CanaKit Pi Zero W (Wireless) Complete Starter Kit - 16 GB Edition

As I've come to expect from Canakit and the Raspberry Pi project, another ideal set. The raspberry pi ZeroW is a great board and a perfect addition to the pi family. The small form-factor makes it ideal for many discrete projects, takes up very little room on my bench yet it still has the full functionality and versatility of its larger cousins. Canakit included an SD card with NOOBS and the installation was quick and easy. Setup for the wifi was intuitive, the drivers were already included and working from the get-go. Once I connected to my network and enabled remote access I relocated the pi to the furthest room in my house and was not disappointed. The wifi picks up at a strength that is equal to or better than any other device that I use wirelessly in that room. I will be making all my pi-board purchases from Canakit as, consistently, they have provided high-quality boards, parts, components and accessories with quality packaging, prompt shipping and just a great product for ideal prices.

The kit had everything I needed to get going ASAP, and you can be fully setup in only a few minutes. The biggest issue you might have out-of-box is the fact that there is only one USB port, so you might be stuck not being able to use the keyboard and mouse at the same time if you don't have a USB hub. Since this is a Pi Zero, you aren't really likely to be using this in a desktop configuration too much beyond setting things up, but you'll really want both the keyboard and mouse at once during that process. I kinda think having the full desktop Pi OS image on the SD card isn't the best idea here, since it's astonishingly slow on the Pi Zero, but it's fairly easy to just flash a minimal install image to the card with the official Raspberry Pi flashing tools and use raspi-config from the terminal to set things up after (and you don't need a mouse attached in the one USB port). Currently, the machine works pretty well for me as a headless system on my home network. The built-in wifi connection is quick enough and stable, much better vs using the plain non-W Pi Zero with a dongle, where I had all manner of connection stability issues (and it used up the USB port). I can use VNC to get to a desktop to make a few little management tasks easier, but it's VERY slow,. Most things should be done over SSH, which is plenty nimble. Overall, if you need a tiny machine that has wireless network access, this kit is great.

I haven't used a pi since 1B, the experience has improved. I am very happy with the kit, noobs was ready to go on the SD card and super easy. I like the case, feels pretty well made. I'm using the Pi Zero W as wireless AP, I'm very happy with the connection quality and surprised by the range. I thought I'd get a few feet but I can get a signal through the floor and through walls. The maximum wireless speed I can get on 802.11n with the built in adapter is 30mbps, but it's stable so I'm happy. By default, Raspbian starts with the GUI. The Pi Zero does not do well with the GUI. Opening Chromium maxes the CPU. Luckily switching to boot to terminal is extremely easy from preferences. From terminal, I have no complaints about performance. I use less than 10% CPU with 1 wireless client connected. CPU temperature with the heatsink attached, inside the case is about 45c in about 21c ambient room, with a wireless client actively connected. Fun project, fun device. I'll be getting more for a wireless mesh.

This is a great little device that gets rid of annoying commercials from almost every device on your network. Or, you can set it up only for certain devices if you'd like. Does not work for YouTube simply because they tend to often serve ads through their own servers, so if you are trying to end those good luck to you because they are smarter than most at making you watch ads. It does seem like there are fewer ads on YouTube, but there are still some that seem to come through. That's what really got me going to do this as I was being overwhelmed with YouTube ads! For everything else it seems to do the trick! So long to most ads!!! Commercials and ads are gone from almost every website and portal. Even the ads on the Roku home screen are gone. The only reason it's not a 5-star for me is that set up still requires a lot of work. Not for the faint of heart, as you need to know a little bit about networking and I needed to follow direction from several different websites in order to set it up correctly. If you are reading this review that means you probably have the patience to set it up yourself. This bundle is great though, as it includes everything you need except for a keyboard, mouse and monitor. It's pretty amazing that this cheap little device can run programs as well as it does. I highly recommend to anyone wanting to take the time to figure this out.

It works great, however it is worth noting that it doesn’t have a header connector soldered onto the pcb so before I can use it properly I need to find someone with a soldering iron and buy a header strip which is disappointing, hence the lower score for easy to assemble and overall score.