What are you going to build with a $5 Pi Zero?

[ultimatebob]

Apparently the guys at the Raspberry Pi foundation thought that their $25 PC boards were too expensive, so they just came out with a $5 version:

http://opensource.com/business/15/11/raspberry-pi-zero

What would you use this for? The lack of WiFi or an Ethernet port on this board seems like a deal breaker for me, but I'll bet that the hobbyists will find a good use for it.

 

[Blue_Max]

I can see this running a LOT of MAME boxes & cabinets!

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I don't really have a use for one yet...

Yet.

 

[klod]

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/usb-wifi-dongle/

 

[ultimatebob]

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/usb-wifi-dongle/

You would also need a MicroUSB to USB adapter to use that on the Zero.

I heard that there is also an adapter that you can plug into the 40 pin GPIO port, so maybe that's a better route to go.

 

[maddogchen]

I have a regular raspberry pi board and still don't know what to do with it.

 

[Exophase]

I can see this running a LOT of MAME boxes & cabinets!

I can't imagine spending money on the cabinet housing, monitor, joysticks, etc and then deciding to skimp $30 to get much worse performance than a standard RPi 2.

 

[ultimatebob]

I have a regular raspberry pi board and still don't know what to do with it.

I made a pocket size Wordpress server out of mine. Worked like a charm.

 

[radhak]

I made a pocket size Wordpress server out of mine. Worked like a charm.

More details please? How does one go about doing this? And is your WP server open to the wide-world?

 

[Ken g6]

I have a regular raspberry pi board and still don't know what to do with it.

I was just looking at making a TV recording system with one. I got an Intel Compute Stick on sale, however, and my current tuner requires Intel, so I'm not planning on doing this soon.

 

[Blue_Max]

I can't imagine spending money on the cabinet housing, monitor, joysticks, etc and then deciding to skimp $30 to get much worse performance than a standard RPi 2.

Point taken... I was thinking on a much smaller scale so I shouldn't have used the term 'cabinet' which implies the whole shebang. (Boy I'd love one!)

 

[ultimatebob]

More details please? How does one go about doing this? And is your WP server open to the wide-world?

It was, yes.

Here's the instructions to start out:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/lamp-web-server-with-wordpress/worksheet/

Before you make it Internet facing, make sure to do these additional steps:

* Disable root remote logon
* Disable the "pi" account after creating your own account with sudo access to root.
* Install fail2ban and configure it to ban IP's after 5 failed logon attempts
* And make sure that you have the latest Wordpress and OS patches installed.

 

[Systems analyst]

Is anybody interested in a Raspberry-Pi thread?
I bought a Pi almost two years ago, and have ported some of my Mathematica applications onto it. I use the Raspbian version of Linux, and Mathematica 10, which comes free with the Pi, and which I have been using for some years, formerly on a laptop. For those who do not know Mathematica, it features the Wolfram language, which has some 5000 or more intrinsic functions; learning it must be like learning Chinese maybe? I cannot over-stress the power of Mathematica; I have used it for number-crunching, simulations, filtering, data-visualisation, writing and algebra, the latter with files up to 30 MB long at times.
The latest thing I am trying is parallel-processing, which seems to be well supported by Mathematica. It detects the available cores, and you can launch processes in a queue, where they are processed four at a time. There are many other parallel processing features, including forming a grid of computers, all running Mathematica. I would like to try using the router, with a USB drive, to enable two Pi's to communicate, to extend the processing in a simple way, without spending money; an alternative is setting up a server in Linux, and reading it with Mathematica.
For those with a GPU on a PC, Mathematica supports CUDA and OpenCL. There is a language reference-guide at reference.wolfram.com.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I can't imagine spending money on the cabinet housing, monitor, joysticks, etc and then deciding to skimp $30 to get much worse performance than a standard RPi 2.

It's the other way around. People will buy this because it's inexpensive, and then sunk-cost-fallacy their way into a 12-machine arcade in their basement.

 

[radhak]

It was, yes.

Here's the instructions to start out:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/lamp-web-server-with-wordpress/worksheet/

Before you make it Internet facing, make sure to do these additional steps:

* Disable root remote logon
* Disable the "pi" account after creating your own account with sudo access to root.
* Install fail2ban and configure it to ban IP's after 5 failed logon attempts
* And make sure that you have the latest Wordpress and OS patches installed.

Thanks! I'll file this for future use!

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Speaking of sunk cost fallacy, I set up my B+ with OctoPi last night and ordered a Pi 2 to replace it in my "I need to do something with this" pile.