Zumo George gets upgrades (part 1)

Everything eventually needs an upgrade. You may think that pencil 1.0 was great, but if Apple has taught us anything: we all need pencil 2.0. I jest, although that said it is time for Zumo George, one of my Raspberry Pi robots to receive the 2.0 make-over. This is brought on by two things:


Previously I had thought of upgrading from the Raspberry Pi A+ to a Zero purely to save some space, enabling me to get a bit o'real-estate back as George measure but 10cm x 10cm. However I would still have the WiFi dongle a-dongling, only it would be dangling from a micro to full-size USB. Dongles dangling from dongles (there's a song in there somewhere) made me sad: "if only a variant of the Zero came with WiFi", I thought. Fantastic news Pi fans: the Foundation delivered.

The Raspberry Pi Zero W is essentially a Zero (same CPU, same RAM, same form factor) with the added bonus of a combined WiFi and Bluetooth chip. Also for our inner geek the Foundation has included the coolest antenna I've seen yet which features a triangular resonant cavity. The MagPi magazine covered the antenna in detail just the other day in Issue 55. Proant, a Swedish company, have licensed the tech to the Foundation.
TheMagPi_55_ZeroWAntenna
The MagPi, Issue 55. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Given the move to the slimmest of Raspberry Pi's it is also time to move from the Pimoroni Explorer Pro to the Explorer pHAT. This half-pint size board has many of the features of it's larger sibling and is a perfect match for the Zero W.

Putting it all together here are collection of parts:

Zumo George Pi Zero W upgrade

Any observant bod will quickly notice something missing. Yes I hang my head in shame and join the "forgot to order a 40-pin header for the Zero" club. D'oh! eBay quickly to the rescue. Given this tiny omission the build is on temporary hold for a few days. Still, let's get the blade in place because sumo blades == awesome. While we're at it let's have a preview of where the Zero is going to go. With all ports along one long edge I can now have these poking backwards from George. You can also see the extra space I am gaining from the move to the Zero W from the A+.

ZumoGeorge_sumo_blade

I am expecting great things from the sumo blade and am already thinking about how to modify my BDD behaviours and code to take advantage: Zumo George shall no longer retreat in fear from Cartmanzilla.

Stay tuned for Part 2, entitled: "Ahah the header has arrived!"

PS: yes those wires are going to get significantly shortened ;)
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