Introducing The Raspberry Pi B+

It looks like Element 14 screwed up a single shipment, because some lucky soul just received an unreleased model of Raspberry Pi. If you can believe the silkscreen, it’s called the Raspberry Pi Model B+, and while we have no idea what the chipset is, the layout and peripherals look pretty cool.

From the looks of it, this new board features four USB ports, a new, 40-pin GPIO header, and more screw holes that will allow you to secure this to anything. The analog video out is gone, and the SD card connector – a weak point of the original design – might be replaced with a microSD connector. Oh, every Raspi case that has ever been made? They won’t work.

Without booting this Raspi B+ there’s no way of knowing what the chipset is on this new board. The smart money is on the entire SOC being the same: basically, what you’re looking at is the same as a Raspberry Pi Model B, only with a few more ports.

There is no clue when these improved Raspis will be available, but the word “soon™” will probably appear on the Raspberry Pi blog shortly.

Thanks [John] for the tip.

EDIT: [feuerrot] is smarter than me and mirrored all the images in an imgur album.

 

208 thoughts on “Introducing The Raspberry Pi B+

    1. I really hope so or they are bringing the Composite video out on he header. I would be happy if it’s on the header as that is the main display for my Motorcycle Audio system.

      1. Fartface: do you have details on your project online somewhere? I’m looking to build a dual BT system with audio routing as well and it would be nice to crib what I can

      1. Also, more money, costing $20 more (original Cubie), $30 more (Cubie2) and $60 more (Cubetruck). The same goes for any other ARM board that’s out there. More features cost more money, and it appears RPi foundation has decided to target a given price. Even the Beagle Bone Black’s price had to go up because they were break-even products for Circuitio.

        And it’s well worth it if you need those features. I think it’s nice to have such a variety of different ARM boards, that way you can pick the one that fits your needs.

    1. There’s no real improvement to the Model B+, other than some cost containment efforts, like consolidating the A/V output jacks to eliminate the price of one connector on the board. That’s a “profitability” upgrade that benefits the makers, and drives up cost of ownership for the end users who want to actually use the analog A/V outputs by forcing them to by new apple-style cabling. The real audio problems that have plauged the Pi since it’s introduction remain totally unaddressed. The streaming analog video output sucks. By eliminating the RCA jack, they’re avoiding fixing the problem, and they’re trying to make the analog video less accessible so that fewer people will use it. Stabilizing the voltage rails is a band-aid fix for on-board analog audio that won’t do squat to fix the USB dropout problem, as it is a chipset based problem. The Model B+ amounts to little more than putting lipstick on a pig to make it appear more appealing. Instead of fixing the well-known USB problem (USB is well-documented as being prone to packet loss, causing mouse, KB and audio dropouts), they just switched from the 9512 to the 9514 chip. That switch doesn’t really do anything to fix the inherent problems in the USB system — it only serves to split the existing USB bandwidth across 2 more ports. It does nothing to fix the existing USB problems. The bottom line is that now you two more USB ports, but the underlying USB problems that are such a menace remain unfixed. End users who have been having problems with mouse, keyboard, and USB DAC data loss aren’t going to notice much of a change, as the underlying hardware is the same old shit.

    1. Even better, the offsets of all the jacks are much better aligned. The standard RPi had demented offsets, like the Muppet’s Swedish Chef arranged all the connectors, aggravating case design.

      I hope they updated the main CPU though.

      1. Will the same old Broadcom chip support the apparent extra GPIOs? There’s so many ARMs out now with dual cores and over 1GHZ clock speeds, technology’s moved on at it’s usual rate since the Pi was first created. Might be they’ve upped the spec, it would help it play media and emulators better. Emulators in particularly are a popular use for Pi’s. And some of them are so badly-coded as to be useless at emulating 68K chips at maybe a dozen megahertz, on a 700MHz ARM.

        I can’t remember the offending emulators off-hand, but I remember me and my friend being severely underimpressed before we clocked it up to 950. That’s as far as we wanted to risk, with the teeny-weeny heatsinks we ordered.

        More horsepower would also allow more rendering stuff to be done in software, make up for whichever mysteries and problems are still left in it’s graphics units.

      1. The new ethernet chip is a LAN9514, just a 4-port version of the LAN9512 present on the regular Model B. Still limited in throughput by having only a single USB connection to the SoC.

        Would have been nice if they had used a regular 9-pin USB header for the 2 new ports instead of 2 USB-A ports (or even a single 4 or 5-pin header + 1 USB-A port), it would have given a USB bus directly available on expansion board stacks.

        1. Well as far as i know the SoC only has one USB and no network capability built in, using GPIO won’t work on this RTOS so there using what they have … but i cant imagine the speed loss if your using all 4 USBs

  1. Did you notice the 3.5mm “headphone” socket silkscreen says “A/V”? Possibly a 4-pole socket with the composite video, left and right plus ground channels. This is pure speculation but If they were to keep backwards compatibility with regular headphones I’d say the third pole / ring from the tip would be the video.

