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.
I’ve been looking at this PI clone cheap still and a CPU boost from http://www.bananapi.org
ARM Cortex-A7 dual-core, 1GHz, Mali400MP2 GPU 1GB RAM What do you guys think?
It’s hard finding a place that sells it, I finally found from several sellers at AliExpress: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/group/Banana-Pi/302756_255464705.html
It looks interesting, at least.
Why in the HELL didn’t they put USB 3.0 on the board!?!?!?
I just made an order of the model B two days ago.
first_world_problem();
nice to see RPi updating, but the banana pi, seems to beat this out… same form factor as the Rpi but with dual 1ghz and 1gig of ram + a sata port + 10/100/1000 Ethernet same gipo header and can run raspian