Raspberry Pi on sale at last

[VK4GHZ]

Why is it, these videos are very nerdy???

[VK2AVR]

No joke.. Banana Pi... better than raspberry ? http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/B ... 60905.html

Banana Pi and there is another called Banana Pro (which adds onboard WiFi and more GPIO pins) are much stronger for things involving intense networking and SATA. Raspberry Pi does not have SATA, although you can plug in a drive via USB. RPi is not ideal for networking because the Ethernet port shares bandwidth with USB, so performance is mediocre if you are trying to copy a file from USB drive over the network to another computer.

On the other hand, RPi has a MASSIVE community behind it and the software will be more polished and diverse. RPi2 is a worthwhile upgrade on the original, and for things like media centre duties the RPi2's hardware accelerated GPU will take care of HD video no problem. The other single board computers available often don't have full hardware GPU acceleration. So you end up with some chips having far superior CPUs than RPi/2 so web browsing etc is better but for media playing the RPi/2 still beats it.

There is also a range of SBCs by ODROID, the XU3-Lite costs about 100 bucks and is used by plenty of people as a complete desktop replacement using very low power. Quite impressive really.

Definitely a case of "it depends what you're using it for" now. There are lots of devices available.

[VK4GHZ]

Introducing the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, the latest member of the Pi family.

Delivering up to 10x the processing performance of the original Raspberry Pi and added connectivity with 802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1.

http://au.rs-online.com/web/generalDisp ... 229-HB-CTA

[VK1JA]

Such an impressive device for the cost and size. I've really got to get off my butt and learn how to program one of these little beasts, then get my creative mind going and translate that into a project of some sort.

[VK2AVR]

Doesn't need to be a big project for you to start playing and get comfortable. They are basically a small Linux computer. And there are so many guides out there that you can just pick one and try it.

Hobby sites like Adafruit and seeedstudio sell all kinds of modules and kits that just plug together onto your Pi.

The 3 sounds almost good enough to use as a desktop replacement. I tried using a Pi 2 but it was just a bit too slow at web browsing. The 3 is 2x the speed so it might work. So as a starter, grab a Pi 3 and hook it up to your TV via HDMI and just start using it like a computer.

[VK5TM]

New, faster, Raspberry Pi 3 now available:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbe ... 3-on-sale/

[VK2EHQ]

I've also heard Windows 10 will run on this new Pi.

Well, yes. Kind of. Limited to the Windows 10 version of "Internet of Things" OS

[VK2AVR]

Yeah, from what I've heard the Win10 version of the "OS" for the Pi doesn't let you run normal desktop applications, it only lets you compile applications for IoT and push it to the Pi. So unless you are doing IoT development it's kinda pointless.

You are much better off to stick with Linux on the Pi IMO, because it's a fully featured computer. You can easily write an image to an SD card using Windows utilities and be up and running. Or you can even buy preloaded SD cards. The standard install boots into a GUI similar to Windows and you can use it for basic internet surfing and so on. The command line is there for experimentation once you get comfortable.

[VK2DUX]

Has anyone managed to get wifi and bluetooth running on the Pi 3? Have tried several distros in addition to raspian Jessie but alas with no luck so far.
john vk2dux