This is not going to be an insightful post. I’m just sharing my excitement.
I managed to fry the UART pins on my Pi 3. Since I’m working with bare metal, it’s kinda important to me that they work. I decided to get a Pi 0 for my future bare metal experiments.
I haven’t actually compiled any bare metal code for it yet. I did, however, boot my Raspbian SD card. Sure enough, everything booted and worked just fine. The boot process was a little slower, of course.
I only had a keyboard, no mouse, on account of the lack of connectivity on the Zero. So I went to a virtual console and started tapping away. The system seemed responsive. Raku was a dog to start up, mind.
I should be able to improve things by downloading the Lite version of Raspbian, and foregoing the desktop environment. It doesn’t seem necessary for what I want it for, anyway.
The Zero certainly looks suitable for a retro system. Provided you code in C/C++ and just use the console you won’t be disappointed in speed. What a fantastic piece of kit the Pi Zero is. No wonder they’re still as rare as hen’s teeth.
I haven’t tried running Firefox on it. No doubt that would be an unpleasant experience.
So, christmas has come early for me. Right, I’m off to fry some more pins.
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