The new Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and a number of RPi projects

Last month, on “Pi Day” (March 14, 2018) an upgraded Raspberry Pi 3 B was announced on the Raspberry Pi website. The new $35 B+ sports a few performance enhancements over the original–most notably:

  • A 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU
  • Dual-band 802.11ac wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.2
  • Faster Ethernet (Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0)
  • Power-over-Ethernet support (with separate PoE HAT)
  • Improved PXE network and USB mass-storage booting
  • Improved thermal management

Here’s a short promo video posted with the announcement:

Click here view on YouTube.

I immediately navigated to my favorite Raspberry Pi source–AdaFruit–and requested a notification when the new units were available to purchase. A few weeks later, I got the notification and placed an order within minutes (you see, when the Pi 3 B was first released, I hesitated a day and had to wait a few weeks for the second shipment!).

I received my RPi 3 B+ a few days ago:

I immediately attempted to put this unit into service but learned that it requires the latest firmware which was only released a week or so ago. If you have have an RPi 3 B+, here’s where to fetch the latest firmware:

NOOBS:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/noobs/
or if you want Raspbian:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
and install on SD per instructions here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati … /README.md

After receiving this latest Pi, I quickly realized I’ve bought a number of Raspberry Pi models over the years and currently have them in service for a variety ofc projects.  Here’s a list of all of my current Pi-powered applications:

That’s a total of seven RPi projects that are in service at time of posting!

As I mentioned earlier, I try to buy most of my Pi equipment from the amazing AdaFruit retailer–I like supporting what they do even if I pay a small premium.

But AdaFruit seems to rarely have stock in some of my favorite Pi bundle packages. If I’m buying a Raspberry Pi for a new application, I look for a package with at least a case, a 2.5 amp power supply, a 32 or 64GB MicroSD card, and two heat sinks (though I’m not certain the B+ needs a heatsink). I tend to grab this one or this one from Amazon (affiliate links).

Post readers: Have you ever used a Raspberry Pi? If so, in what sort of applications? How many do you own?  Please comment!

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3 thoughts on “The new Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and a number of RPi projects

  1. DL4NO

    As a primarily hardware guy I prefer ready-to-use software projects. A Raspery Pi B2 is the controller of my smart home installation: Plug in the 868 MHz TRX (in the US you use 915 MHz or so for such purposes), load a special image to the SD card and click the rest together in the Web browser.

    While many people active in this area do quite some software development, I stick to hardware. As a radio amateur I recognized the shortcomings of many units of my manufacturer: They have absolutely no idea about radio frequency systems!

    See https://www.elv.de/homematic-funkmodul-fuer-raspberry-pi-bausatz.html and scoll the pictures until you see the transceiver 868 MHz module on a Raspi: The antenna uses the Raspi as a counterpose! So all the CPU noise directly couples into the receiver.

    For my alternatives see http://www.techwriter.de/beispiel/raspberry_pi_homematic.htm, http://www.techwriter.de/beispiel/funkeig1.htm and http://www.techwriter.de/beispiel/homemat4.htm. The texts are in German, but the pictures should tell enough of a story. I got quite some thankyou messages for publishing those antenna modofications.

    Reply

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