Why raspberry pi zero is not for faint hearted?

The story starts with family wanting to watch streaming TV as Digital terrestrial TV is not the best with us. I read an article about using Kodi on a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi 3, Noobs MicroSD and old USB keyboard with a few hours and I had one media player. Exhalent but it got me intrigued….

After a bit of searching on the net and I found £4 for a Raspberry Pi zero and I was sold what could go wrong?

Well a lot really first one I ordered would not work checked the microSDs in the Raspberry Pi 3 ok.  Ordered a replacement (impatient me) and was about to send back the first so started checking simple stuff like power and clocks.  I work in the trade so have access to equipment. Power was coming up and then dropping from 3v3 to 2v8 odd?

When I looked under a microscope, I could see filaments of solder around the regulator chip. Wiped them off and it booted. Second Zero booted first time.

But the zeros would not boot off some microSDs that worked on Raspberry Pi 3 anything bigger that 16GB in my collection of microSDs would not boot. I even ran Raspbian Jessie Lite on a 4GB from an old phone. If anyone knows a source of 32GB microSDs that work in zeros let me know.

The zero only has one USB port so you need a hub, I also have a collection of these. It does not have WIFI or Ethernet so to make it connected you will need a hub.  Odd things happened here I used one of those OTG shims to connect to USB hub flashed the light on the hub and showed the wifi icon on the screen but no working keyboard or mouse. Keyboard worked without hub?

To set stuff up I used the serial terminal see this link http://elinux.org/RPi_Serial_Connection. Now I could go in and set up USB WIFI dongle got two different ones working but that’s a different story.  Now I had network I could use VNC (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/) works sometimes and not others. I can now do stuff with it, via serial terminal and VNC. 
You can do so much. I have for example:

·         Programed Arduino boards.(http://openenergymonitor.blogspot.com/2013/12/developing-for-arduino-remotely-on.html , http://pblog.ebaker.me.uk/2014/01/uploading-arduino-sketch-from-raspberry.html )

·         Set up PHP web servers.

·         Samba file and media servers.

·         Connected sensors ( acceleration, magnetic, humidity, air pressure and temperature)

On the whole a very useful box but if you want a desktop get a Raspberry Pi 3.