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Boards and maker kit · Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 3B+

10owners with an opinion
56%of verdicts positive
5/4positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and value; criticized for performance.

What owners wrote

Likes it
I run the media lab at one of Europe's must prolific art universities. The variant I tend to use most is the 3B+. Reasons: - full sized HDMI connector - headphone connector - good bang for the buck If I had one wish for any new product in the Raspberry line it would be: Do the Raspberry Pi 3++ or something. Same thing. Faster, but with USB-C power connector, 4K Video resolution, 2× USB-C I/O, 2× USB-A peripherals and maybe M.2 support.
Likes it
This is why I keep buying 3B+ and Zero 2 W and not any of the newer versions...it's much more in keeping with the relatively low cost board with GPIO and reasonable compute. It's kind of the last one they made that does what I kind of expected out of a Raspberry Pi at a reasonable price point. If I needed more compute I would have skipped the travesty that is ARM and just bought an x86 system.
Neutral
I don't think wpa_supplicant.conf has been used for sometime, as they moved to cloud-init for bootstrapping. It requires the network-config file instead, the format of which is documented on the cloud-init documentation page. I happen to have been experimenting with this for the past few weeks, and the most persistent issue was getting wi-fi to work correctly. It's quite a common issue, with any number of hacks. I offer my own network-config below, though I've only tested it with provisioning Ubuntu Server on the RPis so far (I have two 3B+s). network: version: 2 renderer: networkd wifis: wlan0: regulatory-domain: "AU" dhcp4: true dhcp6: false optional: false access-points: " ": password: " " The important parts are: 1. The renderer, as the default is NetworkManager, which doesn't work correctly with RPis (at least on Ubuntu Server). It may work with RPiOS, but I haven't tested it yet. 2. The regulatory domain, the lack of which is what disables wi-fi in the first place. I forget how much testing I did with the format, but I believe it must be uppercase (I don't remember about quoting the string, however). 3. Disabling IPv6 may be relevant, though unlikely. It was just in a working configurations I found; I just haven't had time to confirm it. The relevant line in my user-data file is as follows: bootcmd: - sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1 The rest of th…
Doesn’t like it
Very cool - amazing that you can fit something that small in your pocket and it can also power a full size monitor & keyboard. It sounds like the Hackberry Pi is a great fit for your use case. I hadn’t considered using the Bumble Berry like that, but now that you mention it, I might try it out like that next time I travel. It would be nice to have the beefier Pi 5 on Bumble Berry for the rare times that I need a GUI. I mostly use terminal on this device so it’s usually not a problem, but when I do have to use the full GUI I find the 3b+ annoyingly slow. I briefly tested the Bumble Berry battery with a Pi 500 and although I got an error message saying that the power supply is not capable of supplying 5A, it seemed to run just fine. The battery is rated to 3A, and streaming full screen video on a 4K screen seemed to draw only about 1A (measured by a usb-c pass-thru dongle). However, I did not push the Pi 5 to its limits and I haven’t used it for an extended amount of time so I can’t confidently say how well it would work. If you’re willing to pay the extra cash and want a smaller form factor it sounds like Hackberry is definitely the way to go.
Likes it
I don’t remember reading that but I had an ADSB receiver prior to COVID and I watched in real time as the aircraft traffic nearly stopped for months using the the data recorded by my receiver and parsed by FlightAware running on my Raspberry Pi 3B+ - as the world shut down.
Likes it
I'm running a Raspberry Pi based GNSS receiver from a 26 Ah SLA battery and an 80W panel. Just passed 2 weeks of uptime in a cloudy period of southern hemisphere autumn. A monte carlo simulation using historical conditions said it had a ~95% chance of no downtime over 3 winter months. A slightly larger battery would bring that up to 99%. The Pi (3b+), GNSS reciever (u-blox ZED F9P), and Waveshare 7600G 4G modem average about 3.5W idle. The GNSS reciever is about 0.1 - 0.2 W of that. Wifi would be more energy efficient, I imagine.
Doesn’t like it
I've been doing some R&D for building a Home Assistant dashboard with a nice touchscreen display I bought to go on the wall at home, with the ultimate goal of expanding it into many home-rolled displays. Having slimmed down the RPi Lite OS as much as I can, running Wayfire with a Chromium kiosk is just too much for the Pi 3B+ I'm using once I add a streaming camera to the dashboard, and it can't cope. My goal is to have a responsive touch-screen display for Home Assistant using something in the form-factor of a Pi Zero 2W, so that I can put the SBC _inside_ the display and build a wooden picture frame to house it all, so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. I'm not sure what kind of API HA has for the frontend, but my first thought, was to build a native application with a Go backend (I write Go for my day job) and use something like Wails[0] for the frontend and completely cut out the heavy-weight Chromium browser. I have Pi4's and Pi5's but I really want to use the littlest amount of compute (and power) I can to achieve this, even it means writing the UI myself. I've tried looking for a lighter-weight browser that I can simply run the HA dashboard in to no avail. [0] https://wails.io/
Likes it
I also never looked at RPi 4s and 5s but for a different reason. Cheaper is good but I don't need "more powerful". I'm using a 3B+ (or whatever) with a TV hat to convert free to air channels to IP streams that I can watch on my phone and tablet. The winning point is obviously the TV hat but also the low power consumption. It's 3.82 W right now. I'm also using an Odroid as my home server, because there where no RPis available and because I can plug two SATA 3 disks in that machine. It's using 3.71 W. Given the load I put on it I could be OK with a less powerful server that would consume even less Watts.
Doesn’t like it
I have been looking for a way to extract the x/y coordinates of people from a realtime video stream over the past week, mostly using YOLO, but also checking out other solutions. I must say, my expectations of where things are in terms of reliability and performance have not been met. Sure on my new threadripper machine with an RTX4080 I can get a decent realtime result, but this is for a month long art installation in another country.. On a Raspberry Pi 3b+ I can decode one frames every 2.5 seconds using the smallest model. Nwed to consider my old notebook.
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
I think the Pi 3 range is a sweet spot for low cost, low power draw, decent-enough CPU. Newer models draw increasingly more power; going from 1.4W to 2.8W may not seem like much, but that's half your battery life. There's a few differences in Raspberry Pi 3 versions that may lead you to buy one or the other: - The Pi 3B has 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11n (single-band) WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1. Power idled at 1.4W and peaked at 3.7W. - The Pi 3B+ removed the 10/100 Ethernet in favor of USB Ethernet (~300Mbps w/USB2.0). CPU cores were overclocked from 1.2GHz to 1.4GHz (so a heatsink is more necessary), with ~15% increase in benchmark performance. It added 802.11ac (dual band) WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2 w/BLE. Power idled at 1.9W and peaked at 5.1W. This is also the only 3-model supporting PoE (w/ extra HAT). - The Pi 3A+ removed Ethernet and reduced USB to a single port. The RAM was reduced from 1GB to 512MB. Power idled at 1.13W and peaked at 4.1W. The A+ form factor is more compact. Overall the 3A+ is smaller, cheaper, and less power draw than the 3B+ (but not as low as the 3B). The lowest power draw with acceptable performance is the 3B . For slightly more power draw and more CPU performance, go with 3A+ . For "everything" (including PoE) the 3B+ is it. If you want the 3A+ but don't need the video, want a smaller form factor, and half the power draw, the Pi Zero 2 W is it. Though the Pi Zero 2 W is supposed to be cheapest, due to demand it's often sold out or more exp…