A new Raspberry Pi goes on sale, a very small motherboard and also accompanied by an excellent price. The only bad thing about it compared to the others is that it is less powerful.
The new Raspberry Pi is called the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, a slightly longer name that sounds more modern. The great thing about this Raspberry Pi is its small size (yes, you read that right). It's significantly smaller than its larger siblings, like the Raspberry Pi 3, which is considerably more powerful. As you'll see in the image below, there's only one USB port, which isn't ideal if you want to use a keyboard and mouse that aren't Bluetooth . Besides that single USB port, there's an HDMI port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and the charging connector. Then there are the essential connectors: the 40-pin GPIO header, the display connector, and finally, the camera connector.
I was really surprised that this “Mini-PC” has so much power for how small it is. Specifically, it has a Broadcom processor, the Cortex-A53, which runs at 64 bits and at a frequency of 1,4 GHz, which is pretty good. All this is accompanied by a 2MB LPDDR512 SDRAM memory, which isn’t much, but it’s enough to use it as a Smart TV or something else that doesn’t need too many specifications to work. Below is a comparison table between the new Raspberry Pi model A+ and its “big sister”, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+.
| Raspberry Pi model A + | Raspberry Pi 3 Model B + |
| Broadcom Cortex-A53 64bits processor | Broadcom Cortex-A53 64bits processor |
| 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM | 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM |
| Connection technology: 2.4GHz and 5GHz IEEE 802.11.b / g / n / ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, BLE | Connection technology: 2.4GHz and 5GHz IEEE 802.11.b / g / n / ac wireless Internet and RJ45 connector, Bluetooth 4.2, BLE |
| 1 USB port 2.0 | 4 USB ports 2.0 |
The price of this Raspberry Pi 3 model A + is around 26 or 27 euros, which makes it very cheap. It is now available to buy this motherboard from the official Raspberry website.
