>> RASPBERRY PI ZERO - FOR ONLY FIVE BUCKS?

I am a sucker for cheap hardware - this is great news for IoT!

Earlier today, the Raspberry Pi Zero was announced and made available for sale - best of all, they are pricing it at a very low five dollars! Just because it is cheap; it doesn't mean it is useless - it is in fact more powerful than the original Raspberry Pi (40% faster) and is a fraction of the size!

The full specifications are:

• A Broadcom BCM2835 CPU (1Ghz ARM11 core)
• 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM
• A micro-SD card slot
• A mini-HDMI 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
• 65mm x 30mm x 5mm

It is great they dropped some of the components that not all projects need; this device would be a great replacement for the Raspberry Pi X-Arcade for MAME project. The extra 100Mhz may come in useful for handling some of the more complex games - so this is a great upgrade opportunity!

The Raspberry Pi Zero would be great for applications that do not use typical TCP/IP based networking environments, the GPIO expansion will allow for other low level wireless technologies such as Bluetooth Smart (BLE), ZigBee and RF transmitters.

I ordered a few from the The Pi Hut (one per customer) - but choose different options for multiple!