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Upgrading to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

· 2 min read
Ludovico Ferrara
Ludovico Ferrara
Maintainer of Security-Cam

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W​

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is a small yet remarkably powerful single-board computer, perfectly suited for projects requiring a compact form factor with minimal energy consumption. Powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor and equipped with 512MB of RAM, the Pi Zero 2 W also boasts built-in wireless connectivity, making it a versatile tool for a variety of applications.

The need for an upgrade​

Initially, I was running a Next.js server on the original Raspberry Pi Zero. However, I encountered limitations due to the maximum supported version of Node.js on that hardware. These constraints led to performance bottlenecks and compatibility issues, particularly as newer versions of Node.js were required for the project.

Transitioning to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W​

To ensure a smooth transition, we prebuilt the Next.js server on a MacBook. This approach allowed me to leverage the MacBook’s processing power to compile and optimize the server before deploying it to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Once the server was prebuilt, transferring it to the Pi Zero 2 W was straightforward, and it ran flawlessly on the new hardware.

The headaches​

While the transition to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for testing our basic server setup was relatively seamless, it necessitated rewriting the setup documentation to reflect the new hardware. This involved updating installation instructions, including the necessary dependencies and configurations. A particular challenge arose with the fact that Raspbian Bookworm no longer supports the legacy camera module. This required some investigation to get the camera working on the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Fortunately, while libcamera struggled to detect the camera, open-cv handled it without issues. Since we recently switched to open-cv for the security cam project, this didn’t turn out to be a major setback.

Conclusion​

After a few hours of troubleshooting and updating the documentation, the server was up and running on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. The new hardware provides a significant performance boost, allowing the server to run more efficiently. The transition to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W was a success.