Apart from the previously mentioned cases, some more B+ centric products are starting to appear.
Over on the Cyntech shop, they’ve got the following:
Russell Barnes has scored a scoop by interviewing Eben Upton about the brand new Model B+ and has produced a special podcast. You can listen to the podcast by going to the raspi.today site now and listen to Eben talk about the Foundation’s great new product.
There’s a lot of detail here about the design of the board, so please go over and listen to it and support Russell’s podcast! I’m not going to post spoilers, but it’s well worth listening to. I will say one thing: There will be an A+.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation included a video on their post with Eben and James introducing the board. Here it is:
Cases! So far, three cases have appeared. The first is the Multicomp case (£5):
the second is a case from ModMyPi (£5.99):
and the last is the expected PiBow (between £8.50 for the slimline Coupe and £12.95 for all the others):
Ben Everard from Linux Voice has written a very detailed review of the board here.
Are you looking for news about the Raspberry Pi 3B+? Take a look here.
Some huge news for you today.
The Raspberry Pi Model B+ becomes available today – the Foundation has just made the official announcement.
So, what can we expect from the B+? I was fortunate enough to be supplied with a board by the Foundation a couple of days ago so I thought I’d take you round it and show you the differences between the current model B and the new board.
The B+ I have came from Farnell/Element 14 and they’ve done a really nice job with the new packaging:
Here’s the pin diagram for the 40-pin GPIO header:
Here’s some close-ups of the board:
So, how does it work in practice? As you can see from the picture above, I powered it up (thanks to The Pi Hut for the 2A power supply!) with a brand new NOOBS card. Everything worked as per usual – I got the rainbow box up, the NOOBS flash screen and then the normal boot cycle. It just worked.
I decided the easiest way to prove the GPIO compatibility was to use a Pibrella:
I wrote some quick-and-dirty Python and confirmed that the Pibrella does, in fact, work correctly, which is good. I also, as a sanity check, ran through the CamJam EduKit worksheets just to make sure they were okay. They were completely fine and operated as expected.
So, in conclusion, I’d just like to thank the Foundation for supplying me with the advance board – it was a real privilege to have a play around with the B+. I hope everyone finds the information useful – feel free to leave questions and comments!
For those of you who like more technical detail, here are some documents you may find interesting:
You can get hold of a B+ from Farnell (the Buy link doesn’t currently work though) and RS (the product is not listed yet) but I’m recommending getting it from The Pi Hut – they’re my local company (near Cambridge) and always reliable.
You can see other coverage of the board…
James Mitchell (@monkeymademe) decided that he wanted to go to a Raspberry Jam. The trouble is in Berlin, where he’s based, there just isn’t one. So, after much fact-finding and deliberation, he decided to run it himself. He’s written an account of it on his blog – check it out. The next Berlin Jam is on 2nd August and you can find out more here.
I was sent one of these to review by Energenie. No preconditions for it – I’m free to say what I like.
The box contains a Raspberry Pi GPIO plug-in board and two sockets.
The board itself is tiny and plugs directly into the GPIO pins on the Pi. Most the actual circuitry is on the underside (as you can see from the picture above).
There is no documentation included in the box, which is a shame. Instead, you have to return to the page you purchased it from to download the documentation and a sample of the code.
In order to run an experiment with it, I first of all turned the Pi on, logged in and used the following command to download the test script:
wget https://energenie4u.co.uk/res/software/ENER002-2PI.py
I plugged the socket into an extension lead and then plugged a digital clock in to the socket. The red light started to flash, which I assumed was some kind of ‘pairing’ mechanism. I then ran the test script which cycles through the following:
Sure enough, when socket 1 was turned on, the digital clock came on, and then went off again when I cycled to “socket 1 off”.
An interesting thing happened when the socket was turned off: my screen flickered. I suspect this has something to do with using the socket in an extension lead, into which my monitor was also plugged, but still it was pretty disconcerting!
The good thing about the demo script is that it is extensively commented so it’s very easy to work out what is going on. I will be altering the script to provide a web interface to the two sockets so I can turn the sockets on and off via mobile phone.
So what do I think of it? Well, at £20 it’s an incredibly cost-effective way of getting some home automation going. Because the sample software is simply a script written in Python, it should be fairly easy to adapt it to whatever use you see fit. For instance, and this is waaaay out there, you could program it so that when you entered a house in Minecraft a light was switched on in your house! You could also do simpler things such as have an automatic timer to turn a set of sockets off at a certain time.
It’s not perfect – you can only control 4 independent sockets with the GPIO board (although you can link more than that together so that groups turn on/off at the same time), and that may not be enough for you to put together a complete home automation solution. The only other thing I can say negative is the lack of a simple sheet of instructions included in the box – even if it was just a slip of paper with a URL on it, it would be an improvement.
I’m very happy to recommend the Energenie kit – it’s a great way to get into home automation without breaking the bank and you can easily adapt the sample script to your needs without modifying your Pi set-up.
Rating: 8.5/10
You can buy one of these starter kits from Energenie’s online shop.
I bought one of these from The Pi Hut on Friday and thought I’d do a quick review.
Here’s how it comes, in a box:
It’s identified as a JK-6088 A, but that doesn’t really mean much, so let’s open up the box and see what we’ve got.
The main box is made out of plastic. There’s a slide switch at the bottom to open the top. When you do, the bits stand up! Very handy.
Inside are 36 screwdriver bits, the screwdriver handle itself and an extension piece. Here’s what the screwdriver looks like with a bit in:
and here it is with the extension piece:
The bits are of varying different types and sizes, including a triangular bit which has enabled me to unscrew an old Gameboy case – it’s an exact fit.
The screwdriver is a nice weight in your hand and has a rubberised grip.
About the only thing I can find wrong with it is that when you close the lid you have to manually poke the bits so that they lay flat.
The cost of the set is £5 and, frankly, for £5 you can’t go wrong – for electrical and electronics work they’re pretty much perfect.
Rating: 10/10
