The Raspberry Pi Zero Contest presented by Adafruit and Hackaday has been going incredibly well! We currently have 132 projects entered, and there is still time for YOU to get in on the fun! The only problem entrants have had is getting their hands on these amazing $5 computers. We’ve made that easy by giving away ten Raspberry Pi Zero boards. The following projects were well documented, well thought out projects were selected by the judges. We’ve already informed the winners through Hackaday.io, and will be shipping out the Pi Zero boards to them right away.
- [Ajlitt] with RPi WiFi
- [Die, Master Monkey!] with IQ Zero: Evolving Stupid, Imperfect Robots
- [spencer] with $5 Graphics Card For Homebrew Z80
- [JohSchneider] with PiGrrl-Zero
- [Patrick Van Oosterwijck] with LiFePO4wered/Pi
- [Erland Lewin] with Pi Chart
- [Lars Knudsen] with Monitoring washing machines
- [Daniel Frausto] with piStudio
- [Markus Dieterle] with TextEye: Raspberry Pi (Zero) Mobile Textreader
- [Brook Patten] with Mr. Gibbs
Please join the judges and the entire Hackaday staff in congratulating the winners of the Pi Zero boards!
If you didn’t win, all is not lost! There is still time to enter the contest. The deadline is 11:59 pm PST on March 13, 2016. You’ll be in the running for one of three $100 gift certificates to The Hackaday Store!
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Are you said because there aren’t any USB hubs in the list?
Sadly the contest is open to the lucky few who could obtain a Raspberry Pi Zero
I don’t think I’ll ever see a Raspberry Pi Zero, ever.
Except you were allowed to proto with the other Pis. “You can prototype with a Raspberry Pi Model B, or a Pi 2” https://hackaday.io/contest/9326-adafruit-pi-zero-contest
No it wasn’t.
Yea, but who wants to develop a project on a platform nobody can readily obtain? If the average Joe could get one at non-ripoff-Adafruit prices (let alone at all), there’d be thousands of projects and no need for a pump-Adafruit contest. Yea, so they pulled a fast one and obtained a bunch of these boards early on. And the few they didn’t unload for ripoff prices they “give away” in a hackaday hipster contest because nobody else can get them. Some people really follow the hype and want one, hoping they’ll be available everywhere for $5 one day .
But the quantities of these boards have remained so low for so long, and getting one for a even $8 or $10 is almost impossible. It’s a loss-leader, a marketing gimmick. A dead platform.
All we have here is great targeted advertising for a company with real shady business practices.
Go ahead, try this new contest: “hey, we’re giving away a free $5 ESP8266 board for winners of our $5 ESP8266 contest.” . Aiya. ;-)
Until these things really sell for $5 and there is general availability, avoid the hype, avoid the board, and avoid the ripoff resellers.
“Until these things really sell for $5 and there is general availability, avoid the hype, avoid the board, and avoid the ripoff resellers.”
This. So much.
An article the other day mentioned how the original Pi took months before people started getting hold of the boards. Now they’re all over the place, for the $30 or so they were promised. This is just the same problem, they made a load of boards but still underestimated demand, and the supply chain is taking a while to get going.
Sure you’re right about the ludicrously overpriced “kits”. But some people have paid $5 and got a Pi, so it’ll come round soon enough. Just business as usual. Having to wait for a hot new computer isn’t new. Happened all the time in the 1980s, before everyone settled on PC clones where availability isn’t a problem.
We know the Pi Foundation has plenty of money, this isn’t some dodgy Kickstarter.
But beside all that, the competition allowed you to use another model of Pi, one that was easily available and you might already have. And the prize is only $5 x 10, you’re not being deprived of much. There’s certainly no need to go throwing money at Hackaday’s Good Pal, Adafruit.
Greenaum speaks the truth, the first Pi was so hard to get early on, I placed my order within hours of them being available and it took more than 4 months to get one. During that time they were being sold on ebay for in excess of $100.
Have to agree, it’s a shady contest. Promoting a contest for a near non-existent item is as best quite odd.
People are much better off getting a $10 NXP ARM board and use the MBED compiler for their projects. Assuming they don’t need Linux and don’t want to run it as a workstation.
HaD store should stock these *without* bundling and make sure it is available for anyone who want to enter into the contest.
whole point of this contest is to push more bundle sales for adafruit :)
All you need to enter is an idea. They’ve repeated this many, many times.
You can prototype with an earlier model pi. I made sure that was in the rules.
Wait a sec… didn’t I buy car insurance from that cartoon chic?
You don’t want to know why they stopped those commercials, but you can probably guess why.
Shh… don’t give the creepers any ideas!
Seriously though, your illustrators are super awesome!
I am the one who wrote the Zero was a marketing trick to keep the community interested, shifting away attention from competing products and pave the way for a bigger model, and I was right: a few days after my post the 3 was announced and distributed, and it is already much easier to obtain than the Zero. That’s nice, I’ll buy one for sure along with other competing products.
But now I have a direct question: are you going to really start producing the Zero in a way that meets the demand? I’m sure many of us and several companies would love to build stuff around the Zero even at a higher cost but one can’t design products around a platform that seem to serve only as advertising device and whose present and future availability nobody is certain about. So please do the right thing and kill it right now or raise its price and give it the distribution it deserves.
I am very impressed with the TextEye, Markus Dieterle deserved to be supported in getting that project developed as far as possible, while reducing the costs, because it would be cheaper than the next cheapest similar option which requires an entire android phone.
Can I just say: “your cartoonist rocks”. They put most of your authors to shame.
Micro center has gotten stock multiple times in the last 30 days. Both times walked in and paid 5bux for a pi zero…. In fact cincy micro center has them now….
Yes, Microcenter is the only real deal for these, but:
In Store Only. Limit 1 per household.
There’s only 25 stores in the entire country.
Also, they say “10+ in stock”. It could mean 10,000, but more realistically closer to 11.
Unless you’re really close, it’s not worth the drive for getting just one. (maybe 5 or 6 depending how many friends you can stuff in your car, assuming they stock that many.)
What’s really amazing is they’re still alive. They evoke memories of quality tech like eMachines, Trident video cards, KDS monitors, Win-modems, Bandai Pippins, SyQuest Sparq drives, and Mustek scanners. How they didn’t go the way of CompUSA, CircuitCity, and RadioShack long ago is a miracle in itself. I guess they never got the message about the .com 1.0 bust.
I was able to snag 2 of them from my local Microcenter on Black Friday but they haven’t had them in stock since. I’m just lucky to have one 10 min from me though.
I drove an hour away on Christmas Eve and was able to buy 2 at $5. Luckily I brought my wife who used my mom’s address to get the second one lol. The messed up part is all these people complaining about not being able to get one, and here I am with 2 and I haven’t even turned either one on yet!
Forgot to mention I got them at MicroCenter near Philadelphia.
Yep – Cincinnati microcenter has had them in stock 3-4x since Christmas. It’s a 45 minute drive so I don’t make it there often, but when I did go I grabbed 2, handed my son 10bux and had him check out. The salesman said it was supposed to be 1 per house but didn’t know how they enforced it, and also mentioned first one was $5 2nd was $10 if you were buying on the same transaction….