So in keeping with tradition (for me) and having purchased every variant of Raspberry Pi on announcement day including pre-ordering the original SBC, today I purchased a Pi Zero 2.
It looks like this is constrained somewhat by memory (512MB) but runs a quad core CPU at 1GHz and will run 64bit OS. It means to my amateur understanding this should be just as suitable as a Pi3 Model B gateway running Balena OS & Basicstation docker image for example? I get that it doesn’t have Ethernet or PoE as most of my RPi based gateways do but should replace my Ch2i spec PiZero gateway which is as easy to deploy as a TTIG but with an external antenna etc.
Anybody else notice the release or have any thoughts regarding very low cost gateways that should perform (on 2.4GHz WiFi) like any Pi3 variant?
Being a gateway is not a very big load, in terms of either computation or memory footprint.
The SD-card / USB stick based Pi’s are popular because they’re well known and widely available, but as a technical choice they are overspeced and fairly fragile state-wise compared to the sorts of SoC’s used in purpose built gateways.
Like you I’ve seen an email with announcement but not had time to read yet… again like you have many GW’s running Pi0w+ Charles/ch2i build and do not anticipate any issues moving on to new bd… as Chris says load for basic gw function isn’t huge! Hopefully new bd will have better availability and won’t run into previous problem of various Pi Emporia attempting to limit of sales to 1 unit per person…ever!
The model RPT use is quite clear - you can have one cheap - the rest (like with headers) come with a premium.
Their remit is to get lots of these in to the hands of individuals, not lots in to the hands on manufacturers who can use the CM3/4 (when available).
And overall, RPT are suffering badly with the current chip shortage. I suspect they pushed this out the door as it was ready and it may as well hit the streets as the new model, the original BCM core is very very old now and is likely to be discontinued very soon.
But as it’s now quad core, you are only allowed to use it for AI applications or the Geek-Hipster squad will come and “do you in”.
Meanwhile, I’m buying up lots of 6502’s so I can return to some level of sanity & certainty.
Hi Marc,
It works perfectly and is very robust, balena.io management of devices is really nice. It has been working since all the support from Balena to cater for possible eth0 or wlan0, so far 100% uptime and many restarts without any bugs. It will be very remote in Lanzarote once I can move it to the island, I missed one chance in February, there is still a temporary TTIG there at the moment. It will be the main gateway for me there with a decent outdoor antenna.
Just today I moved the Pi Zero 2 gateway into my office to show off a proof of concept non-lethal mouse trap that messages for service to avoid distress to trapped animals. It works perfectly on a hot-spot cloning my home WiFi setup but for some reason the second WiFi config I put on the SD card does not load or does not have the correct creds for the office WiFi (I should have brought a card reader from home!!!) I am guessing a typo by me!
@GryKyo my recommendation is that you add a new container with the wifi-connect service. Check here the project, so once the WiFis are not recognized the devices gets on access point mode and allows you to connect a new WiFi.
For me this is a key feature for gateways that are mobile and need to connect to different WiFis every X days.
Hopefully new bd will have better availability and won’t run into previous problem of various Pi Emporia attempting to limit of sales to 1 unit per person…ever!