    1. Possibly, but those 4-pole plugs are a pain in the arse, and not nearly as ubiquitous as the normal kind. Not always as easy to get hold of. Still they could include an adaptor with each one I suppose.

      Worse would be to lose composite altogether, because so many projects use it. Unless they’ve upgraded to a chip that doesn’t do composite. Shame tho cos of all the composite LCDs you can get, in absolutely every size, often with touchscreens attached.

      Maybe the Pi could generate composite through a GPIO in software? Andre Lamothe got a 52MHz chip to do it, I think a PIC derivative, with the addition of an analogue delay chip to do the phase-shifting for colour. B/W text works on an Arduino. Wouldn’t like to hear it go that way, but maybe they’ll keep selling the old line as well for people who still want composite.

      Or maybe they’re gonna do something with the onboard LCD connector at last? Launch a range of screens that work easily with it. Or at least maybe an adaptor.

      We’ll find out more when the Kiwis who have it get round to testing, I suppose. Could be an escaped prototype where they haven’t fitted the RCA plug yet.

    2. anyone else notice what looks like 2 DACs behind it? i believe the SoC used has built in audio dacs .. maybe for higher quality or bidirectional audio? i cant imagine there doing any video with them …

      1. Those are two different chips, one is marked “Z16T” (The T might be two seperate lines, and not a real T, Z16 is a BZX84-C3V9 zener diode) and the other something like “6S4VD” (picture is a bit fuzzy).

        1. So that’s what it is. I listen to some of the videos that use the onboard audio and it just grates on my nerves. Even the earliest Soundblaster cards sounded better. Irritates me that we go so far with audio chips and we go straight back to the stone ages because too many chumps are willing to settle for less.

          1. In fairness, it’s the rPi’s analog audio that sucks. The HDMI audio works fine, assuming that the sink device is good for it. This is still a problem if you need decent analog output directly; but was likely one of the things left on the cutting-room floor to keep the price down. Decent analog audio is hardly free and you can chase diminishing returns quite a ways.

    3. I think you’re on to something there. Good news is that if they do have analog video available, it wouldn’t be difficult at all to break it out behind/under the a/v jack to a composite plug which could be mounted to any case with enough headroom to clear it. Here’s hoping that analog video is actually available on that plug!

      1. English spec sheet (linked below) shows NTSC/Pal as being available “via composite”. So??? There’s no composite jack in the pictures. That means that it’s got to be part of the audio jack (or on an unpopulated header) if it’s there at all. Hopefully some folks that order today will post back and confirm whether or not it’s available in any form once their units arrive.

        1. Schematic linked below confirms that it’s the innermost ring of the A/V jack (first position, before ground). So, if you use a 4 pole plug, you’re golden. If you use a 3 pole plug it just shunts the analog video to ground. This means that if you want to break it out internally, you’re going to have to break the connection to the socket (so that it’s not shorted out any time a normal 3 pole plug is inserted) and then tie in the composite socket. Alternately, 4 pole to 3 pole + video adapters abound on the internet (if you’ve got digital cameras of a certain age and you kept the adapters, you’ve already got one!).

        2. The way the symbol is drawn is that what usually the ground “sleeve” is video (pin 1 – *outer most*) and the next ring is ground (pin 2). L audio is the inner most aka “Tip”.

          In some sense it might be better as the construction of the plug is that these are made of 3 hollow concentric tubes for each of the 3 rings and and a central solid piece for the tip. So there is the ground tube separating the video from the audio stuff.

          1. Sort of, kind of. A four pole plug like this still has the same max dimensions, and the tip and ring still have the same length dimensions. What differentiates the four pole from the three pole is that they split the ground (shield) in length and insulated the two parts (so that one is now ring2 and the other remains as shield). The ground contact point for three pole jack is typically far enough forward that when used with a four pole plug, the ground contact touches the front part of the shield section. With the back part of the shield section isolated, it is used as the composite video contact and the four pole jack’s extra contact finger makes the necessary contact. The three pole jack is blind to the fourth pole and sees it as a standard three pole plug. This works the same way with some headphone/microphone combos that plug into computers, game systems, or phones.

            What will sometimes hang people up is that manufacturers weren’t always consistent when it came to which half of the shield area was assigned to be the video/microphone contact and which half was assigned to be the ground contact. Some did it as Tip/Ring1/Ring2/Shield, and others did it as Tip/Ring1/Shield/Ring2. So, if the 4 pole plug you have doesn’t properly output video from the RasPi B+, it’s probably the alternate configuration…

            If you’re feeling adventurous, you can cut the cable midway and then re-connect as needed so that the outputs are functional. Of course, this would put signal over the cable shield on one end and bring the ground into the inner part of the cable, but in most cases this shouldn’t be an issue. Alternately, the typical RasPi vendors should have the correct four pole configuration of cable, properly built and reasonably priced.

