$4 Raspberry Pi Zero as a DESKTOP? + Best OS to use?

Wi-Fi shape would like to say a huge thank you to all of you that kindly support us help us continue to bring new videos like this join patreon.com forward slash Wi-Fi sheep from just one dollar a month hi everyone and welcome back to Wi-Fi sheep with me tom i Jeremy hope you out and hope lockdown has been treating you well now the other day you may have noticed a brand new recipe for model dropped onto the market this was the 8gig variant and with it came a brand new rebranded Raspberry Pi operating system no longer called raspbian now simply known as Raspberry Pi OS or where it's still Linux and it's still built on a debian Buster framework but all this got me thinking about the PI 0 that original board that came out nearly 5 years ago now I still have my copy of issue 40 of magpie magazine from November December 2015 which had the ratified 0-3 on board this summe was an incredible moment and something we yet to see repeated or even topped but it did get me thinking is the Raspberry Pi zero capable of being used as a full desktop computer one of the bragging things that the Pi foundation likes to push about the PI 4 however before we find that out a reminder that Wi-Fi sheep is partnered with PCB way dot-com if you have a need for inexpensive high quality professional PCBs we'll look no further from PCB Wacom in our recent video I uploaded a custom Gurda file to my free PCB a user account and went through the whole online ordering process within less than two weeks to finish PCBs are webbing ready for assembly so dude go check out that video and if you haven't already do register for your free account at PCB Tway dot-com okay then so let's start by having a look at our supply zero happen to have one here so this is a slightly later revision of the poison which first version 1.3 you can see it here and I saw the introduction I think these things are amazing the difference over this and slightly earlier version 1.2 which are the ones that came on the front cover of magpie 3 is the late ones added a camera port here for no extra cost brief tech specs for you the CPU and shared GPU and shared round it's all on this one stack here it's a Broadcom BCM 2 8 3 5 that's a 32-bit single core processor with 512 megabytes of RAM and hopping is clocked 2000 megahertz which is equivalent to 1 gigahertz this CPU was originally used on the 1st 2012 I suppose where it ran at 700 megahertz and you could get variants at 256 megabytes and the 512 so obviously we've moved on with PI 2 3 4 etc they've gone to quad-core chipsets it's a little underpowered but what you have to remember this board is it's a complete self-contained microcomputer with video out USB input for less than a cup of coffee at a high street store the cost of this hasn't changed much it originated at 4 pounds and also for u.s. dollars which means that the board is slightly more expensive here in New Haven is in US but even so you actually get change out of a five-pound note for one of these let's put that to one side now I was looking for some alternatives because it's slightly shorter PI 0 is that the supply of them is limited and it's always been limited for the past five years which is almost so I looked at alternatives and one of them I found was the orange pi zero which branded itself here as the new generation of mini PC yeah let's have a quick look inside and here is the orange pi zero which is a completely different shape and form factor to the Raspberry Pi zero the orange pi actually promised to be quite good and on paper the specification this is really great first of all the form factor I like the square small form-factor package it has an Ethernet cat port and it has a full USB onboard which is a bonus the CPU it's another ARM based CPU but it's an all winner brand and it's a h2 plus that's a quad-core 32-bit CPU so it's quite a bit more powerful than the recipe 0 this one had 256 megabytes on board but you could buy them in the 512 package so basically this supposably was a little bit better a little bit faster than the 0 it also had onboard Wi-Fi as standard later versions of the 0 came in a 0 w does have an warn Wi-Fi as well this one is just the stock plain 0 so on paper this looked to be a real alternative to build a system around unfortunately it was badly let down by the terrible terrible OS is for all versions of Linux Ubuntu and Debian for it the support from the manufacturers and then existent I tried some third-party os's including arm Brean which supports a number of V and none Raspberry Pi base boards and this thing just wouldn't stay booted it would crash we try and reboot it it would kernel panic if crop the SD card and I tried and trying to drive for a number of years with this and I just got nowhere I've give not with us in the end so if you know different to me and can get these damn things running reliably and that's only to be start of its problems please to drop a line let me know I paid about 12 pounds 54 256 megabytes and about three years ago now off it was DX or Aliexpress a cart remember I just wanted to Chinese wholesaler sites yeah no basically so that was pretty much the end of the pi zero and we always go back to the Raspberry Pi zero because at least to support and software for this and also just it is a piece of hardware is much more reliable much better supported but it does have some input/output issues so no Ethernet on board this one doesn't have Wi-Fi it has one mini USB stick micro USB and micro USB for power and it has mini HDMI which actually I prefer over the micro HDMI used on the point four but that's another story for another day this could potentially be more useful if we could have this kind of full-scale input/output that the orange bi0 had well the other day I saw this advertised on Twitter and I bought one this is from wave share and adapter board for zero [Applause] there we go this protective layer off so this is an adaptable of the zero that sits on top like a hat and actually gives you three full USBs a full