After having a couple of system crashes of my PI2, Which I was using to run my DHCP, VNP, DNS, NTP and WoL servers I decided it was time to upgrade it.   I did this by upgrading the PI3 in my Media Center to the newer PI3B+  which gives faster network speed (it doubled in practical use) and a bit more speed which will help when I get RetroPie up and running again.    The PI3 that was in there, I have repurposed to use as my home server.

The main differences between the two versions are….

1. Added WIFI
2. Added Bluetooth
3. 900Mhz processor upgraded to 1.2Ghz
4. 32-bit processor is now 64-bit processor
5. 450Mhz ram boosted to 900Mhz ram speed.

Overall this is quiet a performance boost.

There is an issue with the PI3, in that when BlueTooth is enabled, it will consume the UART and the serial port which I need to access the GPS.   After doing some digging around the internet, it looks like the solution to that problem is to modify the  /boot/config.txt file by adding the following two lines of code.

dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt
enable_uart=1

What these two line do are to disable the bluetooth completely.  The second line turns on the serial port.   This should be enough to get the serial port on the PI working as I want.

As an alternative there is a possibility of moving bluetooth to a difference serial port using the command

dtoverlay=pi3-miniuart-bt

For my purposes, I’m happy to disable Bluetooth completely though.