Raspberry Pi seems to be preparing two boards it has not announced yet: a Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W and a Raspberry Pi 4 Model A. Device tree files for both were merged into Raspberry Pi's fork of the Linux kernel on 25 October 2026, in a pull request titled "Add device tree for Pi Zero 3 W and Pi 4A" from Raspberry Pi engineer Marta Momotko. Hackster.io reported on the change on 27 October. As of 28 October, Raspberry Pi has not announced either board, a price or a launch date.

What the files reveal

Both boards use the Broadcom BCM2711, the system-on-chip from the Raspberry Pi 4, with four Arm Cortex-A72 cores at up to 1.8 GHz. That is a step back from the BCM2712 in the Raspberry Pi 5 but a big step up for the Zero line. The current Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses a much weaker quad-core Cortex-A53 chip.

According to the device trees and Hackster.io, both boards have:

  • a Broadcom Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip;
  • a physical power button;
  • the usual 40-pin GPIO header;
  • a single HDMI output, because the second HDMI port of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is "permanently disabled" in the files.

The files do not say how much memory the boards will have. The BCM2711 supports up to 8 GB, but Hackster.io considers it unlikely that a Zero board will use that much.

The Model A returns

The "Model A" name stands for the cheaper, cut-down version of a board. The last one was the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, without Ethernet and with a single USB-A port. The Raspberry Pi 4 was only sold as a Model B, and the Raspberry Pi 5 dropped the suffix altogether, so a Pi 4 Model A based on an older chip would be the first new Model A in years.

Why it matters for home automation

The Zero 2 W is popular in smart homes as a small Bluetooth or Zigbee bridge, a sensor hub or a host for scripts and MQTT clients, but its 512 MB of RAM and older cores are a tight fit for heavier software. A Zero with the Pi 4 chip could handle more, such as Zigbee2MQTT with a larger network or simple camera processing, in the same small format. A cheaper Pi 4 Model A could suit tasks where the full Pi 4 or Pi 5 is more than you need.

This is still based only on kernel code, though. Until Raspberry Pi announces the boards, the memory options, price, power draw and availability in Poland and elsewhere remain unknown, and the final hardware may differ.