Ethernet connection and you still get the full GPIO pins through the only slight snag is that it needs GPIO pins to connect into the bottom and a stock PI zero does not have any GPIO this didn't come with a kit this is stuff I added separately I bought these as well and it's a heat sink which we can fit to the top of the CPU and it comes with all this particular thing I bought separately comes with the GPIO pins that we can solder on so we're going to do that now that's not such a big issue so we just move the rest of the kit to the side yes you've got both male and female connectors so we want the male connector this little one here is if you want to use the PI zeroes reset and TV or composite analog out which I do want to use but don't think I'll put that header on that's what this one does so we'll just put that one side so what we've got to do is sort of this header onto the board which isn't too much of a problem just heatsink there to keep it square I've actually got my soldering iron just off camera here which have been heating up while I've been talking to you so a bit of flux again I use the screwdriver I keep saying every time I do a video don't do it like this this is just me being lazy and bad but it works so okay so what the heatsink just there track just to keep it straight wise the board would dip and cause problems I've got my soldering iron sit up it's a soda okay little bit not I'm expected but we're now there so that header is now solved at all but you can see the amount of flux on the board so put a piece of kitchen towel and obviously need to let let's cool down a little bit will you do this just do that just to take some this flux off what you can do if you've got time and you want to is you could actually wash this under the tap but obvious you need to make sure it's thoroughly dries before you put any sort of voltage back through it okay there we ask there's our header now on our PI and we can all look after assembling the rest of it so the way this next bit works it's very simple so you have your headed PI 0 here and we have new board unless you can see has female stop it versus the male header we fitted so these two will now just clip together like that and then you see these two micro USBs here there's this tiny love it really cool little bridge board and this will connect this hub via USB to zero goes in like that and that now creates hopefully a fully hubs PI zero with Ethernet connectivity and three separate USB sockets plus you've still got the GPIO out and I've just noticed one of the pins here and mine is actually a little bit bent must have happened in transit it's a big deal in just oh yeah just straighten that out with a pair of pliers so what that means you could actually fit over hats mostly PI hats on top of there or you still at your full GPIO out or hobby projects one quick thing I did forget to do it my excitement to get this together Lots but the heatsink in Soho probably do anything else let's just take this apart again we go now heatsinks I was little stuff adhesive pad seemed to peel off like that get this on nice and square yeah son like that and I will help just keep this chip called especially as it's pumped me overclocked should only be running around 700 megahertz and it's doing that the gigahertz oh and I'll just help it a little bit I don't really make much difference having this happen board on top but let's put the board back together now you do get these little stanchion fixings for fitting between here and here to be honest with you but on its own is quite secure depends on the back of this coupling USB coupling piece on the front so I'm tempted not to put those in also if I want to fix it in song and feature I'm gonna need to keep these screw holes player so yeah I'd open up Bob with that but overall see the heatsink best is enough room overall yeah that's looking all right so we've got our pressure PI 0 with its new adapter board set up ready to go however to make this work we're going to need a few adapters and additional parts so the first thing you'll need is a way of plugging in HDMI now unlike the PI for the PI mini has a HDMI mini connector not a micro connector so I have him you get these very cheaply this is a HDMI mini 2 standard HDMI adapter and we can plug that in and that'll get us the video that we need that's the power I'm going to use one of these slightly older browser PI power supplies these are the 5 volt 2 amp power supplies which are 5 dish you can use the slightly newer pasteurizer go up to 5 volts 2.5 amps if I remember correctly these have the micro USB connect on your knees are not USBC so the pi0 is not useful see so we can plug button so keyboard and mouse we can just use any sort of generic mouse so gotten these these are very very cheap ones you can get which actually work quite well considering so let's plug that into one of the USB keyboards I like to use so we'll plug that in the other side or we could plug into there if we want to I filed because this is just a standard recipe 0 it doesn't have any Wi-Fi will need to cable in via an ethernet port some internet and I have here this is a live cable luckily with this house we actually broadband quite early on before the Wi-Fi technology was any good so my father originally actually put in cabled network infrastructure into all the wall cavities of this house a bit like you would have an office sort of school so we actually have their points you can actually plug directly even in the upstairs rooms you can plug internet straight in and that will plug straight through to the router downstairs so that's quite useful I mean it's been obsolete for some time but I still use it for experiments like this so that's now fully setup and we should be able to pair up of course this one feature we are missing and that is an operating system so which operating system to try and use well I thought we might attempt three different OSS now Banga man this is a roasted by zero so it's not the most powerful by any stretch of imagination it's quite underpowered