The RPi foundation has just announced a Raspberry Pi price cut for the Raspberry Pi Model B+ and also launched an add-on called the “Sense HAT”. The new price is $10 dollars off the regular price of $35 dollars, what a deal! Still this is a incredible price for a little computer that can be used for a low power desktop, home theater, an educational machine or much much more. When the quad-core Raspberry Pi 2 model B+ arrived in February with the same price we know that there would be a price drop was approaching. With the arrival of Next Thing Co’s successful Kickstarter campaign for it’s $9 and up Chip SBC, makes you wonder if it was due to that. The Raspberry Pi 2 has sold over a million Pi 2 units in the last 3 months so that could be another reason. Well even at $35 dollars, the single core ARM11 based Model B+ has continued to sell really well. In truth the $9 dollar Cortex-A8 based Chip is not much of a threat to the Pi Federation, which has even better bargains with its much faster $35 Pi 2. Besides the Chip SBC won’t ship until December, and versions with world display ports won’t arrive until May 2016 at $19 dollars and $24 dollars for the HDMI version.

 

Raspberry Pi alternatives.   There are quite a few Raspberry Pi clones out there to choose from, but none have the performance and price of the Raspberry Pi. The Banana Pi Pro B+ clone sells for $49 that features a faster dual-core Cortex A-7 Allwinner A20 SOC. SinoVoips Banana Pi M2 has a quad-core Cortex A7 Allwinner A31 that is remarkably similar to the Pi 2’s Broadcom BCM2836, and goes for $59 dollars. The Banana Pi will also a new BPI-G1 smart gateway board which is now selling on Ali Express for $100.     The BPI-G1 will not run LInux, but it does support WiFi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee and has a Cortex-M3 microcontroller. Another Raspberry Pi alternative is HardKernel’s $35 dollar Odroid-C1, this features four 1.5 GHz Cortex-A5 cores, with dimensions matching the Pi, and a quasi-Pi-compatible 40-pin expansion bus. then there is a trio of Orange Pi SBCs from Shenzen Xunlong Software that are served up in $40, $50 and $70 dollar flavors.   Innovations and thoughts.   As mentioned earlier Raspberry Pi announced a Sense HAR using the Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Attached On Top (HAT) as an add-on. The Sense HAT has an accelerometer, gyroscope, and a magnetometer, and a air pressure, temperature, and humidity sensor. It also features a 8x8 LED display and a teeny tiny joystick is also included. The Sensor HAT as of now has no price, also it is aimed at the educational market. You can probably thank a strong independent development community for that as there’s a lot to be said for a choosing a product that’s already been widely adopted since there’s plenty of support and third-party software for the platform. If you want more information about the wonderful Raspberry Pi, you can always visit the Official site.