            And of course you can buy some bare four pole plugs and some RCA jacks and some shielded three conductor cable and solder it up a proper cable yourself from scratch… more satisfying (keep the Hack in HAD!) and keeps the shielding intact.

    1. Looks so. Sometimes I wonder whether HaD is not just a cleverly hidden voluntary DDoS. :-)
      Maybe it would be a bit more polite to make the links lead to a local copy of the page on HaD servers. Imagine people with cheap servers – one entry at HaD and their monthly bandwidth is gone.

      1. Maybe it might be possible to get HAD’s CDN buffers to cover the sites it features, for a while after each article. If it’s possible to do that transparently for a site.

        If not, then yep a mirror would be good, updated near-instantly, just keep in touch with the site’s changes. There’s some HTTP way of doing that right? For each site HAD could set up a mirror and have the main article link to there.

        If a site objected you could always stop doing it. Maybe allow advert-links to come through unbuffered, if that’s how a site’s earning it’s money, since they can generally cope with mega-traffic. I think most site owners would appreciate the attention and the large audience, and any mirroring that came with it.

        1. I don’t think that is a good idea, there are possible copyright implications, and maybe even the potential for fraud abuses by by mirroring content without prior permission – no matter how well meaning.

          1. @RicoElectrico

            Well Google are a huge corporation whom get away with plenty of legally suspect things without scrutiny, doesn’t make it legal. Besides, they have a protocol whereby you’re able to have cached versions of your site removed from their index.

            @Greenaum

            Yes, I’m fully versed in how the web works thank you very much.

          2. There’s 2 options, do it anyway, and comply when people want it taken down, while being very friendly and decent with it. I shouldn’t think anyone could prove any harm done, and I think that’s the basis of getting sued for copyright, right?

            Second option is ask the site’s owner first, and offer to mirror it. If they don’t answer in time, run the article anyway, with the offer still open.

            Pretty sure you have to commit fraud intentionally, so as long as nobody does that, everything’s ok.

            Just since the “slashdot effect” is so well-known, a solution to it would itself be notable in Internet publishing.

            It’s also the case that probably 90% of the web content you read has run through a “content distribution network”, whereby sites are mirrorred, silently and invisibly, all round the world. Saves on intercontinental web traffic, and traffic in general. You ask for whichever IP address, and your provider returns the data you’re expecting, but it doesn’t actually come directly from there. There’s now a giganormous series of caches. One at each end of each intertube.

            Came in a few years ago, look it up. It’s all “transparent” and “neutral” whatnot, so they think it’s covered legally. Most of the web needs it to run nowadays.

      2. Yeah, it happened yesterday with the computer on BGA chip…it took more than a day for me to be able to read it… XD!

        I dared people to make a giveaway on my blog appear on HAD, luckily for me, it doesn’t appear to going to happen (never intended to, just the extra “impossibru” bit on the gymkhana), but previous posts of mine have really scared the hell of me..and they’re not as cool as this.

    1. There is nothing wrong with most chargers, it’s the ultrathin (sometimes not even copper) cables. A SMPS will only be worse with these kinds of cables due to the negative input resistance of a step-down convertor.

        1. It sounds more difficult then it is:
          With a positive resistance, the current goes up when the voltage goes up.
          With a negative resistanve, the current goes DOWN when the voltage goes up.

          DCDC convertors are a good example of negative resistances. When the load on the output of the convertor stays the same (for example; 1V 1A), the input current depends on the input voltage (and the switcher efficiency, but lets assume 100%). If the input voltage is 5V, the input current will be 0.2A. If the input voltage drops to 2.5V, the input current will rise to 0.4A. If the total resistance of the system (bering the input resistance of your DCDC convertor plus the output resistance of your power source (for example batteries + wires)) is positive, there’s nothing to worry about. However, as soon as the total resistance drops below 0Ohm, things start to go catastrophically wrong.

        1. Even then it is a very real possibility that the RPi will require more power then the PSU plus cables can supply. A 5V PSU with 10Ohms of wires connected to it, can only supply 250mA at 2,5V to a RPi. That’s not enough, even with a buck-boost convertor.
          Even 5Ohms is too much; that will only be able to deliver 2,5V at 500mA.

        2. FYI, they are probably using a fixed voltage (3.3v/1.8V) version of PAM2306D. I recognize that layout and the symbol in their schematic pinout is identical.

          BUT the part # is not labeled, so how “open source” is that. :P

        3. BTW that PAM2306 chip can operate at 100% duty cycle, i.e. a “drop out” mode (i.e. directly passing regulation). So its output can still be 3.3V when the input drops down to 3.6V give or take.

          chip is rated to 1A output current, Rds for their PMOS is 0.3R (typ) at 3.3V input.

