Exploring the new Raspberry Pi Model B+

The first Model B Raspberry Pi was originally launched for sale on February 29, 2012, after nearly six years of development. If you, like me, were one of the people eagerly refreshing their browser in order to get one of the first batch, you might recall that the RS Components and Farnell websites were nearly brought to a standstill with the excessive web traffic. They sold their initial stock in minutes and went on to take hundreds of thousands of pre-orders. In the two-and-a-half very short years since that day, our favorite little computer has racked up some pretty serious sales (with more than 3 million units sold to date), with no signs of the rate of sales tailing off anytime soon.

In the early hours (UK time) of July 14, 2014, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the latest hardware upgrade – the Raspberry Pi Model B+. This upgrade represents the first major hardware change to the Raspberry Pi board since the Model B Rev 2 hardware upgrade to 512MB of RAM in October 2012. The new Raspberry Pi comes with more USB ports, more GPIO pins, and a new specification that will standardize and simplify the use of add-on boards. If you want a B+ board to try out for yourself, see the box titled "Where to Buy?" In this article, I offer a glimpse at what you'll find with the new Raspberry Pi Model B+.

First Impressions

Whether the Model B+ board you purchase originated from an RS Components or Farnell batch, the first thing you are likely to notice is the new packaging (Figure 1). Both the RS and Farnell packages are significantly improved since the previous plain white box, and the improvements give the product a more professional look. The Raspberry Pi logo is a fantastic representation of what the whole project is about, and it is nice to see it featured prominently on the new packages. It does seem like RS Components and Farnell both got their colors mixed; the Farnell version of the logo looks dark red, and the RS Components version looks positively pink!

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