Made in Wales and priced at just $5, the Raspberry Pi Zero was released earlier today. PIZERO is about the size of a stick of chewing gum but comes with endless possibilities for everyone from programmers looking to create fun new projects to students learning about programming in the classroom.
“The original Raspberry Pi Model B and its successors put a programmable computer within reach of anyone with $20-35 to spend,” Eben Upton, founder of Raspberry Pi, wrote in a blog post today. “Since 2012, millions of people have used a Raspberry Pi to get their first experience of programming, but we still meet people for whom cost remains a barrier to entry. At the start of this year, we began work on an even cheaper Raspberry Pi to help these people take the plunge.”
Despite its cheaper price, the latest addition to the Raspberry Pi family runs the Raspbian operating system and various applications including Minecraft, Sonic Pi, which allows users to play with code to produce new sounds, and Scratch, the programming language that lets people create their own stories, games and animations.
Hardware specs:
- A Broadcom BCM2835 application processor
- 1GHz ARM11 core (40% faster than Raspberry Pi 1)
- 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
- Our smallest ever form factor, at 65mm x 30mm x 5mm
