Jun 242019
 
Raspberry Pi 4 launches with BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 64-bit SoC running at 1.5GHz with dual 4K display capability

Raspberry Pi 4B launches today. It’s a fresh new generation of Pi with brand new silicon – the Broadcom BCM2711, quad-core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC running at 1.5GHz. The new VC6 GPU is able to drive dual 4Kp30 displays and can handle H.265 decode at 4Kp60. It has true Gigabit ethernet (independent of USB), USB 3.0 and dual 4K HDMI outputs (micro). There’s also 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz 802.11b/g/n/ac wireless and a choice of 1GB, 2GB or 4GB LPDDR4 memory (depending on which model you select). Pi4B is the same form factor as […more…]

Mar 162018
 
Raspberry Pi 3B Plus Family Photo Update March 2018

One of my other little launch week traditions for a new Pi launch is to update the Pi Family Photo. This time we’ve got three new members since a year ago when it was last updated for the Pi Zero W launch. The aim of doing this is to maintain a record of pretty much all of the versions of the Raspberry Pi which could be purchased by the public. I do have some other rare ones which I don’t include because it seems a bit like gloating. Perhaps one day I’ll do a blog […more…]

Mar 142018
 
New Raspberry Pi model 3B+ 1.4 GHz, 330Mbit Ethernet, 802.11ac, PoE

It’s Pi day (if you do dates in the illogical MM/DD/YY format) so Raspberry Pi is releasing a new version of the Pi 3B. It’s called the 3B+, which is logical because it has more to offer than the 3B and is also in keeping with previous Pi naming conventions. It contains several incremental improvements, but taken together they provide a substantial upgrade in performance with a faster processor, addition of 5GHz wifi and 330Mbit ethernet and PoE. More detail further down. Here’s the new board… New Chip BCM2837B0 1.4GHz Probably the most significant change […more…]

Nov 142017
 
Full pHAT

In April this year I designed a HAT-sized PCB that would allow two pHATs to fit on one Pi. I was thinking it might make a good “over the summer” KickStarter campaign. But events conspired against me. I had trouble tracking down a source of the right stacking headers and I needed a break over the summer. So I sat on it until recently. Then, a couple of weeks ago I found a suitable header and now we’re back on track. What no KickStarter? I’ve decided to crowdfund this project by taking pre-orders at the […more…]

Mar 022017
 
RasPiO InsPiring - a new system of RGB LED boards controllable by Pi and just about anything

I’ve been playing with RGB LEDs on and off over the last year or so. They’re amazing things. It’s incredible to me that something so small can produce such bright and brilliantly coloured light. I’ve played with the Adafruit DotStar Pi Painter project (using APA102), which is enormous fun. Also the Pimoroni MOTE (also APA102), which makes everything plug-and-play. Then there was the McRoboface from 4Tronix (using 2 sizes of WS2812). Then back in October 2016 I bought 4 quadrants of 15 WS2812 on ebay to make a 60-element clock. And then one day, amidst […more…]

Feb 282017
 
Pi Zero W - WiFi on the Zero for $10 and a gorgeous new case

Raspberry Pi launches the Pi Zero W today – on the 5th anniversary of the original Pi1 launch. The Zero W sports the same WiFi and Bluetooth chip as the Pi3B. It costs $10 plus shipping and local taxes. Since the Pi Zero release in November 2015, people have been conjuring up ingenious ways of getting it online, such as; ethernet via SPI; soldering a WiFi USB dongle to the back; kickstarter projects for ethernet add-ons; USB hubs providing extra ports; even an IoT pHAT It was clear that people could find a lot of […more…]

Dec 072016
 
RasPiO Portsplus Picademy - NEW product.

If you’ve been hanging around the RasPi.TV blog for a while you’ll have heard of the RasPiO Portsplus board. It’s a little PCB with the Pi’s GPIO port numbers on that you can use to avoid counting pins when wiring up your GPIO projects. A few months ago I was visiting Pi Towers. Ben Nuttall mentioned that they use the Portsplus at Picademy, but sometimes people put them on the wrong way up and it causes confusion. The original Portsplus has GPIO port numbers one one side and pin numbers on the other side. It […more…]

Nov 172016
 
New Raspberry Pi 2B 1.2 with Pi3 BCM2837 Processor

Back in September a new version of the Pi2 quietly appeared on Farnell’s website without a fanfare. It’s exactly the same as the original Pi2 except the processor is BCM2837 running at 900 MHz instead of the BCM2836. Why the New Revision? By changing processors to the Pi3’s BCM2837, the older BCM2836 can cease production and the Pi2 gets an upgrade to the newer, faster A53 CPU. To keep the BCM2836 in production in small quantities no longer made economic sense. I pre-ordered one immediately. It arrived yesterday and I tweeted some quick photos straight […more…]

May 202016
 
Raspberry Pi Zero 1.3 Power Usage with camera

It’s only a few days since the Pi Zero 1.3 came out, but people are already asking for me to “fill in the gap” on my power chart. Which gap? The “Pi Zero shooting 1080p video” gap. With no camera port, the previous Pi Zero couldn’t do this, so there was no measurement to report. I’ve made some measurements this morning and here are the results… No Real Surprises I tried both old and new cameras and there wasn’t any significant difference (that I could measure) between them. The results are comparable to that of […more…]

Mar 042016
 
Raspberry Pi Family Photo updated to include Pi3B 29 Feb 2016

It’s become a bit of a new model launch tradition now that I release a new “Pi family photo” with all the main revisions of Raspberry Pi in it. I’ve done things a little differently from last time in order to get a better resolution result. As usual I make this 1500px version available to the world under a CC-BY-SA-4 licence with the only condition being that the RasPi.TV credit stays intact. Aside from that, it may be used as you wish. I have ‘gone to town’ on this one slightly. Where previously I’d always […more…]