Pi Zero Cluster

Workshopshed over 9 years ago

I spotted this project from Koichi Nakamura

A mother board approach to a Pi Zero cluster

https://twitter.com/9_ties/status/689707306494271488

shabaz over 9 years ago in reply to jack.chaney56

Hi Jack!
Yeah, that's the one, that Paul linked to.
I like that it has a built-in UART to USB, so you can easily interface with a PC if desired without all the USB learning headache.
It uses an IDE called Dave. Some specs from the user guide:
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mconners over 9 years ago in reply to shabaz

That made me think of this,

https://mchck.org/

which I built a couple of years ago. That was a fun project. I did it just to go through the process of having a board built with the intention of making my own.

Mike
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shabaz over 9 years ago in reply to mconners

Ohh I remember that now!
Very nice board. Those Freescale parts are really great.
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mconners over 9 years ago in reply to shabaz

Yeah, that was a neat project

That was my first attempt at having a board commisioned and smd soldering at home. I think it came out pretty good.

It really did come out to right around $5 each

Mike
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Problemchild over 9 years ago

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!
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Problemchild over 9 years ago in reply to shabaz

The Freescale stuff does seem to represent good value and well thought out I/O ..Amazed we don't see more of them to be honest!
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Problemchild over 9 years ago in reply to shabaz

Nice board gets you in to the "super Arduino " arena for £5 Farnell pounds which is good value from them .
Would be even cheaper than the Zero if you include micro SD Card you need for it and just as good if not better for most light weight apps you may have for it!
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rew over 9 years ago in reply to Problemchild

John Alexander wrote:

you too can have a cluster with the same compute power of an 5 year old Atom CPU

If you manage to get the videocore to "do your work" the raspberry pi is QUITE economic in terms of performance per dollar. Or performance per Watt. 24 Gflops for a raspberry pi, 500 Gflops for a xeon. At $10 per node (5 for the RPI, 5 for the SDcard) a 20-node RPI cluster would in theory achieve similar performance as a hefty xeon. I think those xeons would cost more than $200, and similarly, at 1W per node, the rpi's would also be more energy efficient.
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shabaz over 9 years ago in reply to Problemchild

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.
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Workshopshed over 9 years ago in reply to shabaz

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