The Raspberry Pi Zero W is one of the smallest and cheapest computers available.
While the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is already highly affordable, selling for about $35, the Pi Zero W cuts that price by two-thirds.
Not much bigger than a stick of gum, the Zero W is the Pi 3’s less powerful but more affordable little brother, capable of being used as a media center, retro-games console, acting as the brain of robots and drones, or, at a push, as a general-purpose desktop computer.
The board is an update to the Raspberry Pi Zero, taking the base board and adding support for 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, making the computer far more useful out of the box.
This upgrade bumps up the price. While the original Zero is available for \u00a34, the wireless variant sells for \u00a39.60, which is about $10 + tax and is available from The Pi Hut in the UK and Adafruit in the US, among others.
The Zero W is the smallest Pi available, at just 65mm by 30mm by 5mm, a good deal more compact than the Raspberry Pi 3, which you can see here alongside the Zero.
Thanks to the its more modest specs, the Zero W also consumes less power than the Pi 3, about 0.18A under load compared with 0.72A for the Pi 3.
The original Zero, launched back in November 2015, will remain on sale alongside the Zero W.
Apart from the added support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the Zero W has the same specs as the most recent revision of the Zero.
On the far left of the board is the microSD card slot, in the center is the Elpida memory chip providing 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM, which sits on top of the single-core 1GHz, 32-bit Broadcom BCM2835 processor–based on the ARMv6 architecture.
At top of the board is an unpopulated 40-pin header, which can be used to allow the Zero W to interact with other electronic hardware, but you’ll need to solder a pin header in place.
The board also has the same wireless radio chip found on the Pi 3. On the far right of the Zero W is the CSI camera connector, for hooking up the official Raspberry Pi Camera.
The underside of the board shows this model was made last year.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has built 80,000 Pi Zero W boards ready for launch, and will produce a further 25,000 each week, in an attempt to meet demand.
As with earlier Raspberry Pi models, the Foundation has made an official case for the Pi Zero W.
Nick Heath is a computer science student and was formerly a journalist at TechRepublic and ZDNet.
