some of these people : ) especially Frederick's amazing projects! And the last one on that list was by a store (ModMyPi) so they have a vested interest to create content.

I get that not everyone blogs, but by the law of averages with (say) 10k sold (I have no idea - this is a stab in the dark) we should have seen a _lot_ more from the noise on that list of 10 projects.

The other odd thing is we haven't seen a million(or 5000)  "How can I get my Pi Zero to work?" questions posted on here

Mike

A Robot is a good use for the Zero it's appropriate to it's abilities

Shabaz I don't think there is that many in use since they don't effectively run Kodi since they lack the networking and USB required for remote keyboards mice etc etc.

This is where 90% of RPIs go and the RPI2 is quite good at it and is still very cheap. It's also why we have 300K+ members in E14 but no one coming back more than once after they get their bit of info needed to get an image on to the RPI and it then becomes a media player.

The Zero is good for more deeply embedded projects which aren't normally educational projects so we don't have so many of the "NOOB" (hate that word!) questions.

In Hackaday for instance anyone who can put a USB hub on it is worthy of a mention and even if you can only get that far you dont need to ask the like of us to help you with your project!

It's a pity to see so many Raspberry Pi's enslaved as cheap media players.

Paul, it's always been that way, after all it's a Media Processor on a board available to the general public who are more interested in watching Hooky SKY TV servers.

We have to admit to our selves that we are a fringe as indicated by E14's own membership numbers

John Alexander wrote:

 

We have to admit to our selves that we are a fringe as indicated by E14's own membership numbers

Certainly true when you take single-use accounts into consideration.

It's still a pity when you look at the original aims of the Raspberry Pi (Foundation) though.

Totally agree there ..Probably most people here would too!

To me it seems even Raspberrypi.org and the resellers are not sure about the reason for the Zero. (my underlining):

Raspberry pi.org's announcement:

However their online store hints at another use, i.e. building projects!:

The resellers go a bit further. This is what ModMyPi advertise the 'Zero for. And they must be experts on it, since they are the ones facing the customers parting with the money:

For comparison, this is the old Pi model B on ModMyPi's site:

Cool Components want the 30GPB for the 'Zero and suggest this is the reason for having a Zero:

Agreed well researched Shabaz, welcome to the world of commercial RPI deployment...Really the Zero is what the "compute" board should of been at £30 is the same price £5ish is more appropriate.

I would pay a bit more for the new  SOC and 1GB of RAM since the RPI only became really tractable once this happened and you can then use many more standard set ups with out cutting them down too much!