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:Much better board layout

[ChrisSlicks]

Yes, a respectable line-in would be really nice. For now I have been using the Wolfson Audio Card but it costs as much as the Raspberry Pi itself, and you have to patch the OS to get it to work (but the quality is great). I've tried some of the USB audio devices but found the quality to be not good enough, probably because they are really designed for microphones and even with gain at minimal settings there is too much distortion for line-in. 48kHz is good enough IMO, the Pi doesn't really have enough CPU power to do much more than that if recording and compressing in real time.