in relation to other Rossy biotite boards including the rest of pi/4 right down to the clones that we talked about it starts the video so the OS is I'm going to try first of all on an 8 gig micro SD card I've got raspberry OS which is the new name for raspbian which is the official Linux Debian based operating system supported by the rice apply foundation for the Raspberry Pi this build is meant to work on effort from the original 2012 pie right the way through to the latest 8 gig model of the recipe for as an experiment and for the first time on this 4 gig card I'm going to try diet pie which is a shrunk down minimal Linux operating system for a host of single board computers including the recipe pie as the name suggests diet pie it's Strunk right down to the burr minimun to get this up and running with a graphical user interface so we'll try that and I said that's on a four gig card and then finally and because well it'd be rude not to on this channel on a 16 gig card I've got RISC OS direct which for those of you that are regulars this channel know that I am actually working on that operating system and Wi-Fi sheep is the official channel of request direct as supported by the parent company risk arrest of elements limited so we'll try the official build to see how that does on the setup okay so as mentioned this is not really a scientific test but we've got iPhone here with stopwatch we've got the official raspberry OS installed on the PI zero so I'm going to turn on the power to the PI at the same time we've set these stopwatch we'll see how quickly it takes to boot up [Music] okay so far so good [Music] coming up to 30 seconds in I'll also point out I have already booted all these oasis because there were fresh boots just to make sure the turning young setup anything that slows down on the first boot has already been set off to give this the fairest possible chance to run as fast as possible so here it is actually raspberry pi RS folks two-bit edition [Music] I'm not - a minute in now [Music] [Music] [Music] I'm in this and a half okay there's the desktop wallpaper got a cursor the mouse works and we have the desktop so from you open filing system you Karen and the command prompt and there's a command prompt so we'll stop so I'll say two minutes ten seconds to get working and once it's up and running it's quite responsive obviously the brand new in stores there's not a lot action on here it does have a slight tendency to sort of stop and have a think about what he's doing but text editor yeah it's it's okay okay so this is Diet pie which is built on the latest 32-bit version of Debian Buster I've added a little bit of manual setting up with this so I've added a lightweight desktop framework now for this boot we will have to put some passwords in which is going to slow the boot process but we'll count that anyway so let's see how while we go free to pay more off [Music] charities experts in okay we've got a prompt I'm still under a minutes or we get to a desktop in under a minute not quite okay filing system [Music] and the prompt as command prompt and it will stop one 2187 so yeah a little bit faster not a lot in it possibly delay abide me on to type the password in but it is faster and this is just going to this up again now yeah alex de which is the super lightweight desktop environment for linux and this it is noticeably now how quickly search in years but it's a very very light built it was actually very little soft around here this is diet pie which i have to make i've been quite impressed with that pie and it's definitely I want to look up again it also gives you some live information about the CPU temperatures have been running at 41 degrees Celsius of 105 Fahrenheit which is about right else you can fight your own lamb IP number and also has a number of tools built in including be able to install configured software especially optimized shine keep performance up on these boards so yeah I've been quite impressed by this so I think finally we probably need to look at risk OS direct ok this is the third and final build this is RISC OS direct we're ready in 3 2 1 and we're off now I do know this has a slight problem with the internet connectivity it doesn't like the even it so it will hang there so if I hit escape it'll go through we hit cancel 20 seconds were on the desktop no come on yeah bring up the file manager manager hiding here is bring up the command prompt there's a command prompt stop 35 seconds and we're in yeah we have a command prompt and I have the filer window open and I think that kind of proves my point about res ghost direct it is so fast even on the slowest oldest browser by BOTS the only slight issue is we haven't got any network and activity for some reason at the moment so there's no interfaces detected which is unfortunate but it's up and running and unlike the other two which are stripped down or minimum requirements Linux distributions this version of Roscoe asterisk of strength it's full fat so it's got everything in it all the software everything running at full pelt so in games like doom work really well even on this 5-0 machine so there we go it's been fantastic to actually find an adapter to make the Raspberry Pi zero a little bit more usable and the results from the operating systems have been surprising I'm going to do a follow-up video on diet pi very shortly so if you haven't already please do like and subscribe to us here on Wi-Fi sheep and don't forget our patreon it's wwp a chong kham /ik Wi-Fi sheep and you can join for just one dollar as ever thank you so much for your company and I will see you real soon right in the channel until next time bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Wi-Fi Sheep

Views: 63,796

Keywords: PCB, Way, .com, Wi, Fi, Sheep, tech, video, retro, computing, Micro, code, making, building, gaming, programming, how, to, Raspberry, Pi, Zero, Dietpi, OS, RISCOS, RISC, Direct, howto, light, review

Id: fpErKjnCY-8

Length: 28min 31sec (1711 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020