Raspberry Pi has been making small, affordable computers for a while now, but it’s just gone and made things insanely cheap. Its latest miniature computer, the Pi Zero, will cost just $5.
The miniature board—it measures just 65mm x 30mm x 5mm—is intended to make it even easier to provide people all around the world with their first steps into the world of coding. For $5 you might not be expecting much in the way of hardware, but the specs are actually fairly impressive. The board features a Broadcom processor that can run at 1GHz and 512MB of RAM, along with a micro-SD slot, mini-HDMI to plug it into a display, and micro-USB for power. The board runs Raspbian, and will happily let you use applications like Scratch, Minecraft and Sonic Pi. Or your own creations. Whatever.
In the U.S., the miniature computer will be available online from Adafruit and in-store at branches of Micro Center. Eben Upton, the founder of Raspberry Pi, writes that the company has “built several tens of thousands of units so far, and are building more, but we expect demand to outstrip supply for the next little while.”
So, you might need to be patient before you can lay your hands on one.