The Raspberry Pi B+ is a welcome evolution of the popular original model B. For backwards compatibility for millions of users the heart of the Raspberry Pi remains the Broadcom BCM2835 System-On-Chip (SoC). The SoC contains a 700MHz ARM1176JZFS with hardware floating point and a Videocore 4 GPU. The GPU will playback Blu-ray quality video with the graphics capabilities being roughly equivalent to Xbox levels of performance. The good news comes from more connectivity, better power management and better audio.
More USB ports: up from the original model B's two to four on the B+. Use a keyboard, mouse and Wi-Fi dongle without a separate USB hub.
Improved audio: the audio chip now has its own dedicated power regulator which protects it from noise from the rest of the board. This provides a significant boost to audio quality.
More IO pins: the GPIO connector has been extended to a 40-pin configuration while keeping the first 20 pins as before to allow existing HAT and add-on cards to work. Please check with the manufacturer of your add-on cards to ensure model B+ compatibility.
More efficient power management: this is a key change making more power available for the extra USB ports. Use a 2A USB power supply (such as 73-6011) to fire up all those extra devices. A powered USB hub was almost essential with the model B to prevent brown-outs but with the B+ that should be a thing of the past, even with all four USB sockets in use.
Numerous other changes have been made including combining the audio out and composite video out onto one 4-pole socket to save space. The USB connectors have been re-aligned with the edge of the board which now sports 4 new mounting holes in a simple rectangular pattern. The SD card holder has been replaced with a click-in/click-out micro SD hard holder which can take the same capacity cards.
New to the Raspberry Pi? It has been designed to be a catalyst for cheap, accessible, programmable computers and more than 3 million have been sold worldwide. This gives the Raspberry Pi the backing of a very active community which constantly produces tutorials, software examples and programs which are free to download over the internet. There's also huge range of add-on hardware available from cameras to robotics and more. It is a credit-card sized computer that has USB inputs for devices such as mouse and keyboard and analogue or digital outputs for monitors or TVs. The Raspberry Pi is a capable computer that will perform many of the functions that a desktop PC will, like spreadsheets, word processing and games and will also play high definition video. Overall, the Raspberry Pi has the real world performance equivalent to a 300MHz Pentium 2 but with the Raspberry Pi delivering vastly superior graphics. Join the millions of Raspberry Pi owners today!
Ideal for learning programming at any age
Huge range of add-on boards and software
GPU features texture filtering and DMA infrastructures
Device boots from a SD card but a USB HD can 'take over' after the initial boot
