It’s no secret that we’re big fans of the Raspberry Pi and today a new model is available. The Raspberry Pi 3 features a new, faster processor, but more importantly, it finally comes with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the board. It’s still just $35.
The big news here really comes from the built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the Raspberry Pi 3. Previously, you needed to shell out around $10 for a USB Wi-Fi adapter and waste precious USB space on Bluetooth dongles. Now, all that’s built in, which means you not only get to save a little money, you also get access to more USB ports.
The other big news comes from the speed bump, which ups the CPU to a 64-bit 1.2 GHz chip (which should work out to be about 50% faster than the Pi 2) and a slight speed boost in the graphics chip, which is now 400 MHz.
After spending some hands-on time with the Raspberry Pi 3, it’s clear the speed boost is useful, but not totally revolutionary. All told, the Pi 3 feels pretty similar to the Pi 2 when using Raspbian. However, an updated version of Raspbian is also being released today that should improve compatibility. We did try to run some benchmarks, but without the new version of Raspbian to test, they weren’t particularly reliable, so we’ll need to revisit them later.
The good news is that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth work pretty much out of the box and if you’re booting into the Raspbian graphic interface, setting up both work just like they would on any modern operating system. Right-click the Wi-Fi Network icon in the top right corner of Raspbian, then enter your network information. As far as setting up Wi-Fi from the command line goes, that’ll work the same as it always has, but you won’t need to track down drivers for that adapter anymore.
The Raspberry Pi 3 retains the form factor of the Raspberry Pi 2, so any cases you may have picked up will work just fine with the newest version.
As with previous iterations of the Pi, you’ll need to wait for operating systems other than Raspbian to update for compatibility. This includes the much loved RetroPie, which turns your Pi into a retro game console and Kodi. Historically, both are usually quick to update. As usual, if you want to update your current build of Raspbian in anticipation for the Pi 3, you can do some from the command line. Just type this in at the command line and then tap Enter:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
Your Pi will now update to the new version of Raspbian, which means you can just swap that microSD card into the Pi 3 when it arrives.
The Raspberry Pi 3 is available from the usual list of distributors at launch, with more being added afterwards. Hopefully it’s not as difficult to track down as the Pi Zero is.
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