“Nice and sleek, enough to power yet another surveillance IR camera.
It's really great R Pi Foundation offer such a broad choice of form factors...
Funny fact: Royal Mail's Dangerous Goods Support Team felt endangered by this little parcel with Raspberry and urged to rip-off the envelope and take a look at this beauty. It got even label : "Lithium Ion/Metal battery do not load or transport package if damaged" :) LiIon on Pi Zero? Where?!”
“Great little board which when loaded with Mopidy and and connected to a bluetooth speaker makes a good music system at a far better price than the SONOS kit I have.”
“Here's some heresy. It's Under-powered and frequently overrated but still one of the best available for the price and convenience.
The problem is this: for simple jobs the PI simply consumes too much electricity and the multitude Arduino clones are often cheaper, more convenient and (cough, cough) more robust. Plus they don't need a micro SD card and can be programmed in a few seconds via a USB port. Board based the ESP32 for example are available with WiFi and run an ARM chipset at 48Mhz with rudimentary communications (MQTT) and will run on a battery for weeks or even months (they have a deep sleep mode).
Many instances where more advanced WiFi is a bonus (torrents, SMB, NFS, etc.) are better suited to more powerful boards which means the Zero gets squeezed into that no-man's land where only the courageous are prepared to tread.
That's not to say it's incapable - it's perfect as a games emulator for the likes of NES, SNES, MegaDrive etc. which is something you really do need the extra beef (not to mention a display!) One of my Zeros is dedicated PiHole and another to the excellent Batocera for games emulation for these very purposes. You could find some other use but in my experience the Pi Zero is almost a solution without a problem.
The need to add extra hardware to do almost anything makes this "low cost" option rather more expensive than it first appears. Soldering a USB hub to the board is possible, and indeed a neater solution if you have the skills, because finding a USB 2 (or 3) hub with microUSB proved problematic and the adapators add both cost and ugly great plugs.
It remains one of the cheapest options for a dedicated PiHole box because that only needs a modest amount of performance, a cheap SD card a server OS such DietPi, although I prefer a more pure Debian without the temptation to add stuff you don't need.
Also, it's quite possible to make use it for projects where an Arduino would be my first choice simply because Python, being a higher level language than C/C++, needs that extra horsepower.”
