Alex Eames always creates a new Raspberry Pi family photo of all the different models whenever a new one comes out. Well, he’s now updated his photo to include the Pi 3. You can view the full 50MB photo on his website.
@Raspberry_Pi #PiParty live streaming URLs
Apologies for the short notice! Just posting this from the hotel!
If you are unable to make the Big Birthday Weekend, you can hopefully (technology allowing) join us via live video stream! Here are the URLs:
http://cam.adobeconnect.com/piparty1
http://cam.adobeconnect.com/piparty2
Here are the talks timetables for the weekend:
That’s all for now. Feel free to share on social media/anywhere else!
PiBorg launches new motor controller for the Raspberry Pi Zero
PiBorg, the small company based in St Ives, Cambridgeshire who created the Doodleborg and Diddyborg robots (as well as lots of other boards, bots and, of course the excellent turntable at this year’s Pi Wars), have this morning announced the launch of their first Kickstarter campaign. The campaign will raise funds for the development and production of the ZeroBorg. The ZeroBorg has the following features:
- Very small – only slightly larger than the Zero.
- Can control four motors (or two stepper motors) independently – as shown in the picture above.
- 4 H-bridges.
- An on board fast blow fuse at 5A,
- Designed to run off a 9V power source (max range 2.7V to 10.8V. To power the Pi Zero 7V minimum),
- 2 analogue inputs, which are great for sensors,
- I2C communication, allowing daisy chaining to other boards,
- Fully soldered and ready to use.
There are several reward levels starting at £10 (plus shipping) for an Earlybird motor controller board only, £20 (plus shipping) for a board with a 9V battery clip, IR sensor and power regulator (allowing you to run the Pi and controller board off a 9V battery and to control it via IR remote control), and various others with various combinations. I’ve gone in at the £20 level.
Myself and Tim Richardson visited PiBorg recently and caught sight of the board. It’s incredibly cute and has a lot of possibilities for battery-powered motor operation.
See the campaign video below and visit the campaign for more details and to pledge here.
Raspberry Pi Zero production and availability – the latest news
The MagPi has just published an article that will appear in the next issue, due out this Thursday. Gareth Halfacree has interviewed Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading, and has got some much sought-after answers about the much-debated question of Raspberry Pi Zero scarcity.
Eben explains that, because the Zero is produced by Raspberry Pi rather than by distributors RS and Farnell, they haven’t been able to easily ramp-up production. Raspberry Pi is, after all, a small player in production compared to these distribution giants and so progress has been a little slow. Eben has also said that in “the past couple of days” he placed an order for 150,000 Zeros with the aim of evening out production at 50k per month. This should hopefully deter those unscrupulous resellers who were buying Zeros one at a time and selling them on for exorbitant amounts.
I’ve also been keeping an eye on the comments section of the Foundation’s Pi 3 post and was excited to hear Liz Upton’s answer to a question someone asked…
Question: How long will the Zero continue to be made available? Answer (from Liz): Forever – we’re churning them out as fast as we can. We’re really sorry we weren’t able to explain why there was a bit of a slow-down; it was because we were using the whole production line for Pi 3 pre-launch!
In my opinion, these pieces of news together should come as comfort to those who are trying to buy the Zero and have, so far, been frustrated. They also explain the lack of Zeros – lack of capacity and a focus on Pi 3.
You can get the full story by reading the full MagPi article here.
Raspberry Pi 3 – launched today and already making the headlines
I was fortunate to be invited to an RS Components press conference this morning to celebrate the Raspberry Pi’s 4th/1st birthday and the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3. I joined fellow enthusiasts and bloggers, including Alex Eames and Matthew Timmons-Brown, to hear Eben Upton, Lindsley Ruth and Dr Lucy Rogers talk about the Raspberry Pi, how it was launched 4 years ago to change computing and has gone on to be embraced by enthusiasts, education and families. Here’s my collection of projects which I showed off to the assembled press.
Here’s a great Pi 3 unboxing video from RS hosted by Pete Wood, who I met this morning:
And here’s the recorded Periscope stream from the press conference (Just watched it… oh, there I am at around 21:15… Man I need to lose weight :-/)
I’d also like to point you at RS Components’ Raspberry Pi page.
Since its launch, the Raspberry Pi 3 has been covered by numerous news organisations including the BBC. Take a look at their news report here.
Apart from being covered by RasPi.TV and the Raspberry Pi Guy, we have also seen a blog post from Average Man (who does a really nice review of the board) and now the Pi Podcast boys have published their podcast interview with Eben.
All in all, a very exciting day!