        1. “meanwhile Mediatek ships whole 4x1GHz ARM A7 +PMIC solution at $4”

          I’m assuming you’re talking about the MT6589 SoC? I can find no indication that the chip is $4. If anything, it’s closer to $30.

    1. because 700 MHz is not enough horsepower for anything at all

      the apollo astronauts must clearly have faked their moon landing because how could they have done it with less than a beaglebone?

      1. Yeah, and insurance companies managed to do all of their accounting on a first-run Univac, so why would anyone want anything faster? Maybe because people have seen what higher-powered ARM devices can do, and continuing to charge the same amount for tech that’s been handily superseded over the past two and a half years is ridiculous, you supercilious dickbiscuit.

        1. It’s obvious you aren’t the target market for the Pi, but resorting to insults like that when none were thrown your way is a bit childish, which is the target market for the Pi. You’re a complicated person…

      2. They didn’t need high definition video or fancy graphical interfaces. We could do likely 95% of our computing tasks with the horsepower of a C64 if only we didn’t take into account the presentation. Save for some niche applications, computing power today is mainly used to present data rather than to create it.

        1. Are you out of your mind? If I used a C64 at my job, my Dilbert Box would be nearly triple the size it is because of all the documents required. My modern PC compresses all of that data into 8TB of drives space, has nearly all of that data indexed and gives me access to reams of information outside that drive space to help me do in 30 minutes today what took someone in 1982 a full day using a C64.

          I love my C64 but I don’t kid myself about what a modern machine gives me. I would say software writers are typically morons with their code, I would never agree with your statement that the horsepower of a C64 would meet 95% of our computing tasks.

      3. Beaglebone? The lunar lander had a 16 core i7 computer with at least 128gig of overclocked ram RAID 0 SSD’s and a pair of the fasted Nvidia video cards available!

        Nobody can do anything with less than that!

  2. 2A over a micro USB socket. They still don’t learn.
    But they learned from the Beaglebone, and reserved pins for id EEPROMs, to enable automatic configuration.

    I don’t think that I’ll buy one, I already have 4.

        1. No, I am insinuating that 0,5A is enough in 99% of the use cases. The remaining 1% can use a powered USB hub, or feed power to the RPi via the GPIO header, that’s what I am doing for 5RPis equpped with servo’s for a pan-tilt mechanism.

          1. Piotr, You don’t need an additional power supply for a USB UART, that will draw almost no power. A USB WiFi stick also works great on my first gen (256MB RAM) model B. A USB hardrive on the other hand…

        2. Max power from a USB is 500mA. 4 ports at 500mA is 2A, the limit of uUSB. But leaves nothing for the CPOU. But then how often do you use 500mA from each port.

          Keyboard, mouse, Wifi, something else. 2A should be fine. Assuming the new power circuitry can provide that level of power.

        3. If they allow for 500mA per USB downstream connector (4), 4 x 500mA =2A is at the limit without any budget left for the board itself.

          Interesting circuit they used for driving the MOSFET Q3. Tempted to check that out in LTSpice.

      1. The point is that every USB has to guarantee 500mA @5V.

        Add some 500-800mA for other things (CPU, HDMI…) and you get in the ballpark of 5V 2.7+A, like the good old Beagleboard xM, which sports four 500mA-capable USB ports.

        Oh, well, the Belching and Raspberrying Pi has already a tradition of tragically underpowered USB ports… ha ha ha.

        1. Incorrect. USB ports do NOT need to guarantee 500mA. Check the spec sometime. And if you are plugging 4x500MA devices in to an SBC you are clearly doing something wrong. I look at keyboard, 100mA, mouse 50MA, Wifi adapter 200mA, USB HD 500mA.

  3. Hopefully they cleared up some of the USB bandwidth problems I heard the originals suffered from. Really nice to see more GPIO but to be honest I was mostly using I2C so I effectively had all the IO I would have ever needed anyhow.

    I am a little disappointed that it doesn’t sound like they added a more powerful CPU. Would have been nice to see it get a boost from 700MHZ to 1GHZ or so.

        1. Tho just to follow-up myself, you need a powered USB hub to run much of anything on it anyway. I can’t think of 4 host-powered devices I’d want to run on it, without maybe a hard drive, a Wifi stick, or a coffee-cup warmer.

          1. I can. I have a project right now that uses TWO Bluetooth adapters so I can stream A2DP stereo audio to two helmet headsets while also routing telephone and GPS audio from TWO phones around in there. I would KILL to have an extra BT and a Wifi Dongle in the slots to give me the ability for some breathing room as well as automatic podcast downloading while the motorcycle is warming up in the driveway from the houses wifi.

            You need to think of embedded devices and stop trying to use a RasPi like a computer.

