A few (loads of) months ago I bought a GPi CASE thinking that I would be able to use a Zero W 2 to make a portable games console …
Then of course the chip shortage really kicked in!
Then the scalper’s came along!
Then that total ****** “oh whoa is me people hate me because I threaten them Putin” invades Ukraine*! *pushing up the price of helium!
Then that total ********* Xi Ki Dnaping (of Hu Jintao) starts threatening Taiwan!
THEN I spot a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Essentials Kit … get in!!!
Ok it was a bit more than just a Z2W but it was cheaper than Ebay and came with stuff I was going to buy at some point!
Anyway moving onto the GPi case, I did originally try a Zero W but was it sluggish? Lets just say that you could wait days for the screen to update!!
Today I put in my Z2W … holy ********* thats quick … doom on a 3 AA battery powered device …thats **************** great!
With a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 processor clocked at 1GHz and 512MB of SDRAM, the Zero 2 is up to five times as fast as the original Raspberry Pi Zero.
Overclock it a bit and you’d likely get close to 3A+ performance.
I did some measurements in the past comparing current and energy. It turns out that even for battery-based projects with a typical “work - do-nothing (or even shutdown) - work - …” cycle the Zero2 is better than the Zero-W. This is due to the fact that the Zero2 is faster at finishing the work.
Here a two graphs. One is with work that keeps all four cores busy:
Even here you can see that the Zero2 is more efficient.
There are still some reasons for sticking to the original Zero-W: lower max-current, lower-price, less heating. And for many applications even the original Zero is good enough and therefore the best choice.
IMHO, the Zero is hard to beat performance versus cost wise. I have 24+ Pi’s kicking around here, about half are Pi Zero’s. Some 3A+'s, 3B’s, 3B+'s and a couple of 4B’s. And one Pi 400. So far I’ve only been able to get my hands on one Zero 2W.
I hang out on the Pi forum a lot. Aside from the chip shortage, they alternate production runs of the various models. What gets made often depends on what SOC is available, and what RAM they can get their hands on. They also try to even out what quantity they send to Approved Retailers.
Clift Notes Version, blink and you have missed your chance. There was a time when I would add a Pi Zero to any order I was placing. If it wasn’t for the chip shortage, I’d be doing the same thing but with Zero 2’s.
