Raspberry Pi have just announced this year’s get-together for digital enthusiasts – Raspberry Fields. This (non-camping, and not in-a-field!) event will be held over the weekend of 30th June-1st July at Cambridge Junction, where last year’s Birthday Party was held. There will be a mixture of talks, performances, show-and-tell, marketplace and workshops at the event. Tickets are £5 per day and free for under-16s. You can get tickets from The Junction here.
They’re also asking for volunteers to be involved with marshalling, running workshops and doing show-and-tell. So, if you’re interested, please use this form to register your interest. (Volunteers and other contributors get free entry… though how this will be managed is another matter because last year there was a lot of confusion).
Alex Eames over at RasPi.TV, as is traditional, has done some power measurements of the new Raspberry Pi 3B+, launched yesterday. As usual, I won’t spoil the actual results here, but suffice to say you don’t get something for nothing – the 3B+ uses more power than any other model of Raspberry Pi. Read all about the measurements and the method here.
Tim’s just alerted me to the latest Humble Bundle book deals, and they are great bundles to grab! They’re all Wiley books, so the quality is excellent.
For $1, you can get:
Complete Electronics Self-Teaching Guide with Projects
improved Ethernet speed courtesy of an upgraded LAN chip. Although still limited by going through USB 2.0, Ethernet users can now get a maximum speed of 300mbps.
improved power circuitry to support all the new functionality.
an RF shield over the wifi chip which means that is now possible to embed the Pi inside something else and not have to worry about certification.
All these incremental improvements add up to a more powerful, zippier Raspberry Pi which retains its price-point of $35.
Both myself and Tim Richardson were privileged to be sent the hardware ahead of time for testing and experimentation, so we’ve done a joint review and briefing for you.
Walkthrough
For a walk-through of the new board, please watch the video below.
Benchmarking
I ran a sysbench on both the 3 and the 3B+. Here are the results. The commands I ran were:
sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 run
sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 --num-threads=4 run
Computer
1-core duration
4-core duration
Raspberry Pi 3
370.89s
92.63s
Raspberry Pi 3B+
317.97s
79.51s
As you can see, there is an approximate 15-20% speed improvement on the 3B+.
Thanks to what Gordon Hollingworth has called a “heat spreader” (the metal plate on top of the CPU), the Pi 3B+ runs cooler than the Pi 3 and, as a result you’ll see far less of the thermometer icon on the Pi desktop with the new board.
Close-up of the Raspberry Pi 3B+, top-left quadrant showing the ‘can’ over the wifi chip, with Raspberry Pi branding, and the ‘heat spreader’ over the CPU
Operating System and Add-ons
A new Raspbian operating system version supports the 3B+, so make sure to download the newest version before switching on your new Raspberry Pi. If your 3B+ doesn’t boot, chances are, you’re using an old image! Naturally, you can also do an upgrade by doing the following:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
I tested out various add-on boards including the SenseHAT, UnicornHATHD, EnviropHAT, the official Camera Module and even the SkywriterHAT. All worked very well and I had no problems with them. There are various other packages that have had, or will need, an update to identify the 3B+ such as GPIO Zero and WS2811 among others.
The top of the new Pi appears more sparse than the Pi 3, although I suspect that is just an optical illusion. Quite a few are hidden under the heat sink and wifi can and there is less lettering on the board.
The Raspberry Pi 3 (top) and the new Raspberry Pi 3B+ (bottom)
The speed of both Ethernet and wireless have both been increased. Ethernet is ‘gigabit’ speed, which actually means about 300Mbps. So, why not full gigabit? This is because Ethernet still runs through the USB 2 bus, so that limits the speed a little. It is still a decent increase and, in my opinion, is more than fast enough for most uses of the Pi. The designers have added Power over Ethernet, though. I suspect this is at the request of commercial users, who apparently buy about one third of the Pis, and probably why the full hardware is not included on-board. That’s the right decision as few school and home users will want it, and those who do will buy the new HAT that will, hopefully, be coming out in the next few months.
The Raspberry Pi PoE HAT (prototype)
WiFi has been improved to include both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. 2.4GHz achieves about 40Mbps, while 5GHz gets about 100Mbps. While not stellar compared with a modern PC I think it’s actually more than enough for the Pi.
I expect there are people who would like to see full gigabit Ethernet and faster wifi, but what would use it? If the Pi had, say, SATA or USB 3, then a faster Ethernet port would be of more use. There is a reason it does not have either of those, though: cost. While some people would benefit from both of these features, the majority would not, so the extra cost would not be beneficial overall.
What other improvements would one have liked? 4K video? While a nice-to-have, I don’t think there are enough people yet who would use it. It would make a nice media server, though. I suspect it would need a better graphics processor, though, and almost certainly more memory. Once again, this would add to the cost and not benefit enough users at this point in time.
Increased memory is something that I have heard more people requesting. This has not been done. I’m sure you’ve guessed by now why it hasn’t. Hands up who has actually run out of memory? I’m sure Chromium would benefit, and maybe other desktop applications in general, but I remember the days when 1K or 3.5K were thought adequate!
What else could be changed? More GPIO? That would be nice, but there’s no space on-board and the form factor is now so entrenched that a change would have its own problems. And that’s all I can think of!
Conclusion
The Raspberry Pi 3B+ is not really a new Raspberry Pi, but it is a substantial improvement on the Pi 3. You will definitely notice the increased speed of the CPU. If you’re a heavy network user, improvements to both Ethernet and wifi will make your life easier, especially if you have access to either a hard-wired connection of a 5G wifi connection. At the same price point, Raspberry Pi have delivered again.
A new Kickstarter has just launched for a tablet, powered by a Raspberry Pi. With it’s eye firmly on the children’s market, the MakePad features a 10.1″ touchscreen and is battery powered (8000mAh). It has a built-in 3W speaker for audio applications and comes with a 16GB microSD card with MakeOS pre-installed. MakeOS has been developed specifically for the touch capabilities of the device and includes a Blockly programming language as well as access to Python. It’s probably a reskinned Raspbian as it also includes the LibreOffice suite, Minecraft Pi etc.
The MakePad comes as a kit that you assemble and reminds me of a mixture of the Kano kit and HDMIPi. They’ve made the sensible decision to have a cut-out for the GPIO pins, although with the Pi ‘around the back’, using it will probably need a ribbon cable and a cobbler. The case is LEGO-compatible so you/your child can have fun personalising it to your heart’s content.
Estimated delivery for perks is October 2018 (which seems a bit ambitious to me, but we’ll see). The Super Early Bird devices are still available at $164/$199 (with/without a Pi), before rising to $204/$239.
Andreas Rottach from Germany has taken 300 LEDs and a Raspberry Pi 3 and created this stunning LED matrix gaming table. He’s implemented several low-res games on it, including Tetris (above) and Flappy Bird as well as programming challenge favourite Conway’s Game of Life. It can also display static images – I particularly like the chessboard one – very functional.