          2. I’d certainly prefer to be able to run a keyboard, mouse, wifi adapter, and Bluetooth adapter all at the same time. Maybe also a hard drive, but one with its own power supply is fine.

          3. Problem, Mr Face, is that the Wifi stick will use most of the available power. The setup you mention should be fine, but sometimes only having 1 full USB’s worth of power is a limit. An example would be streaming media through a Wifi stick and storing more media on a hard drive, you’ve only the power for one.

            The Retropie setup uses an HDD, or can, to read ROMs off, to copy them to the OS’s SD card. If you’re setting a system up it’s often handy to have apt-get available, so Wifi’s good there. Sure you can do a lot without needing external power, but there’s a whole lot you can’t, too.

            For unpowered stuff, you can get unpowered USB hubs from the pound shop. Literally a pound. Mine’s working fine for all the low-speed low-power stuff on this PC. So extra unpowered USB ports are 25p each, virtually free. Same place card readers and cheap cabling come from.

            My mate’s powered hub was around 16 quid, with most of the ones in shops being above 20. It adds a lot to a “cheap” computer.

      1. Some of the tiny stick on heat sinks and a tiny fan and they run all day long at the overclocked speeds. it’s the fools that seal them up in the boxes and then stick them to the back of their TV set where even more heat is added to the mix that have problems.

        1. I’m running mine at 1.35V @ 1100Mhz with no extra cooling whatsoever. Never went over 65C. Its also capable of doing 1225Mhz with extra voltage.

          So yeah, fitting a fan to such lowpower device is plain idiotic. Maybe a tiny heatsink, but even that is not necessery, since you’re only gonna be cooling the ram, not the actual SoC

        2. So if (and surely that’s easy enough to do in a couple lines of code) the overclock can be called by one of the GPIO pins, why not mount a 2 position SPST rotary selector on the case and label the positions “10” and “11”, and tie position “11” to the relevant pin. There, I fixed it!

          Also: Adding a pushbutton to trigger another pin to play a sound file of a cowbell is entirely up to you.

          1. You play the game, you take your chances. Well… that’s what everyone tells me when I buy a product and they release the replacement a week later.

    1. @HV said: “Sounds like a play from the Apple handbook”

      Sounds like you’re an obnoxious troll. Name a single company that doesn’t react the EXACT same way when product specs and pictures are leaked.

  4. Throwaway account (obviously). I can confirm this is the new raspberry pi model. It does have a new chipset, although I can’t confirm the identity or any other details. I got this information some weeks ago under NDA from a source at Farnell/Element14 directly.

    I have some hi def press release pictures, but I’m not elligable to share them. Keep pushing, they have more information available.

    I can confirm a/v is one connector, more ram, more gpio, more usb connectors.

    1. Can you tell us whether the old model (A and/or B) will still be made and sold, or will be fased out as soon as stocks are gone?

      More RAM is not true, however. The B+ had 512MB, just as the B.

  5. I have been banned from the Freenode IRC Channel #raspberrypi for breaking the news. This is exactly the type of poor behavior that I expect. I am also banned from the Foundation forums. Please protest loudly.

    1. Go cry somewhere else. They asked you to keep a lid and you wouldn’t listen. You’re free to post about it and talk about it in places that allow it, but you don’t have an inherit right to do whatever you want in someone else’s IRC channel.

      1. Whatever… You are the only one making offensive remarks. Not to mention the pointless rants. I made a concious decision to make you, James, annoyed by not doing what the foundation wanted. Now the world knows how I feel about being banned by you from the Foundation forums with no reprieve. Looks like you are annoyed and it is likely others close to the foundation know you are to blame for my attitude. Mr Davis seemed to understand he was on a hiding to nothing when he made untrue statements. Do you need a clue stick?

        What was the real release date of the Model B+?

        Perhaps, in hind sight, a message in confidence via email would have been a better idea. But someone telling me to shut up on IRC ain’t going to cut the mustard.
        Mr Adams and Hollingworth have visited my LinkedIn profile.
        It clearly states my policy to in confidence.

        People can read the IRC logs and I can clearly state that I have not been kicked, banned or had anyone question my behaviour on IRC at all. The IRC channel states they are not an arm, pun intended, of the Foundation yet a Foundation trustee has thrown me off for something I did elsewhere. There is nothing in the rules that says I can not use the knowledge gained on IRC elsewhere. Simply stating he is a jerk without any evidence does not hold water, James.

        Do as I ask and nothing but good things will be uttered.
        But I doubt you will man up. You seem to prefer name calling and crying into your milk.

        1. Sadly I don’t think it was. It’s a pretty big leap for any mind to go from trying to keep launch details secret for a new product, and spying on the entire worlds communications. Not sure that’s a mind I would like to meet. Unless it was in jar.