Raspberry Pi 3 launched – features 64 bit processor, 50% speed increase and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth
Photo credit (with many thanks): Alex Eames, RasPi.TV
Today, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has officially announced the launch of their latest model, the Raspberry Pi 3.
Videos
If you prefer to get your news from a video, head over to Alex Eames’ RasPi.TV YouTube video. I was going to do my own “walk around” but I saw Alex’s video and there’s no way I could do better. Similarly, Matthew Timmons-Brown has created a video in his guise as “The Raspberry Pi Guy” and you can see his very slickly-produced video here.
Features
The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, to give its full name, has the following features:
- Quad-core 64-bit ARM cortex A53 processor (the new Broadcom BCM2837 chip) clocked to 1.2GHz.
- 400MHz VideoCore IV multimedia graphics chip.
- 1GB LPDDR2-900 SDRAM.
- Built-in 802.11n wireless networking chip (the BCM43438) and antenna.
- Built-in Bluetooth 4.0 (also from the BCM43438).
- 40-pin GPIO header.
- 4 USB 2.0 ports.
- 100 Base-T ethernet.
- DSI and CSI ports for the official touchscreen and camera, respectively.
- Composite 4-pole video/audio output port.
The Pi 3 is about 50% faster than the Pi 2 and is now very usable as a desktop machine. Web browsing, in particular, is much improved and reduces a lot of the usability frustration that still existed with the Pi 2.
Changes
You’ll be relieved to hear that not much else has changed with the Pi 3 – it’s still the same shape and most things are still in the same place. Probably the most notable “geography” change is that the power/activity LEDs have moved to the other side of the DSI connector to leave space for the wifi antenna. The GPIO pins are the same, meaning all your add-on boards will work just the same.
WiFi antenna. Photo credit: Alex Eames, RasPi.TV
The one big thing that has changed is that they now recommend a 2.5A microUSB power supply rather than the Pi 2’s 2A. This is likely only to be an issue when using all 4 USB ports, or if you’re hammering the four cores of the processor.
The other change that is particularly welcome (at least by me) is that the micro SD card holder is no longer push-in, push-out. It’s a friction-fit socket now, meaning that you’re far less likely to accidentally remove the card. The number of times I’ve accidentally ejected an SD card because of the spring-loaded mechanism…
Oh, and that pesky problem with camera flashes crashing the Pi? That part now has a black shield, preventing the issue entirely.
Price
Amazingly, considering the added wifi, bluetooth and new chip, the Raspberry Pi 3 comes in at the same price as the Pi 2 – $35, or your local equivalent, plus shipping and taxes. You can buy it at The Pi Hut for £30 (plus postage) as well as other resellers including RS Components. You might even say that the price of getting a Pi up-and-running has dropped because you no longer need a wifi dongle.
In use
The built-in wifi “just works”. (I did have to go through a little procedure pre-launch, but have been assured that it will be integrated properly once the news of Pi 3 officially breaks). It seems very zippy and range and power seem to be good. This is based on non-scientific tests, but suffice to say the days of using a wifi dongle, at least on this Pi, are over.
As mentioned above, the approx. 50% speed increase really makes a difference. Web browsing in particular is greatly improved. I even managed to load up the full version of Google Mail and use it. It was nigh-on unusable on a Pi 2. Looking at videos on YouTube was a good experience, also, and once it had buffered a bit of the video, playback was smooth (I was using the official touchscreen for this test).
Loading applications like LibreOffice Writer is very quick, especially on second and subsequent load-ups. Even Sonic Pi, which is notoriously slow to load, came up in a non-headache-inducing 14 seconds, an improvement over the Pi 2 which sometimes took 20 seconds. I clocked Scratch at a brilliant 3 seconds, although how much that has to do with the Pi 3 and how much that has to do with recent enhancements is anyone’s guess 🙂
For more information about how the Pi 3 behaves, Alex Eames over at RasPi.TV put the new machine through its paces and found it very usable with software loading times much improved. You can find out more about his experiences by heading over to his blog post.
More news
Also revealed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation is that there will be a model 3A this year in the A+ form factor, together with a Compute Module 3. These will be eagerly awaited by those with a penchant for smallness.
Conclusion
The Pi 3 is clearly the way forward for general use, but that doesn’t mean that the Pi 2 (in particular) suddenly becomes useless overnight. The original Pi is still highly usable, and each subsequent revision has improved upon its predecessor. The Pi 3 is an extension of that – evolution, rather than revolution. There will no doubt be detractors who will complain about the lack of this, or the lack of that, but the Pi remains what it always has been: an excellent tool for both school and home education and an excellent toy for hobbyists.
Photo credit: Alex Eames, RasPi.TV