[MrBuddyCasino]

But what to use? The Pi Zero can't be used for mass-production, because you can't get it in quantity. Other options exist, but they are even more expensive, or obscure chinesium for which you can't get documentation or someone to talk to.

[joefourier]

If you want an decently peforming SBC that can match the Pi Zero in price, unfortunately you're out of luck. But if you're willing to put in a bit of work, make your own board and suffer most things not working out-of-the-box, you have a wide variety of cheap SoCs and MPUs. E.g. the STM32 MPU line, which has a decent enough ecosystem and plenty of devboards available, and has some chips under $5/unit in bulk.

[MrBuddyCasino]

None of which have wifi, as far as I can see?

[numpad0]

The original ESP8266 ESP-01 was among such devices to add Wi-Fi to host CPU over SPI or UART...

[joefourier]

You need an external module for WiFi, but the standard Linux networking tools and drivers work.

[throwaway9d0291]

Development kits like the Pi Zero are usually intended solely for development and experimentation. When it comes to production, you either take the product the dev kit is wrapped around or there's some kind of module you can use.

For example Raspberry Pi has the Compute Module, ESP32 comes as a solderable module and for the Teensy I suspect you'd just put a IMXRT1062 in your design.

[chillacy]

Is particle.io considered one of the more expensive ones? I've used them for one-off projects but it looks like they do volume discounts.