  6. If you need more horsepower than a 700 MHz ARM11, pick a different option. There are tons of boards with Cortex A8s, A9s, and A15s out there. Personally I’d love to have a quad core A15 for $35, but I’m not going to flame the Pi folks for not building me one. Respect the gift horse please. These changes are very welcome even with an ARM11.

  7. The guy who broke the story has now been banned from the Raspberry Pi forums and I just saw him kicked from the IRC channel.

    And they are still deleting posts on the forum that make any reference to it.

    Idiots….

    1. the guy who “broke” the story had been skating on thin ice for a while as shown by the fact he has been banned from the forums for many months for cause. The photos he published were not his copyright (afaik as they were taken by someone else who agreed to not say anything until informed that he could) & he was asked nicely to not ruin it for everyone else and not only did he ignore that request he went around being a jerk and pushing the info into as many places as possible. A post about it that he posted on another forum was removed by their mods and he was asked to refrain from reposting which he then went and did.

      He was banned for being Jerk not because he was leaking.

      1. You are stretching the truth for your own benefit. The pics were posted in public, copyright does not apply. Anyone can look up my posts on the forum (Bencom). E14 made a new forum and left it open. E14 had been denying the Model B+ existed for a while. I have no obligation to the Foundation to keep information discovered to myself.

        Specially when they ban me for life with no reprieve.

        The original images remain where they were posted on i.imgur.com

        I have participated in the IRC channel helping other users since it’s formation pretty much without any incident at all. UKScone does not. Channel logs exist. my nick rikkib.

        The statement about E14 asking me not to post again is untrue although I did not post again anyway. Repeating the same thing and hoping for a different result is pretty brain dead. E14 did not say anything. Others who saw the post questioned E14 about policy.

        The E14 post was immediately indexed by google.

        Social media did the trick and a few emails to a select few.

        Mr Davis’ name calling gives readers an idea of the attitude of this man.

        Do not believe UKScone’ FUD it is just that. He banned me because I posted the news and stole the Foundation’s thunder. People with half a clue knew there was something up.

        No doubt I will never have access to the forums or the official IRC channel. Tongue in cheek of course. The IRC channel is not official just ruled by the Foundation and their hatchet guy UKScone.

        I suggest that UKScone needs to do the right thing and stop what will be an ongoing bun fight by removing the two bans. I still wish to help my local community here in NZ and see more open debate. And of course I reserve the right to publish whatever I see fit on my web site. The Foundation is certainly not sending the right messages to the younger generation. When found out they deny and try to censor. That is not the kind of world I live in.

    2. What the heck. They ban because someone got something in a mail. That’s just stupid. Mistake has already happened, it does not help anyone to start banning people in hope of they shutting up. Just sad to see this happening ;-;

      1. The person who got he Pi in the mail was happy to keep quiet about it once he had been asked to take his posts down. Then someone else took his copyrighted images and posted them as his own, and continued to keep posts up despite being asked nicely by the Foundation to wait until launch (since a lot of press/media was lined up and leaks don’t help with that sort of thing – they also don’t help in lots of other areas as well). So eventually, he got himself banned from the Raspi forums, as was to be expected (forums are not democratic free speech havens and never have been). For being a jerk more than anything else.

        1. Images loaded on anonymous web sites with no copyright notice can not claim to be copyright. The image has now been publish many times by others and remain up at the original location. I was not asked nicely to stay quite as such. Nor did I have any contact with anyone from the Foundation. It was more like a demand with little to no explanation. The right thing as far as I am concerned was to release the information.

          Specially when you banned me from the forums in 2012 with no hope of ever using the forums again. Considering that ASB added some of the requested features further down the track I consider I have some justification to feel aggrieved.

          Once again a Foundation representative is stretching the truth for nefarious purposes.

          shiftpluson> =( please don’t
          shiftpluson> not cool
          shiftpluson> You should email liz and let her know where it’s from.
          rikki Where what is from?
          siftpluson> the b+
          shiftpluson> since… it’s a massive &%$-up on the distribution end.
          rikki Not my problem
          shiftpluson> ‘course not
          shiftpluson> but you know…. doing the right thing and all that, which I guess you disagree with
          rikki and I do not talk to the “foundation”

          IRC is an anonymous system although in my case the ops in the channel know who I am and how to locate my email address or should know. I have no knowledge of who shiftplusone is in real life. That is the nature of IRC.

          So Mr Hughs, your actions have come back to haunt you and you are the only reason I published. No other reason. Indicators are that many had advanced information that allowed some a commercial competitive advantage. All this was happening while those in the know were denying the B+ existed.

          1. My name is Hughes, not Hughs. Moron. Publish and be damned (and really…publish? Publishing is what professional authors and journalists do. Slapping some oddball nonsense on a webpage is not really publishing, is it.)

            Or you could stop acting like a dick.

            I suggest the latter, although it may be too late, since the internet thinks you are a dick.

            Your choice.

