Pulse of the Pi
The Raspberry Pi 2 looks just like its predecessor, the Rasp Pi 1 B+, and has lots of similarities. However, the freshly hatched second generation is much faster.
Raspberry Pi 1 and 2 compared
Lead Image © Daniel Villeneuve, 123RF.com
Since the Raspberry Pi first went on sale in 2012, it has accumulated a customer base of five million. From the beginning, Rasp Pi fans found ever more applications that pushed the boundaries of the limited hardware built into the nano-computer – and when the computing power was really at its limit, you could always overclock the CPU.
In July 2014, when the revised Raspberry Pi Model B+ was released, Eben Upton first announced that version 2 of the Rasp Pi would be available in 2017 [1]. However, on February 2, 2015, the Foundation surprised the world with a much earlier release of the second generation of the computer.
Second Look
At first glance, the board in version 2 looks identical to that found in the Rasp Pi 1 Model B+ (RPi1B+; Figure 1). The format and the connections have not changed. Users switching over to the Rasp Pi 2 (RPi2B) will find that the accessories and add-on boards that connect to the GPIO still fit. However, a closer look reveals a number of changes. The 512MB storage that is mounted on the BCM2835 chip [2] in the first model has wandered onto the underside of the board in the new version 2 (Figure 2), and it is twice as large, with a 1GB capacity.
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