Raspberry Pi 3B

2019-12-30 I am starting to work with this very cool version of the Raspberry Pi. I guess I am a late adopter but honestly I have quite enough capability even with a RPi Model 1 for what I have been doing with them, which is mostly some development, some so-called "IoT" security studies and robotics. I am into all of that you can say, heh. Here is years-later comments on an RPi 3B.

I really love the fact that it has built-in WiFi and so far I am very impressed with the improved speed! I loaded up a 16gb micro sd card tonight and installed Raspbian Buster. It only took 5-minutes to enable the wireless interface, reboot and then disconnect the ethernet I'd used to make the initial connection. I still have this first unit using DHCP but eventually I will need to configure static which is also very easy (once you figure out how.)

I need to create a new case for this Raspberry Pi 3B shortly. I also ordered a couple Pi 3B+ units (for a couple top secret projects I am working on…) I have found a few cool designs on Thingiverse

Using a 16gb micro sd card, with Raspbian Buster installed is about 13gb free after performing apt full-upgrade ad before installing any additional software.

Here a few cases that I have printed, so far.

The (2) cases on the right are an abject failure if you want to attach a standard 40-pin GPIO cable to the unit, it won't fit. The rightmost case is very nice if you don't need GPIO access or if you do not need the B+ PoE feature.

2020-01-02 It is beginning to seem that if you want to use GPIO you may want no case at all in which case you can use a base plate like the one I have for this particular Raspberry Pi 3B unit. I bought (2) of these (pre-owned) with the acrylic base plate and this has one has some poorly-installed heat sinks as you can see. I checked the temperature of a 3B unit without the heat sinks and they both seem to be around 44-45C so perhaps the heat sink won't help much unless the unit is in a tightly-enclosed case with poor ventilation.