A while ago I received a Raspberry Pi 2 model B - the new and improved faster version of the Raspberry Pi.
I already had a Raspberry Pi B+, so it was neat to be able to compare the two.
Unboxing
Here are some first impression pictures:
The Pi2 (on the right) has a box that's thicker, to accommodate the new "manual", which is more or less just a whole lot of legal stuff in a whole lot of languages. I'd prefer if they had just kept that out of it and saved a few million trees instead.
To my untrained eye, the boards themselves look nearly identical. Upon closer inspection I can see that the Pi2 has a larger main chip, a smaller raspberry logo, and the fine print gives the complete name, model, and version numbers. And on startup the Pi2 has 4 raspberry logos showing up - one for each core of the new quad-core chip. Plus it's a whole lot faster, which kind of gives it away too.
It's nice that the rest remains exactly the same, like the size and position of the ports and pins - meaning that everything that works on or with the B+ will most likely also work on the Pi2. This gives us all kinds of options when looking for cases, for example.
The Upgrade... attempt
Since I had my first RPi nicely set up, I thought I'd try upgrading the SD card that came with it so that I could then use it on either of the boards. That turned out to be easier said than done.
First off, I did try just moving the SD card to the Pi2, to see if that would work. Nope. Not even close, it just hung there on that colourful screen. It was worth a try.
I should tell you a little about my setup: I use a wireless keyboard/trackpad for a mouse, which uses a wireless dongle, plus I have it set up with a cheap no-name kind of WiFi dongle. I also have a regular big keyboard plugged in.
So I went through the whole upgrade process to bring the Raspbian OS up to snuff to handle the Pi2. From what I understood, it should then be useable on either Pi. In my case, the Pi2 just hung on the colourful startup screen (the 4 colours full screen). I don't know if that was because of different USB power limits on the new Pi, or what, but it wasn't happy. It still ran on my original Pi, thankfully. And I did also take a backup of the SD card onto my Mac, just in case.
I tried a few times, without success, and eventually just put the card back to its original state from the backup.
I've heard that to use WiFi the RPi might require the use of a powered USB hub, so maybe that was it. I realized later that I do still have a powered hub in that big pile of "old stuff I never use, but haven't had the heart to throw out yet", so in a future attempt I could try that.
So then I decided to just use a new SD card for the pi2. I happened to have a 32GB card handy for that, so might as well use it. I downloaded the latest Raspbian image, and without the WiFi dongle everything has been working well ever since.
I did try installing that same WiFi dongle, but the drivers seem to be completely different than those for the original Pi, and I wasn't able to get it running using the same setup instructions as before. And it's also possible that some power issues were getting in the way again. I hope not, as I'd prefer to keep that little computer as small and portable as possible.
I did buy another cheap WiFi dongle later, and even though I *thought* I had the right type this time, it's also not plug-and-play, so I'll have to figure that out some time when I have the time and courage to do so 
And maybe I'll also try it with the powered hub while I'm at it.
What I learned
* The Pi1 is NOT directly compatible with the Pi2 (I think that's old news now)
* I can't use my Pi1 SD card on my Pi2 (maybe an upgrade has worked for some people?). I found it just wasn't worth the effort to keep trying this.
* The Pi2 really is MUCH faster than the Pi1 - in fact I found the Pi1 somewhat too slow to the point of it being annoying to use. The Pi2 is no longer annoying and, in my opinion, is quite a useable little computer.
* My Python applications, and previous posts on how to program the Pi using Python, all work exactly the same way on the Pi2 as they do on the Pi - hooray for that!
* One more small note - I did have a 4GB card I tried to use for the Pi2, but it ran out of space no matter how I tried to install Raspbian on it. From what I recall, 4GB was OK on the earlier versions, but now the minimum requirement seems to be 8GB.
ps, Now that I've set up both Pi's to work with Remote Access, it makes even more sense to have a dedicated SD card for each, as now I can have both running anywhere on the network while controlling them both from the comfort of my Mac - but that's another blog post
Cheers,
-Nico
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