For my first rasberry pi project I decided to try and set up a balena sound box as a christmas present for my father to use with his hifi system. It seems like a good project for beginners.
Yet I immediately struggle when ordering the hardware. The projekt page says Raspberry Pi 3A+/3B/3B+/4B/Zero W are all good. Now for someone who never touched a ras pi it’s hard to decide which on to order. Is there any advantage in getting the newest one, the 4B? Or better one of the others? And how much RAM? The 4B is offered with 1, 2 or 4 Gb - does that make any difference in this usecase?
So this is a very subjective choice. It really comes down to how much like you’d to spend on a device and what you need it to do. If it’s just to be used for balena-sound, then the Zero W is quite a lightweight device with 512MB of memory, but is also quite cheap.
Whereas the 3 series are obviously more expensive depending on model, up to the Pi 4 which also has the most extensible memory footprint.
Really, this is down to whichever you feel you’ll get the most use out of and if it’d going to be used for multiple projects. Personally, I’d probably go for the Pi 4, with as much memory as I could afford if this were not to be just used with balena-sound.