which Pi?

It’s all very well writing new software but if you don’t keep abreast of the availability of the hardware you need to run it, you can get in a mess. Raspberry Pi is now making Pi4’s. Our yellow and sensory bikes run on Pi2’s, and the Magdeburg and Buzz bikes on Pi3B’s. There are also Pi3B+’s available, which are more expensive and power hungry as they have POE. (power over ethernet). I’ve been discussing which Pi model we should be buying with Dave and Sukandar, remembering that it was a stupid amount of work to update the Pi2 System to run on the Pi3B.  Sukandar unearths a useful article https://hackaday.com/2018/03/14/raspberry-pi-gets-faster-cpu-and-better-networking-in-the-new-model-3-b/
from which we can conclude that
– the Pi3B+ has better networking, both wired and wireless
– it also has a PoE option
– and is slightly faster

None of this is important for us, so if we can still get them, we decide that we should get the regular 3B now because of the power savings. I put in an order for 12.