Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ HeaterMeter Support


 

Bryan Mayland

TVWBB Hall of Fame
The Pi Foundation has released an updated model A! It is a Pi Model 3 B+ except without the Ethernet and only one USB port
  • 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU
  • 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM
  • Dual-band 802.11ac wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.2/BLE

They are currently available for $25 and again I am jealous of folks near a MicroCenter store as pishop.us charges $7.45 in shipping, cah'mahn! Their GPIO layout is the same so that's good, but the board is physically smaller so the USB port will be inaccessible inside the standard HeaterMeter 4.3 case. I've got one on order to verify it all fits together properly and I can release a new snapshot with support for booting this device and having it recognized properly. It will use the Pi 2/3 target. I'm not sure there's any benefit to using one of these over a Zero W, which is less than half the cost and is unnoticeably slower when running the HeaterMeter firmware. Updates will be coming to support it though!
 
I've just published updated firmware that works on the "Raspberry Pi 3 Model A Plus Rev 1.0" (as it reports it self to be) to HeaterMeter downloads. Note that it uses the Pi 2 / 3 / 3B firmware, not the Zero firmware. Not many changes needed but I may not have time to push to github before taking off for Thanksgiving tomorrow evening.

It fits inside the 4.3 case but there will need to be a special option for it which combines some of the Zero parts with the 3B parts so it fits correctly and doesn't have the holes in the side. The USB port will be sealed up inside the case, inaccessible.

I'll also try to mate it with a 4.2 board next week. I think it will fit as well, although there's no case design to really accommodate it.
 

 

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