If you know anyone with a 3£ printer near by. And some time with a craft knife.
Would be pretty darn easy to cut the slot in the case. And print a plastic cover that clips in.
As you said plenty on line to add your own M2 and the power circuits to support it.
Likely will be more soon with the plus to look at.
Personally. I have a 40p and a 500 so will wait a few months and see what happens. But I will likely go for that keyboard eventually.
Oh that is kind of interesting about clips vs bolts. But, they really should have modified the 500 case as needed to add a slot for the SSD. I don't want to spend 2x more just to get that slot. Oh well, if I go this route I'll just get a pi 5. It looks like memory upgrade is a huge pain though, and 16gb upgrade is not known to work. People have upgraded to 8gb though.
no, it is, because micro-hdmi is a real brittle connector. you need to be careful when moving a pi4 and up because the cables are heavy and stiff and the connectors are tiiiny.
Lots of design considerations to be made there. When they can easily include a micro-full HDMI cord and adapters and stuff are easy to come by, it's not a horrible compromise IMO.
Define "ultimate"
Pis are neat, but they're not particularly great at anything, and they in fact suck at most things. They're toys except maybe for some very specific use cases (for which anyone reading this doesn't fall under).
You can find something more powerful and useful for $200. Just buy a used laptop, and you even get a battery, screen, and touchpad (neither of which come with the pi)
they have full control of the size of the pcb. they could have made it a cm wider.
I think when they're just a bit faster (like twice as fast) they'll be viable as a desktop computer for most people which is pretty cool.
400 and 500 case are identical E. It is not the space. But the fact that opening the case is not considered a user task.
The 500plus has bolts to open the case rather then the having to deal with breakable clips. The 400 and 500 case need a little more width and completelly new injection moulding to do that.
As I made clear in my post. What you and I are willing to do. Vs what a corporation is willing to sell as maintainable are different.SSD and storage in general has consumer expected requirement to be replaceable. Hence why every laptop etc has easy covers for upgrade.
Doing that requires a whole new case with now injection moulding machines and factory lines etc.
Just looked it up, and I think my point is correct. You could get about one regular HDMI port in the space they used for the two micro ones. And that row of stuff seems kinda full
I can do emulation with a regular keyboardless rpi connected to my tv. You want portable emulation? I do that with a gpi case, and runs on batteries! This weird desktop approach is what doesn't make any sense to me.
I could stream a beefier PC to it with sunshine/moonlight maybe and use it as some kind of really light desktop, but still, why would I do that and not just have the beefier PC in said desk.
If I had one I'd probably dedicate it to emulation.
But I have a MiSTer for that, so...
Likely the issue was that the board layout as is. Did not allow for the current 400 case to take the M2 slot in a way that users could have easy access.
The 500 case (no idea about 400) could accomodate the M2 drive and some people installed their own.
It's also weird that the 500+ comes with a 256GB drive with no 512GB offered (maybe they will offer that later).
Still, for $200 you can get a decent X86 laptop, so this $200 rpi is niche.
At that point I’m not sure if there’s a point running Linux on such a small device. With 64MB RAM, you won’t even be able to run a Python interpreter, let alone any useful services.
You can run Python just fine in 64MB (were you thinking 64KB?). I've written substantial multi-threaded Python applications on boards like that. It used to be a lot of memory! But increase it if you want. You can run Micropython pretty comfortably with 64KB by the way. CPython might need more like 1MB, idk.
The ESP32-P4 for example has up to 32MB in-package RAM and can deal with extra external SPI RAM.
On https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-p4 it says 768K. 32MB might be possible with SPI ram.
Without the overhead of running a Linux Kernel, you might even get more performance out of that.
The OS actually does useful things (multiple processes with memory protection) which is the point of wanting to run it instead of an MCU.
In my region the CM5 is €50-€150 and the CM4 is €32-€102.
Yikes, that is pretty expensive, considering that most cheap Android phones have way more compute power AND a phone with a display etc. This is from 2021 and is the type of thing I have in mind:
Idk if anything came of it. There was a mention at the time of using it on a Linux board same size as a Seeed Xiao.
The Pocket Beagle 2 is maybe like a CM4 or rpi 4 and is $29:
The original Pocket Beagle was priced around the same, from 2017:
https://www.righto.com/2017/12/hands-on-with-pocketbeagle-tiny-25.html
Plus of course there is the whole Pi Zero series. Shouldn't these CM's cost less rather than more?
I just said the same thing, got a couple 1ghz quad core I use with an old version of RetroPi, think they were $35 when I got em
This is a cool piece of tech but I can't really think of real world use cases besides looking cool and having that weird but cool computer-in-keyboard retro vibe. I had the same idea with the 400.
