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Comment by cmdrfred | Hacker News Reader

I'll be picking one up. Onboard WiFi is a big deal.

I'm still waiting for a Zero. A Zero with onboard Wifi would be brilliant: really small, needs little power, and you don't need to hook it up to anything but the power supply.

I wouldn't mind onboard power supply though

With a Zero with an on board power supply, Wifi, and Bluetooth the possibilities are endless.

Here's someone working on a ESP8266 module for the Zero, which will include a simple power supply:

https://hackaday.io/project/8678-rpi-wifi

Looks like they are planning to offer a few for sale eventually.

Get a Chip!

Seems like you'd get a Pi Zero before you'd get a chip. They don't start shipping until June, and I see Zeros in stock for a few seconds (some on Adafruit yesterday, although they sold out in seconds).

I have a CHIP, from the Kickstarter campaign. It really is a better deal than the Pi Zero, unless you have Pi-specific needs. It's much more powerful than the Zero in my testing (though not quite as powerful as the Pi 2) and the built in Wi-Fi/BT is awesome. The fact you can attach a LiPo battery and have it managed by an onboard power regulator is worth the whole $9 as far as I'm concerned.

The only downside is no HDMI or even VGA until the respective adapters come out...in June. I currently only have one screen in the house with a composite input and it's not always available for tinkering.

Another downside is the size of the community. I think this is why the pi is going to be around for a long time despite not having the best tech specs around. There are all kinds of tutorials for hundreds of projects and the prevalence and availability of rpi forums further lower the barrier for entry.

You're going to be waiting a long time.

Not necessarily. I picked one up about a week ago, I guess? Impulse purchase.

Keep an eye on etailers that won't back-order, and just nab one when they come into stock. There's a stampede, but it's then luck of the draw.

Couldn't you already just plug a fairly cheap USB dongle in your rasperry pi ? I'm not sure I see what the big deal is, aside from probably making the price cheaper and freeing up a usb slot

Oh you can, its just little kids tinkering around (and the parents who are going to buy the thing) having it "batteries included" is good thing.

Aren't those two pretty big upsides?

You're fairly limited in terms of antenna size/placement when you use a tiny dongle. If it's built into the Pi, they could have the antennae wrap around the edge (similar to how the iPhone does it) to allow for a much higher quality connection.

At least, that's what I hope they're doing with it.

If you've ever tried to get wifi working (esp on earlier RPis) you'll understand it is not that simple. Especially for newbies. Having said that its a good baptism of fire.

Raspberry Pi with built in wireless comms means it uses a standard piece of hardware so the software stack can be configured to work out of the box. That can't happen with the existing arrangement. Also the power supply problems with original Pis are frustrating to say the least. These are most evident when plugging in USB wifi devices. Again having a standard integrated piece of hardware will (hopefully) avoid this.

This doesn't really reflect my experience at all with the RPi 2. The edimax or official wifi dongles "just work" with NetworkManager.

With the early RPi it was a bit different because of USB power problems and kernel bugs, but those are mostly solved.

Experiences vary. I agree with tonylemesmer, getting them to work has not been trivial for me.

Agreed.

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