Gumstix has released a new board that lets you power a Raspberry Pi Zero computer with a pair of AA batteries, allowing you to use it without plugging the tiny computer into a wall jack or a bulky battery pack.
The Gumstix Raspberry Pi Zero Battery Board also adds motion sensors to the Raspberry Pi thanks to a 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope.
One down side? With a price tag of $50, the battery board costs ten times as much as the $5 the Raspberry Pi Zero computer it’s designed to power (or five times as much as a WiFi-enabled Raspberry Pi Zero W).
That said, the solution does offer some versatility to Raspberry Pi’s tiny computers. The board supports rechargeable NiMH or NiCd batteries and you can recharge the batteries by plugging a micro USB cable into the Raspberry Pi Zero.
Raspberry Pi’s little computer features a 1 GHz single-core processor, 512MB of RAM, a microSD card reader, a mini HDMI port, micro USB OTG power and micro USB power port, a CSI camera connector, composite video header, and a 40-pin, HAT-compatible header (which is what the battery board connects to.
