The Raspberry Pi B+ has a native VGA connection. Sure, it’s hidden away in binary blobs and device trees, and you need to wire up the GPIO pins just right, but it’s possible to connect a VGA monitor to a Raspi B+ naively. For the brave, smart, or foolish, this means you can also drive raw DPI displays. [Robert] had a few of these dirt cheap displays sitting around and decided to give the entire thing a go. It worked, and he’s written down how to do it.

Let’s add a dirt cheap screen to the Raspberry Pi B+
http://blog.reasonablycorrect.com/raw-dpi-raspberry-pi/

The Raspberry Picademy is a free professional development experience for primary and secondary teachers, initially for those here in the UK.

Over the course of two days, 24 teachers get hands-on with computing here at Pi Towers in Cambridge, and discover the many ways in which the Raspberry Pi can be used in the classroom.

Raspberry Pi founder [Eben Upton] recently sat in an uncomfortable chair in London to discuss all things Pi. Having sold about four million units over the last 2.5 years, he feels the future is bright for his original vision of inspiring and helping kids to learn programming.

[Eben] is quite pleased with the Pi-Top, a B+ based laptop kit that’s pulling in backers left and right while completely unaffiliated with the Pi foundation. The kit includes a 13.3″ HD LCD screen, keyboard, trackpad, and an injection molded case, though you can print your own with the included STL files. Kits start at $249 without a Pi and $285 with a B+ included. Robot and home automation HATs are also available separately or bundled with the Pi-Top kit.

The most exciting news is that the $600,000 spent on DSI connectors for those four million Raspis is about to pay off. [Eben] hopes that an official touchscreen will be available for purchase before the end of 2014 or in early 2015. He showed off a 7″ capacitive touch panel

The UK designed Raspberry Pi microcomputer, which has triggered all sorts of creative single board computing projects — most recently being repurposed as the heart of a DIY computer designed to help kids learn to code — continues to sell in far greater quantities than its creators ever imagined.

Sales of low cost, open source microcomputer have now passed 3.8 million, according to the Pi Foundation. And while that pales in comparison to sales of consumer electronic devices such as smartphones, it’s a seriously impressive figure for a bare chunk of electronics, especially given the creators of Pi envisaged selling as few as 10,000 boards over its entire lifetime.

The Broadcom SOC in the Raspberry Pi is actually surprisingly powerful

[Gert van Loo], Raspberry Pi chip architect, wizard, and creator of a number of interesting expansion boards showed off a VGA adapter for the new B+ model at the recent Raspberry Pi Jam in Cambridge this week. Apparently, there is a parallel interface on the SoC that can be used to drive VGA with hardware using a resistor ladder DAC. That’s native VGA at 1080p at 60 fps in addition to HDMI for the Raspberry Pi. Only the new Model B+ has enough pins to do this, but it’s an intriguing little board.

The prospect of having two displays for a Raspberry Pi is very interesting

The VGA expansion board, “is likely to have issues with EMC,” which means this probably won’t be a product.

Review You might think that as a purveyor of a nifty compact computer selling in the millions, you’d consider two years after the debut of your first offering that it was high time you tempted back the buyers with a go-faster, more capacious and shinier model. Heck, Apple and others don’t even wait that long: they upgrade products year in, year out.

Not so for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, for whom such compressed upgrade cycles are vulgarly short. The very first Raspberry Pi Model B micros slipped out early in 2012, and just over two-and-a-half years later, we have the follow-up, the Model B+ – and it isn’t even an upgrade in the modern sense of the word.

It is a better device, but it has been given an old-style upgrade of the kind made back when the word meant a small incremental improvement and didn’t refer to an almost entirely new product that just happens to sport the same name as its predecessor.

The B+ is simply a redesigned version of the original – the Foundation calls it an “evolution” of the original Pi, and dubs it “Revision 3″ of the B – rather than an updated version.

So what has changed? From a compute perspective, not a jot. The B+ runs no more quickly and has no extra memory than the B has.

Gone, then, is the flaky, latch-less SD card reader, replaced by a Micro SD slot that is spring-loaded to prevent the inadvertent card removals that fritzed so many Model A and Model B users’ installed operating systems.

The Model A Pi’s single USB port was next to useless; the B had two
The B+ has four USB ports, more than my laptop

The B+ sports improved power regulation circuitry: out goes the old wasteful linear regulator, in comes an much more efficient switching regulator.

Gone are the separate RCA composite-video and 3.5mm audio ports, both replaced by a single 3.5mm port that handles both sound and vision.

extra GPIO too

The layout changes will mess many of these up – my PiFace, for instance – requiring either the use of a GPIO extension cable, a 26-pin GPIO raiser, or the purchase of a new, updated add-on.
For the same reason, existing Pi cases will not work with the new model.

status LEDs have been reduced to two: power and disk activity.

There are broader improvements to the GPIO that make all this case business irrelevant. Two of the pins are intended for I2C EEPROM connectivity, but the Foundation will be using them for add-on board interrogation, part of a new spec it’s calling HAT (Hardware Attached on Top).

It’s the Pi answer to Arduino’s shield system, and defines a standard schema for implementing Pi-friendly cards. The specification includes auto-configuration and automatic driver setup, and aligned mounting holes to boards can be bolted to the host Pi.

The B+ is unquestionably a better Pi than its predecessor.

Yep, that’s right, the fantastic engineers at Raspberry Pi HQ have blessed us with a new design. They’ve taken all the feedback over the last 3 years and rolled out a nice updated Pi with many fixes and extras…all at the same price!

What does/doesn’t work anymore

Just about all our Pi plates work fine

You may need a new Kernel/Firmware
Without new kernel/firmware, the USB/Ethernet chip doesn’t work

Even though the ‘top 26 pins’ are still compatible pinouts, IDC cables have a bit of a thicker part and the ends, so it will bump into the #27 and #28′th pins when you try to plug it in.

Wolfson Audio Card & Other I2S (not I2C) Devices

Enclosures
We don’t know of any old Model B enclosures that still work. Since the ports have switched around, and the mounting holes moved

Depending on who you believe, yesterday someone either broke an NDA or was the lucky recipient of an Element 14 shipping error. Nevertheless, we were lucky enough to get a glimpse at the new Raspberry Pi Model B+. Today, everything is live, and Adafruit has a great teardown of what’s new, what’s changed, and what’s completely different in this new board.

This is the same 700 MHz Broadcom chip with 512MB of RAM.

Despite not having an upgraded CPU, there are some neat features that addressed the complaints of the original Pi: The standard sized SD card socket is replaced with a microSD card socket that won’t stick out over the edge of the board. The ports are rearranged, with the analog video out on a TRRS plug with the audio. There are now four USB ports and an Ethernet port
and mounting holes galore: they’re M2.5 holes in a square 58mm wide and 49mm high. Also included in the B+ is a completely redesigned power supply – the jumbo linear regulator is gone

The biggest change for anyone looking making a project with the Pi is the expanded GPIO header. This is a 40 pin header, with the ‘top’ pins identical to the original 26 pin header. Yes, all your existing Pi plates/shields/whatevers will still work.