Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

[ag123]

Raspberry came out with a new board
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/ra ... -zero-2-w/

[mrburnette]

Yawn ... old chip, new footprint. I'm going back to sleep.

Ray


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[AndrewBCN]

Indeed when one reads the specs for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, everything looks dandy, until one gets to the power requirements: 5V @ 2.5A!

Uhhh, What? Yes: 5V @ 2.5A. And that's a pity, because with a lower power consumption this RPi Zero 2 W could have found a home in a much larger number of compact embedded Linux projects.

[ag123]

i'd guess Rpi is assuming u'd have a huge solar panel with a huge battery to keep it happy, but that these days as everyone wants more speed, so i'd guess that translates to more power consumption. if you take a cue from desktop processors these days, 10 cores 20 SMT is no longer unusual, this energy density are extreme, and I'm seeing 1 KW power supply for PCs being sold on the market, that's enough to boil a small kettle of water every 10 minutes

[racemaniac]

Indeed when one reads the specs for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, everything looks dandy, until one gets to the power requirements: 5V @ 2.5A!

Uhhh, What? Yes: 5V @ 2.5A. And that's a pity, because with a lower power consumption this RPi Zero 2 W could have found a home in a much larger number of compact embedded Linux projects.

I assume that's the absolute maximum you could reach with peripherals/whatever else

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKS2ElWQizA&t=515s

The actual max power consumption of just the Pi Zero 2 is 2W (compared to 0.8W for the original zero)

[AndrewBCN]

Unfortunately for any SBC you have to size your power supply for peak (not average) power consumption. So having a tiny SBC with a relatively large peak power requirement of 5V@2.5A kind of defeats the whole purpose of the small size.

[racemaniac]

Unfortunately for any SBC you have to size your power supply for peak (not average) power consumption. So having a tiny SBC with a relatively large peak power requirement of 5V@2.5A kind of defeats the whole purpose of the small size.

but the 2W is peak consumption during GPU/CPU stress tests. That's the entire point of that measurement.

And you should indeed size your power supply for peak consumption, which is probably why the raspberry foundation assumes people will connect usb peripherals that are allowed to draw a certain power, and add a pi hat on top of it that can draw a certain amount of power. So the recommended supply being a lot heavier than what just the pi zero 2 itself needs.

[ag123]

i think it is still likely manageable, if intended use is well below the peak. I'd guess it may be possible to handle occasional milliseconds surges, say with a large capacitor.

I tend to power my RPi and other boards using high amps mobile usb chargers these days as they're readily available locally, they also tend to be well build and rather small. I find it quite easy to get chargers with power ranges like 20 watts which is like 4 amps x 5 v.
But preference wise, I'd prefer to just get a model B board as that has a lot more peripherals, usb etc.

[racemaniac]

A quick google search showed me this article that claims the pi zero 2 is the most power efficient raspberry pi so far: https://hackaday.com/2021/11/01/the-pi- ... icient-pi/

and if you want to make it even more power efficient, here's how to disable some cores on it:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/ ... ption-half

[AndrewBCN]

Efficiency is a measure of processing performance divided by average power consumption and so is rather irrelevant for peak power consumption. As for disabling cores, this raises more questions than it answers, imo.

Again, the RPi Zero 2 W specs all look good/acceptable considering its tiny size, except for one thing: the 5V@2.5A power requirements. The Zero 2 W cannot be used as a drop-in replacement for the original Zero W because of that issue.