The Pi Wire

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Aaron Shaw

The Pi Wire looks at new products, education, boards, and ways people are putting the Rasp Pi to work.

Official Case and WiFi Adapter Now Available

In previous issues of Raspberry Pi Geek, we mentioned two new official Raspberry Pi add-ons that were going to be released soon – a case and a WiFi dongle. They have both taken a little longer than expected to get to the market, but they are now available for purchase.

The WiFi dongle is a small unit based around the same BCM43143 chipset that is found in the triangular WiFi dongle and USB hub released by Broadcom at the end of last year. It is no surprise that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is using a Broadcom chip, as a lot of employees used to work for Broadcom and are familiar their product lines (the processor at the heart of the Raspberry Pi is also made by Broadcom). It is not the smallest dongle available – at 30x16x8mm including USB plug – but that means that they have likely opted for a larger antenna, which should mean very good signal quality when compared with typical "nano dongles." It is a 802.11b/g/n-capable dongle with a max throughput of 150Mbps.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation says that, in their tests, "this dongle has performed significantly better than many others on the market," and it is apparently used by their staff – so it must be pretty good! The dongle is £6 and currently seems to be available for sale only at the Swag Store (http://swag.raspberrypi.org/) and through Pimoroni (http://shop.pimoroni.com/) or Pi Supply (https://www.pi-supply.com), but it will likely become available from other retailers soon.

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