According to Flirc, the enclosure is made out of sand-blasted, machined silver aluminum. It was created with the living room in mind, sporting rounded edges and a fanless design that serves as a passive processor heat sink. That means users could possibly overclock the board’s CPU without having to worry about overheating issues going on within the silver-and-black enclosure.
As a refresher, the Raspberry Pi 3 (Model B), released back in February 2016, is the third generation of the popular Raspberry Pi board series. It features a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor clocked at 1.2GHz, 1GB of system memory, Wireless N and Bluetooth 4.1 connectivity, and Bluetooth Low Energy. There’s also four USB ports, one HDMI port, an Ethernet port, a microSD card slot, and output for composite video and audio.
That said, don’t expect the Raspberry Pi 3 to run the new Doom installment. The board packs Broadcom’s dual-core VideoCore IV multimedia co-processor that’s compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0, and can handle 1080p video output at 30Hz and H.264 high-profile decoding. While we’ve seen Quake III Arena running at a Full HD resolution to give you some idea of its graphical prowess, the Raspberry Pi Foundation says the co-processor is capable of one gigapixel per second, 1.5 gigatexels per second, or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and a DMA infrastructure.
The big deal with the credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi boards is that they can serve as a powerful media center on the cheap. But they’re also relatively wide open for basically any application, providing 40 GPIO pins, a camera interface, and a display interface to expand the board’s basic functionality. The first generation of Raspberry Pi boards went live in February 2012, and since then we’ve seen a number of amazing uses, from replicating the Pip-Boy from the Fallout games to creating a working mobile phone, and on to serving as a built-in car computer.
“Since the first Raspberry Pi was announced in 2012, it was inextricably linked with XBMC/Kodi,” writes Nathan Betzen from the Kodi team. “It was built with the tinkerer in mind and capable of new advanced applications, but always with the perfect fallback of being the tiny living-room Kodi media center that could.”
Kodi’s custom enclosure costs a mere $20 here in the States, and it also supports the Raspberry Pi 2 and the Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+ board. The case will come partially assembled, with the top, black plastic piece already connected to the aluminum housing. Customers merely need to attach the included thermal pad (12 x 12 x 1.4mm) to the board’s processor, place the board inside the case, and then connect the top and bottom together with provided 10mm M.5 screws.
The new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B board can be purchased here for $35. Customers can also grab camera modules, official Raspberry Pi cases, the Raspberry Pi 3 power supply, and more. Fun fun fun!
