The Pi Zero attracted a huge amount of attention, which is great for the educational mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Whenever a new product is released, people air their opinions in the forums on what they would have liked it to have.
One of the most common “I wish it had”s was an ethernet port. There are reasons why ethernet was not included. The two most obvious ones are cost and board size (it would have almost doubled the size of the Zero)
Well the obvious solution would be to buy a B model Pi. B+ is fairly inexpensive these days, but also the Pi2 B has ethernet.
The other option, that we’re going to cover today, is to add an external ethernet port using the SPI pins on the Pi.
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!