Five ways to upgrade your Raspberry Pi (free PDF)

If you’re looking to soup up your Pi, you’re in luck. There are plenty of hardware add-ons that can boost performance and expand its capabilities. This ebook runs through five options to get you started.

From the ebook:

he Raspberry Pi may pack in a lot of computer for $35, but there are times you’ll want to do more than the vanilla board allows. Fortunately, the success of the Pi—more than 20 million sold and counting—means a huge ecosystem of add-ons is available to extend the Pi’s capabilities.

Whether it’s faster storage or mobile internet connectivity, all can be added, and it can be as easy as slotting a new HAT board on top of the Pi.

Here are five ways you can upgrade your Raspberry Pi using hardware add-ons.

Fast mobile connectivity

If you’re interested in fast mobile internet on the Raspberry Pi, the 4GPi is the Pi’s first commercially produced add-on board offering CAT4 LTE connectivity, with 150Mbps download and 50Mbps upload speeds.

The add-on, produced by Japanese company MechaTracks, is compatible with any Raspberry Pi model that has a 40-pin GPIO header: the Pi 1 A+ and B+, Pi 2 Model B, Pi 3 Model B and B+, and the Pi Zero and Zero W.

While the board is expensive, $222 / €195, TechRepublic’s James Sanders writes it is “substantially more affordable than other LTE-connected development devices”, making it attractive when developing hardware that requires fast mobile connectivity. He says competing products suffer from being bandwidth limited or are adapters for LTE modems used in laptops, with smaller antenna connectors.

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Hardware
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PDF