Hacker News

Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees

53 points by sthlmb 3 hours ago | 14 comments

bArray 31 minutes ago

I really hope they can keep the cost down, it needs to be in the "it's so cheap just hack on it" price range for not just engineers but kids too. I'm excited to see low-cost hardware put in the hands of kids with LLMs in their sails.

jacquesm 59 minutes ago

I'm using the 2 W for a project and one thing I would love is for a better wifi antenna, the one that's on the 2 just isn't good enough. You can hack it though, there is a spot on the board where you can solder on a connector, cut a single trace and you're good to go. But it would be great if it would do better out of the box.

Amazingly powerful hardware for the price these little things.

jubilanti 40 minutes ago

I wouldn't hold out hope for an easier out of the box wifi antenna. If you want a U.FL antenna for the built-in wifi, there has to be a physical switch (cost, fragility) or a built-in antenna connected to U.FL you can replace (same issues) or the same cut and solder pattern for wifi antennas across chips like ESPs, nRFs, and others.

Just use a USB adapter with a decent antenna.

amatecha 55 minutes ago

Yeah I find the Pi's of that era have pretty poor wifi reception, has been a constant source of uncertainty when I run things on them sadly

wolvoleo 23 minutes ago

I hope they'll finally bring usb-c to the zero. Badly needed

zokier 50 minutes ago

there is radxa zero 3w, which on paper is nice looking board. bit dated maybe but still lot fresher than pi zero 2w. the rockchip soc should have decent mainline support and it has been around for a while

internet2000 43 minutes ago

Decent support is not good enough. The Rasppi support is kind of an unsurmontable advantage.

zokier 3 minutes ago

[delayed]

qwerpy 32 minutes ago

Seems like a good use for AI. If people can use it to port video games from one system to another or jailbreak consoles, surely "get this library/program compiling on this device, then get all the tests passing, here's root ssh and an internet connection" could work pretty well in most cases. I wouldn't have bothered wasting my time in the past, but now, sure why not? It's not my time anymore and AI can turn the crank until it works.

jauntywundrkind 3 minutes ago

Yeah, I have a bunch of Radxa zero 3W, with their Rockchip rk3566. 4x A55 is just barely better than the A53 era still plaguing us 15 flipping years latter! Unbelievable. Alas just a hair before modern era of Rockchip, so it's support is much less consistent! But still pretty competent all in all!

Pine's Quartz64 has different peripherals attached but still afaik one of the best ways to track upstream support. It hasn't changed much since Linux 6.1 and I don't know if that's because there's nothing new or the page is just out of date. https://pine64.org/documentation/Quartz64/Development/

walrus01 2 hours ago

The biggest thing I want to see in a zero 3 w is not better cpu or ram, but wifi that isn't the zero 2 w spec of "2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN"

Having at least 1x1 802.11ac that's capable of working in the 5050 to 5900 MHz band will be a huge feature improvement. Such as to connect to a 'modern' AP running in an 80 MHz channel.

There's tons of environments where 2.4 GHz is a CSMA hell of noise and the performance in a single 20 MHz channel will always be crap, and ranges/real world distances between AP and pi will be very limited because of the extreme noise in the 2.4 band.

jacquesm 58 minutes ago

Can confirm. Unfortunately. Even so this form factor is really nice and it's cheaper than an Arduino and far more powerful.

oynqr 46 minutes ago

Supporting WPA3 would be nice as well.

ThrowawayR2 3 hours ago

Original source article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-Zero-3-W-Pi-4-A

VCFundedGenYer 43 minutes ago

A Phoenix link is almonst never the "original article." It barely contains half the info OP's link does.