The making of the Raspberry Pi Model B+ | Hacker News Reader

The making of the Raspberry Pi Model B+

raspi.today

44 pointsnkurz10 comments

Got my B+ yesterday, and it is much nicer than I expected. The fact that all ports (especially USB, HDMI and USB power) are on 2 sides is so pleasant in practice. Previously the cables were all over the place.

BTW I've seen the B (without the +) on sale as low as 19 EUR - just in case anyone was on the fence about getting their Raspberry Pi...

How is the I/O speed? With my current pi B I can get max 2 mb/s when I rsync to my macbook from a usb-disk. Has this increased?

Probably not. Just more ports, better overcurrent protection and hotplug capabilities.

(But along with a better energy efficiency this means you can probably skip the USB hub for many applications and that's a huge improvement imo.)

If you care about I/O, you should look into the Banana Pi, it's like a really souped-up Pi with a lot of power, like fast Ethernet and a dual core processor. Of course, it also draws more power than the Raspi, but it's still a pretty good tradeoff.

"Banana Pi" is absolutely different from Pi. Some comparances: http://hardware-libre.fr/tag/banana-pi/

Yeah, I should have made that clearer. It's not a Raspberry Pi. Obviously, if any of the differences is a showstopper for you, don't use it. Personally, I'm happy with my Raspis and I have no experience with the Bananas.

But "absolutely different"? And then putting the name of the Banana in scare quotes? That's a purist's perspective.

Judging from the comment I was replying to, it seemed that the poster was less interested in an absolute clone of the Pi, but was in fact looking for something Pi-like with more I/O power.

That assumption may have been wrong or not, who knows. I just felt like putting it out there as an option, which judging by the moderation wasn't warranted. Sorry about that.

The benchmarks on that website are bogus. For example, he uses the gtkperf benchmark to draw the conclusion that the Banana Pi has a better GPU that the Raspberry Pi, but gtkperf doesn't even run on the GPU on the Raspberry Pi, and I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't on the Banana Pi either.

The best part about the Model B+ is the better power management. One of the huge issues with the older model is that it was super inefficient with power. Based on our initial tests (and covered in this article) they made some huge improvements in the power. This makes it much easier to power by alternate means (IE stick in a robot or power with batteries or solar). Pretty awesome step forward!

I've really been enjoying the new podcast they're putting out. Some great interviews with big (and not so big) names.

www.raspi.today/category/podcast/

Just as a side note, its great to see someone trying to make good use of the new top level domains.

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