New Raspberry Pi Model B+

mikejuk writes The Raspberry Pi foundation has just announced the Raspberry Pi B+. The basic specs haven't changed much — same BC2835 and 512MB of RAM and the $35 price tag. There are now four USB ports, which means you don't need a hub to work with a mouse, keyboard and WiFi dongle. The GPIO has been expanded to 40 pins, but don't worry: you can plug your old boards and cables into the lefthand part of the connector, and it's backward compatible. As well as some additional general purpose lines, there are two designated for use with I2C EEPROM. When the Pi boots it will look for custom EEPROMs on these lines and optionally use them to load Linux drivers or setup expansion boards. Expansion boards can now include identity chips that when the board is connected configures the Pi to make use of them — no more manual customization. The change to a micro SD socket is nice, unless you happen to have lots of spare full size SD cards around. It is also claimed that the power requirements have dropped by half, to one watt, which brings the model B into the same power consumption area as the model A. Comp video is now available on the audio jack, and the audio quality has been improved. One big step for Raspberry Pi is that it now has four holes for mounting in standard enclosures.

Re:RPi? That overhyped underdimensioned joke alive

[CastrTroy]

I think the problem that people run into is that it's somewhere in the middle of where they want a device to be. For people who want true low power computing, Arduino is the way to go. Some people want to be able to run an actual desktop operating systems, hook up standard off the shelf peripherals and run a home server, or hook it up to their TV. This is what Mini ITX or Intel NUC machines do pretty well.

The problem is that the Raspberry Pi looks like the second kind of device, because you can install Linux on it, plug in USB devices, hook it up to your TV, and do many other desktop / media centric things. However, due to certain constraints like the slow processor, small amount of RAM, slow I/O, and insufficient power for USB, it seems to fall short of what many people envision using it for. I guess you can blame the customers because they bought something that wasn't really meant to fulfill their needs. But you also have to look at the way the device is marketed and designed. Why put all these USB ports if you can't actually hook up a bunch of USB peripherals? Why put an HDMI port on the thing if you don't have the power to drive a 1080 desktop environment? Why run full Linux when you don't have enough power to run most Linux applications?

Don't get me wrong, I think the RPi is a great little machine, but I think that many people get disappointed with it because from the person who's inexperienced with it, it looks very much like it's trying to be a full desktop replacement, but then get disappointed when they find out that it's really just great for running embedded machines.