Spotpear's Adapter Boards Bulk Out the Raspberry Pi Zero Family to Match the Raspberry Pi 3, 4
Clever boards turn a Raspberry Pi Zero-format single-board computer into something closer to a full-size model.
Electronics design house Spotpear has launched adapters designed to bridge the gap between the Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and the larger models in the family — literally adapting the former into the footprint and port layout of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ or Raspberry Pi 4 Model B.
Launched a year ago, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 was the long-awaited follow-up to the original compact Raspberry Pi Zero and Zero W single-board computers. Priced at just $15, the board features a quad-core Arm chip with Broadcom's VideoCore IV graphics processor, 512MB of LPDDR2 RAM, and microSD storage, plus on-board 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity.
What it lacks compared to its larger brethren, though, is ports. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, like its predecessors, has a mini-HDMI port for video and audio, a micro-USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) port for a single peripheral or an external hub, a Camera Serial Interface (CSI) port, and the Raspberry Pi standard 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header.
With full-size Raspberry Pi stock in short supply, Spotpear's idea is to adapt the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W — which, sadly, is also hard to find, but may be languishing in drawers around the world for those who picked one up but found it ill-suited to a given project — to the larger-model form factor. As a result the company has launched carrier boards, brought to our attention by CNX Software: One to convert the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W to mimic a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, and one to mimic the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B.
In both cases, the Raspberry Pi Zero simply slots into the adapter board — without the need for soldering. It also provides many, but not all, of the same ports as the bigger variants — the exception being the second micro-HDMI slot on the Raspberry Pi 4, which is present but not connected on the adapter, and the USB 3.0 ports that are replaced by USB 2.0 equivalents.
Exactly how many functional ports you get depends on the model of adapter chosen: versions with an RJ45 Ethernet socket sacrifice one USB 2.0 port for the privilege, leaving only three of the four physical ports functional; a model without network chip is also available, which leaves all four USB ports available for use.
The adapter boards are priced at $15.89 upwards, model-dependent, and are compatible with the Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi Zero W, and Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W; more information is available on the Spotpear product page.