          2. Mr Hughes, most that I talk to say wear being banned by the Foundation as a badge of honour. The choice is actually yours and calling me names is not a good choice.

            The copyright issue is a non issue. I live in NZ. The images are no longer on my web site therefore I have done what is required by NZ law when informed of a possible copyright breach even though the OP has not notified me directly.

            It appears, My Hughes, you have chosen to inflame the situation but feel free to continue.

          3. It seems that certain people are under the Liz and Eben spell.
            As for the name calling by JamesH65 and the warped sense of the definition of publish, I suggest you check it at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/publish
            1 a : to make generally known
            b : to make public announcement of
            2 a : to disseminate to the public
            b : to produce or release for distribution; specifically : print 2c
            c : to issue the work of (an author)

            I think any web page falls into the first 3 definitions.

            This behaviour is exactly the reason I gave up on the foundations forums.
            There seemed to be some people whom appeared to assume nobility, and if anyone dared question them they found themselves banned.

            You expect this sort of censorship in certain Asian countries, but not within countries allowing free speech.

          4. Some IRC users are concerned by the heavy handed tactics and Foundation influence and have created a channel with relaxed rules. Feel free to join ##raspberrypi_relaxed on Freenode IRC where you can discuss issues without the fear of being banned for having an opinion. I also recommend the E14 community forums.

            One only needs to look to find plenty of bad press for the Raspberry Pi and the problems it suffers from.

      2. This is why IRC sucks, and also web “forums”. Present company etcetera. And also why Usenet is awesome. Nobody was ever banned from Usenet! And yet everyone can ignore anyone else if they choose.

        Since IRC has an /ignore command I really don’t know why it has to have “ban”s as well. Inevitably this sort of boring job, being “op” with the only reward being a petty bit of power, attracts the worst elements. Stupid whiny teenagers who thrill at being in a position where people *have* to take notice of them, and where they can be the bullies!

        Mind, HAD excepted and all that. Far as I know there’s little “moderation” goes on here, and we’re all still yet to kill ourselves over people being sarcastic to each other. Not even a scuff-mark on my wrists, how about you?

        There’s a difference between abuse *of* a medium, and people just abusing each other the same way they have since the first opposable proto-thumb let our ancestors throw rocks at each other. Any amount of control, any imbalance of power on a communication medium, and it ends up like Soviet Russia before your palm can hit your face.

    3. I’ve also been kicked out of the IRC for using the wrong words. Welcome to Disneyland, where nobody has an underbelly.
      I didn’t bother protesting or coming back. If they don’t want adult senior developers in their chan, then be it so.
      And their actual actions proof that they are in fact a Kindergarten.

      1. You guys and your sense of entitlement. Have you really no idea how stuff works? The news on this was embargoed. Most people were more than happy to keep quiet about his launch until release time.

        But there are always some people who want 5 minutes of the limelight to make themselves look good. I knew about this device 6 months ago. I never felt the need to go spaffing the news about across the internet.

        Before you start slagging of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, take a closer look at yourself, and think – why do I need to ruin something that a lot of dedicated people have spent months working on, just so I look good for five minutes.

        1. But James, you are actually the person to blame for the release of the information. I had nothing to gain from what I did. I knew this when I did it and being kicked from IRC is something I expected. I suggest both bans are removed and we can start again on a better footing. I think I have made my point. Banning people does have ramifications.

  8. Wow so many sensible design choices, even ports that line up. This should have been the original design.

    Strange that they are being so fussy about the news when most distributors already have product pages up.

  9. You still need a goddam microsb cable to power the thing,and (apparently) no way to power the thing through GPIO. Anybody want to shine some light on me? This just looks like bad design.

        1. What? I power a couple of them with 5v over the GPIO connector, no probs. External regulator? Yes, but how is that different? Are you feeding unregulated power to the micro-usb port now?

          You do bypass a fuse, which is something you might want to account for, but not the regulator.

      1. How much power can you hand it over the GPIO connector? Enough to do everything, or is it just an add-on in addition to the main microUSB power feed? I’ve got one of those Adafruit connectors from the GPIO to a breadboard, so it’d be easy enough to add a regulator and power that way.

      1. Generating PoE power is somewhat expensive and complicated. I don’t think receiving it is that tough, depending on the PoE version, but it tends to use a high voltage and low current, just the opposite of what you’d need to power an RPi board, so turning it into something useful at 5v is probably not worth the trouble.

        1. I think the versions is part of what makes it complicated. But narrowing it down is difficult too. I know a guy that wanted to make a PoE ARM board and it turned out there’s a lot more to it than you’d think to make a properly compliant PoE circuit. The isolation requirements are pretty excessive.

          As it is, none of that fits the foundation’s goals of an educational computer. There’s little reason to put on parts that only a very small portion of the user base wants. I think a separate splitter might be the best bet for these educational & hobbyist boards.

