The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is likely the most popular maker board available today at $35, but it just got a little brother, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+.
Raspberry Pi.org announced a new smaller and cheaper board of the RP3 series. You can now get the 1.4GHz clock speed, 5GHz wireless networking and improved thermals of Raspberry Pi 3B+ in a smaller form factor, and at the smaller price of $25.
In order to decrease the price by $10, they obviously had to cut some features. We lost the “Gigabit” Ethernet port, memory dropped to 512 MB RAM instead of 1GB, and there’s only one USB port. There also some invisible changes with improved USB mass-storage booting and improved thermal management.
Want to see benchmark results of various Raspberry Pi boards? Gareth Halfacree has a great article on this aspect, comparing Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ with other RPs.
Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ incorporates most of the neat enhancements we made to its big brother, and features:
- A 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU
- 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM
- Dual-band 802.11ac wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.2/BLE
- Improved USB mass-storage booting
- Improved thermal management
Specifications
- Processor: Broadcom BCM2837B0, Cortex-A5364-bit SoC @ 1.4 GHz
- Memory: 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM
- Network: 2.4 and 5 GHz IEE 802.11.b/g/n/ac wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2/BLE
- Interface port: Extended 40-pin GPIO header
- Video & sound: 1 × full size HDMI
- MIPI DSI display port
- MIPI CSI camera port
- 4-way stereo output and composite video port
- Multimedia: H.264, MPEG-4 decoder (1080p30); H.264 encoder (1080p30); OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 graphics
- SD-card support: Micro SD-card for operating system and data
- Power supply: 5 V/2.5 A DC via micro-USB-connector
- 5 V DC via GPIO header
- Operating temperature range: 0–50°C
- Compliance: For a complete list of regional compliance certificates, click here
- Production: The Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ will be in productions until at least January 2023