Maybe the best use would be some sort of super portable thin client, but looks very capable to be just that. Having a battery would have made sense too, for portability. Any out of the box way of connecting it to a smartphone screen would be great too, even if it's just tty.
Maybe I'm just being obtuse and just want a laptop, but the whole thing seems impractical to me.
'member when Raspberry Pis were like twenty-five bucks?
there are tons of images of the thing on their store page, including of the pcb, which is entirely custom.
At that point I'm not sure if there's a point running Linux on such a small device. With 64MB RAM, you won't even be able to run a Python interpreter, let alone any useful services.
You'd probably be better off using a microcontroller. The ESP32-P4 for example has up to 32MB in-package RAM and can deal with extra external SPI RAM.
Without the overhead of running a Linux Kernel, you might even get more performance out of that.
Reasonable points about the CM boards but I don’t see much attraction of the CM0 vs CM4 or CM5. Given that they aren’t after cost minimization, might as well take the extraperformance.
The CM0 is smaller and consumes much less power than a CM4/CM5. It's also way cheaper. They give a range of $18-26, probably depending on how much storage is on there.
In my region the CM5 is €50-€150 and the CM4 is €32-€102. That's a huge difference.
So if you just need a small, low-power compute unit for a cheap handheld device, the CM0 really does make sense.
I don't see a good view of the row of ports, but on my 400 there's quite a bit there between the HAT, USBs, micro SD, etc. My guess is that full HDMI would cause some space issues
...why is there no normal HDMI port?
shows what they were up to when they left the M2 slot out of the original Pi 500. I’m sure it helps.
Likely the issue was that the board layout as is. Did not allow for the current 400 case to take the M2 slot in a way that users could have easy access.
While you and Def I. May not worry about having to unclip the case. For a company selling mainly as an educational product. (Dispite that no longer being their main market).
The cost and time for case mods of that level. Likely made this option much more logical.
Many guess something like this was the next stage. Keyboard is a real nice suprise though.
Ultimate?? And this certainly shows what they were up to when they left the M2 slot out of the original Pi 500. I'm sure it helps.
I have a 400 and it's a cool machine but its web browser is unusably slow. This new thing will be better but is will still be slow compared to a basic x86 board.
Interesting about the mechanical keyboard and I wonder if maintenance is possible. With the 400, there is no way to replace the keyboard when it wears out.
The lack of a pointing device is a big error imho. You end up needing a mouse or other thing needing a surface to put it on. Not so good for using on your lap.
Even with my 400, I generally used an external USB trackpad keyboard. So I think this 500+ ($200) has to be compared with a Pi 5 ($132 with 16GB and already overpriced) plus a keyboard and M2 drive. A Pi 5 with 2GB is $50 and a 16gb ddr4 sodimm (which won't fit in a pi) is about $40, so there is a gap somewhere.
No need for the Pico-sized Linux board to have Pi5 performance. It's fine if its performance is like a single core version of the Pi Zero 2, with say 64MB of memory instead of 512MB. Just get the size, power consumption, and cost down.
Reasonable points about the CM boards but I don't see much attraction of the CM0 vs CM4 or CM5. Given that they aren't after cost minimization, might as well take the extraperformance.
All the CMs are quite similar to regular Pi boards, just with optional on-board storage and in a form factor that lends itself to smaller integration. They are mostly used for industrial purposes or at least for people who can make their own PCBs.
Remember, that image above shows the CM0 soldered onto a generic IO board, which is only used as a demonstration platform for what (and how) can be done with the CM0.
The CM0 is only that small PCB soldered on top of it.
That form factor is much better for industrial purposes than the original Zeroes because it's smaller, contains storage (so no finnicky, easy to break SD cart that you need to factor into the cost as well) and the castellated holes are much easier to solder automatically or at scale than through holes. And easier to route connections to and from as well.
Also the CM0, like the other CMs doesn't contain its own power regulation because it expects that the carrier project already has its own power management, thus reducing the efficiency penalty of doubled up power management.
If you don't know what to do with the CM, then it's not for you. But if you do know what to do with it, it's one amazing device.
One thing I would want to make with this is a tiny, super slim handheld computer with a keyboard or a small, slim emulation handheld.
Edit: Tbh, I don't think this could get much smaller, at least not with the ICs they are using. Sure, it would be amazing to have a Pico-form-factor device with pico power consumption and Pi5 performance for €5, but at least for now that are some quite unrealistic targets. Maybe wait another 15 years for that.
"In other words, it’s basically a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with some additional I/O features, an optional eMMC module, and a different form factor." .... "$18 to $26".
Seems like the pi zero 2W is preferable or anyway cheaper. In fact the original Zero and Zero W were fine for many purposes. It's unclear to me what this CM0 module is intended for. It would be great to have a minimal Linux board in the Pico form factor and price level, or anyway sub $10.