Four years after the launch of the first Raspberry Pi board, the Raspberry Pi Foundation unveils the third generation of the single-board computer. Building on the success of its predecessors, the Raspberry Pi 3 has been upgraded in terms of processing capacity. It offers 50% more performance than the Raspberry Pi 2 and around ten times more than the original Raspberry Pi 1. The latest generation is aimed at use in industry, the home, schools and universities. A 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor has been installed for this purpose. As a result, the new model offers more power and an integrated Bluetooth and wireless LAN connection as standard for Internet of Things (IoT) development projects.

While retaining the same footprint as previous versions - with its credit card-sized dimensions of 85 x 56 x 17 mm - the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B retains many of the same features and capabilities of the previous generation. These include: The 40-pin GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) port; four USB ports; full HD HDMI; 10/100 Ethernet; 3.5mm audio jack and composite video; a camera (CSI-2) and display (DSI) interface; and a micro SD card slot. Power can be supplied to the card via its micro USB socket using an external power supply unit (PSU).

The technical data

The board is based on the Broadcom BCM2837 SoC, which includes an ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor running at 1.2 GHZ. In addition, there is a BCM43438 Combo Connectivity Device, which provides 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy. The BCM2837 also integrates a dual-core VideoCore IV multimedia coprocessor, which offers the following:

• 1.2Gpixel S / s fill rate, 1.8Gtexel / s of texturing rate
• 29 GFLOPs shader compute throughput
• OpenGL ES 1.1 / 2.0 support
• 1080p60 hardware video decoding
• 1080p30 hardware video encoding
• One hardware image sensor pipeline

The Raspberry Pi 3 loads its operating system from a microSD card and uses the NOOBS (New out of the box software) Easy Installation Manager.The standard installation of the Raspbian operating system is bundled with a range of applications and programming tools including Node-RED. This visual tool supports the wiring of hardware devices, APIs and online services, making the board ideal for rapid development and prototyping of IoT projects. The new Raspberry Pi is now available to order from RS Components.