Raspberry Pi 3 Breaks Cover In FCC Filing, Now With On-Board WiFi And Bluetooth

It's beginning to look like Raspberry Pi's developers are keen on releasing newer models a lot quicker than before. The second generation unit was released just last February, and already we're being treated to a tease of the third iteration. Well, by "tease", we mean that the FCC has a public filing now of all of the important bits of info - including photos.

At first glance the RPi 3 looks similar to the Raspberry Pi 2. With top-down images side-by-side, it took us some serious effort to spot the differences, and the differences we did see turned out to be some modification to the traces and filter cap arrangements on the board, not the ports, headers and slots.

The only thing the FCC didn't leak out is a table of official specs. But based on the fact that we know wireless has been added - by way of a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module of some sort--and that the RPi 3 looks just like the RPi 2, it'd be easy to write this off as merely an RPi 2 with wireless capabilities tossed in. However, it'd be very unusual for those additions to bump the product's major version number, so we'd bet that there are more upgrades present than what the photos, mechanicals and information provided reveal.

At this point, until an official announcement is made, some of the details will be up-in-the-air. One thing we can't help but wonder: will the Raspberry Pi 3 be vulnerable to the Xenon Flash "Death Ray"? What we do know for sure is that the RPi 3 will continue to allow people to create some amazing things.

Need an example? Look no further than our DIY mini PC build right here.