Raspberry Pi Zero W with WiFi and Bluetooth costs 10 dollars

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has introduced the Zero W. The development board will cost $10 and is largely the same as the previously released Zero, with the difference that the Zero W has a wireless 802.11n Wi-Fi connection and Bluetooth 4.0.

The new board comes exactly five years after the introduction of the original Raspberry Pi. According to the foundation, twelve million copies of this original have been sold and to celebrate this, the foundation is now releasing the Zero W.

Like the Raspberry Pi Zero, introduced in late 2015 for $5, the Zero W has a single-core processor running at 1GHz and 512MB of lpddr2 sdram. The Broadcom BCM2845 soc with an ARMv6 ARM11 core is the same as in the original Raspberry Pi from 2012, but with the Zero boards it is clocked 40 percent higher with a speed of 1GHz.

There is a micro SD card slot to add storage space. Due to the small dimensions of the board, the Ethernet connection and the large USB ports are missing. However, Raspberry has found room for a micro USB port and a mini HDMI connection, and the forty-pin gpio header is also present. A second micro USB header is used for the power supply. The dimensions of the Zero W are 65x30x5mm, the same as the Zero. This makes the Zero W a lot smaller than the flagship model, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, which costs about forty euros.

Along with the introduction of the Zero W, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has released three new cases for the new development board. It concerns a closed variant, a variant with an opening, so that the gpio ports are easy to reach, and a third variant with an opening specifically intended for the camera. These three housings are sold as a set, along with a flat cable for the camera module. The three housings contain rubber strips to have more grip on a slippery surface.