SEE: All of TechRepublic’s smart person’s guides Executive summary You’ll find everything you need to know about the Pi Zero W in this “living” article, which will be updated over time. The latest offering is the Raspberry Pi Zero W, a tiny $10 board that adds Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to the cheapest member of the Pi family, the Raspberry Pi Zero. I will be updating this article, once it makes an appearance on Amazon.Since the original $35 Raspberry Pi computer launched in 2012, it has spawned a whole family of low-cost computers. Currently, it is available at CanaKit, SparkFun, and MicroCenter. Overall, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, is a fantastic upgrade and is perfect for those wanting to run room-assistant and some other applications 24/7. The Wi-Fi connection should see an improvement thanks to the new enclosure which improves RF compliance, but is still only capable of Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n). There are 512 MB of RAM available, two Micro-USB ports (one for data, one for power), a Mini-HDMI port, a MIPI camera interface (CSI), and a MicroSDHC slot.

The rest of the specs have been left untouched, which is what you would expect for a US$15 computer. Unfortunately, Bluetooth 4.2 is quite dated at this point and I would have hoped to see Bluetooth 5.X to increase the range of my room-assistant nodes. Other spec bumps include Bluetooth 4.2 with Bluetooth Low Energy instead of Bluetooth 4.1.

While the cores in the newer model are almost ten years old, they are a significant upgrade. A total of four ARM Cortex-A53 cores make the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W's system-in-package, which is the most significant upgrade when compared to previous models, which only had a single ARM11 core.

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