The $8 Linux Computer (2022)

I love looking back 10+ years for the cheapest Linux thing you could buy. People were buying devices that were for kids or a router or something and repurposing it because it was open enough to get a shell on / flash Linux to it and start doing projects with.

In the 2020s or somewhere before that we got a bunch of dedicated cheap MCUs that were good enough and I think stole the thunder from full Linux but there are still projects to run it on things like the ESP32 family.

Either way, hardware hacking is still my favorite hobby to watch.

The Raspberry Pi Zero sold for $5 before the foundation sold out.

This article motivated me to buy three of these, it was fun, I had to get a pico to build the interface.

I still intend to go back, but time keeps on slipping...

I'm sure many have collected an impressive number of SBCs since the beaglebone, someday I want to build a display case that runs them all on some distributed process as a visual art piece

One could buy an old router or Android device for media playback on a TV for less. So the main attraction here is not that it's cheap, but that it's small and has convenient GPIO.

I want this but in credit-card form factor, with a screen built in.

Quick someone upload a passmark score

Probably a little faster than a Pentium 3

The chip computer used to be much more capable and feature rich at just 9$

Is the Pi Zero 2W globally unobtainable at this point? What are folks using instead?