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.

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!

My turn again. The lament of most Pi's being used for video streaming is a reflection of the market. Build it and they will come. Pi 2 is quickly becoming the premier solution for personal video streaming. I found the biggest limiting factor is really the network bandwidth. B+ and my old B also run Kodi without buffering on clear nights, when traffic is low. Just as, my Pi 2 with overclocking, will still buffer a lot, when everybody in the neighborhood is checking their Facebook page.  Be happy that the market is there, and chalk it up to a steady input of funding.  Now for more interesting uses for the Pi, I didn't hear about anyone that is doing video, or artificial intelligence, or voice recognition and text to speech. The entire library of Sourceforge applications is waiting to get tested out on this platform.

Keep getting the word out. We really  do have a better mouse trap.

Jack

ps. wasn't this a discussion about Pi Zero being used for clusters?

Agreed Jack the volume of sales has kept  interest in this device alive although the pretence of a great educational revival on the back of it actually drives the delivery of a quite good video platform.

Fortunately with millions of them about even if the number that do inspire kids is say .01% then we will have 100s if not thousands of engineers brought in to the frey by them and we should be grateful for that.

Re Zeros for clusters, that's just silly  for reasons mentioned previously also in terms of RPIs it would be more economic to use RPI2s as a cluster as you get a QUAD core for £25! and you dont need a special board to attach to them

Looks like cool components have tried to do something to improve their position on the price elasticity curve, they have "slashed" prices heavily down to a mere £24 including tax. Their stock has now depleted from 6 to 2 in 48 hours. : ) Hardly popular item at these prices.

Looks like cool components have tried to do something to improve their position on the price elasticity curve, they have "slashed" prices heavily down to a mere £24 including tax. Their stock has now depleted from 6 to 2 in 48 hours. : ) Hardly popular item at these prices.

Their generosity knows no bounds. :)

They're out of stock now.. price now set back to £6, so no-one is the wiser : )

The twitter response from a week ago,.. interesting how they treated potential customers I thought..

Pimoroni had restocked at noon today, tried to come to e14 to spread the news, but website was down ...

How does pimoroni get them, when I ordered one the day they were released from Newark and my delivery date was pushed out to March 21.

I thought newark/element 14 were partners with the foundation.

Mike

Not sure, but I ordered one every time they restocked, always get it within a couple of days.

Looks like newark/e14 should have a talk  with the foundation or work on their process.

Don't think there's any money in it so really no great urge to chase after the remaining stocks!

I'm not sure that this still holds for "production of the pi zero". It could be that the foundation now has a separate deal with the Sony FAB to make the 'zeros, and that those  being produced are being shared between pimoroni, farnell, pihut and a few others......

I don't entirely understand what they mean by "no proper reseller program"

Other thing is that if you can only buy one at a time then a RPI Zero is actually £10 =£5+5postage and you need to repeat that for each of them

That's why I delayed some purchases, waited for Zero to be in stock and combined the orders

The Pi Hut had them at £4 + £2.5 shipping.