          1. The underlying issue for PoE is that there are really (at least) two different use cases, with very different constraints, on the table, only one of which PoE actually attempts to answer:

            The PoE specs we actually have basically answer the question “How much power can we deliver over existing ethernet wiring without voiding our fire insurance or requiring a licensed electrician to run data cables in any reasonably important jurisdiction?” They may or may not be the optimal solution; but they certainly are close enough that they beat installing all that extra mains cabling by a pretty substantial margin.

            The one that would be nice (but is essentially nonexistent, aside from totally nonstandard hacks using spare pairs in 100mb ethernet) would be a “Why does the hardware pile next to my router need 7 different wall wart adapters?” PoE is overpriced and overengineered for that problem; but your other options are limited. You either get full PoE, suitable for code compliance over relatively long ethernet runs, or you get wall warts.

        1. And to embelish my response, I use a poe breakout power cable, and a dc jack->micro usb adapter.
          I find mounting it in a larger enclosure gives some spare space to stuff extra bits in to do this, with the side effect of giving it slightly more breathing space around the board too.

          1. Update, I *RAN* my pi’s like that. I’ve moved to a different board since due to reliability issues, not related to the setup as I ran a normal local install during soak test…

  10. Wow the “Raspiado – the USB hub that fits your Raspberry Pi” project on Kickstarter got funded just in time so now a choice $35 + $30 for 5 USB ports or only $35 plus costof a power supply for 4 USB ports and a micro SD card slot, I think the Raspiado has lost.

    1. I really want to believe this was only put on the RasPi blog today as damage control for E14’s mess-up and only because. and that sparkfun’s and E14’s stock have been there for nearly a month waiting for the go-ahead to list it.

      but conspiracy theories, etc. aside, this could have been a much bigger hyped announcement if E14 didn’t mess up. it’s like Apple announcing a new product at a keynote, but everyone in the press audience knowing everything about it already from leaks. the hype is there because now it’s official, but it’s not as big.

      1. It was due to go up today – but the leaks last week really caused chaos (first one was Wednesday). Why these people cannot keep their staff in check is beyond me. It’s not rocket science.

  11. Really nice move that they improved what was the issue according to users and that they listen to the comunity. I am really excited about this model. Already ordered one :)

  12. I’m sorry to say, I’m not impressed. According to the specs, they’re still using the same chipset at the same speed. The biggest drawback of the RPi as it sits now is its speed. I personally don’t use the damn thing as it is slower than a 90s home computer. You can argue about this issue – maybe it’s the Linux software, maybe it’s the hardware – but the fact is in some situations you can type faster than the graphical shell can follow and that’s a bad omen for any computer system. A graphical system like the Amiga performed better 25 years ago and that machine ran at 8 MHz initially.

  13. Please please please let it have finally fixed usb->sd card controllers during hte migration to microsd, and stomped out the sd card corruption issues once and for all.
    I have put all my originals in a cardboard box somewhere, every so often I read that the issue has been “fixed”, get one out, reflash and put a new sd card in, then a few days of soak testing later, back in the box it goes.
    I’m not holding my breath, as I understand it, the whole issue is down to the way the soc works and interfaces to the socket/usb ports electrically… Even though sd card quality, user error in not shutting down, and it wasn’t really important to the target audience all seem to have been bandied around in various places.
    I’m going to sit on the fence for a few months while the test and reports of reliability in this area finally surface, at risk of not filling more cardboard boxes.

      1. Randykc, no offense but google it. There is even a long running thread on the Pi forums themselves with various people batting it away as sd card compatibility issues or fake cards, weak psu, firmware fixes not applied etc. A quick summary is that we have 4 pi’s for testing all bought via RS I believe, the first one we purchased has been rock solid, the next 3 (bought at different times to eliminate a bad unit as the cause of the first problem device) have all suffered this issue even when using sd cards the first one is happy with. They all run from a common rail psu, always shut down correctly, left on 24/7 etc.
        If the b+ fixes the sd card corruption as part of its redesign to micro sd, we’ll ressurect what we were tinkering with, but prudence teaches us we need to wait a few months before we wade in and get burned again. It is a really great little device apart from this and the video performance is amazing for the power consumption and outperforms by far the alternatives we’ve tried once you get the appropriate codec’s licensed, plus I love the mostly open nature of it, but the filesystem problems nuke it for our application.

        1. How recent is your firmware? There was an SD card fix a few months back. Most failures nowadays are due to wearing out the card rather than corruption. There still a chance if power goes off at an inopportune time, but its remote. If recent, and you have a way of reproducing the problem the engineers will be interested to know how.

    1. yes there is. you’ll need to do surgery on the card to remove the no-longer used pins, and pull some wire between the relevant points where the pins were to the correct pins farther down the GPIO rows, but it should still work… just not quite as pretty. I’m sure they’re working up a new, cosmetically-correct version as we speak.

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