The topic PiZZa turns your spare Raspberry Pi Zero W and 2 W into an Arduino is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
If you’re a tinkerer, there’s a very good chance you have a spare Raspberry Pi board or two sitting around. If one of them happens to be either a Raspberry Pi Zero W or a Zero 2 W, and all it’s doing is collecting dust right now, why not turn it into an Arduino? It may sound impossible, but one project, called PiZZa, aims to let you do just that.
As spotted by Hackster.io, PiZZa (short for “Pi Zero with Zephyr for Arduino”) allows you to take your spare SBCs and give them a brand new life. As PiZZa’s creator puts it:
Write sketches in the Arduino IDE and run them on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W or the original Raspberry Pi Zero W. A small firmware on the SD card (a Zephyr “loader”) loads your compiled sketch as a runtime module — so after a one-time setup, Upload is one button: no SD swap, no manual re-flash.
All you need is one of the aforementioned SBCs, a microSD card that’s larger than 2GB, a micro-USB data cable (not just a charging one), and Arduino IDE 2.x. You can run the IDE on Windows, macOS, or Linux; PiZZa won’t mind. Once you’re done, you add the board to Arduino IDE, flash the Raspberry Pi, and you’re good to go.
This lets you code using Arduino while also taking full advantage of the fast boot times and extra processing power that the Pi can offer you. It certainly beats purchasing new hardware when you can recycle your older stuff, at any rate.