Raspberry Pi 400 teardown and review

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/raspberry-pi-400-teardown-and-review

by geerlingguy • 6 years ago

124 66 6 years ago

jeffgeerling.com

4x5-Guy• 6 years ago

Interesting form factor of the board. Everything on one edge. I wish I could buy just that.

I supposed I will have to settle for the whole thing and toss the keyboard.

geerlingguy• 6 years ago

I wonder if someone will build a little custom (long) case for the Pi 400 board. It's a very simple design, and in the official Pi 400 case, it just snaps in with two snaps. Could be 3D printed easily enough.

avh02• 6 years ago

AFAIK (don't have one) the (larger, with SSD slot) NESPi cases redirect things to the back (minus two USB ports)

edit: ignore me, i see now you said board, not case.

jamesfmilne• 6 years ago

Try the Pi4 Compute Module IO board

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4-io-boa...

tssva• 6 years ago

If your goal is just to have all ports on one side there are a few cases available for the RPi which accomplish this. I use the Argon One case.

omnibrain• 6 years ago

Has anyone reading this ever used scroll lock? I've at least used num lock before, but never scroll lock.

Yes, to see the check the output of the console when it is fast scrolling, or occasionally in other programs to decouple the scrolling from cursor-movement.

Similarly the lack of a PAUSE button gives me pause. How would I stop running scripts/programs to check the output before making them continue? I guess there is some magic ctrl+??? combo for that...

afandian• 6 years ago

Check out tmux. I don't ssh without it. It gives you persistent sessions, tabs, scroll and more.

Lammy• 6 years ago

tmux is great but isn't in my OS' base installation, e.g.:

- won't be available first thing after an OS install.

- might be on a filesystem/dataset that's unavailable in certain circumstances (less common these days).

- might be broken after a major-version upgrade if built against old libs if I don't have a compat<n-1> package installed.

Scroll Lock has been a lifesaver many times :)

tpmx• 6 years ago

In typical terminals: Ctrl-S (Pause) and Ctrl-Q (Continue).

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7263/hist...

morsch7• 6 years ago

This works even during POST. At least it used to.

nobrains• 6 years ago

I always use the SCROLL LOCK button to disable scroll lock when I mistakenly press the SCROLL LOCK button.

metaphor2• 6 years ago

Throwing KVM switching and spreadsheet review into the bag of real world considerations.

mongol• 6 years ago

It changes the behaviour in Excel

SSchick• 6 years ago

Hoping they release a 6 or 8gb model, 4gb might be somewhat tight for some office environments.

peterburkimsher• 6 years ago

What are the physical dimensions? I'd like to know how it compares to an 11" MacBook Air for portability.

LeonM• 6 years ago

Maximum dimensions 286 mm × 122 mm × 23 mm

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400-unit/

saagarjha• 6 years ago

For comparison, a MacBook Air is ~300 mm×190 mm×17 mm.

Kliment4• 6 years ago

One thing that's missing compared to the standalone pi is the camera connector (and display connector, but I've found that less useful as HDMI displays are cheaper and more available and I've ended up using several Pis in headless camera applications).

Legogris2• 6 years ago

I think the overlap of people who wants it integrated in a keyboard and people who will make meaningful use of camera connectors is pretty small.

Kliment4• 6 years ago

You're probably right (though I see a lot of people using a pi as their first foray into computer vision, and I could imagine some of them wanting to play with this) but it was not mentioned in the review or in the raspi blog post so I thought I'd point it out.

unwind• 6 years ago

As someone with experience in headless cameras, do you have any comments on the Pine64 "PineCube" [1] stand-alone IP camera? It seems pretty awesome but I have no clue.

[1] https://pine64.com/product/pinecube-dev-kit/?v=0446c16e2e66

Kliment4• 6 years ago

Nope, sorry, haven't used it. The major benefit of the raspi setup is the software support, which is excellent.

ohazi3• 6 years ago

No idea if they have plans for this, but a laptop form-factor device would sell like hotcakes (judging by the apparent success of the Pinebook Pro).

You could probably design a drop-in replacement motherboard for a Thinkpad X or T sized laptop pretty easily using the new compute module 4. You could even used the single pcie lane to run it off of a real SSD, since the microSD card seems to be the speed/reliability bottleneck.

gambiting• 6 years ago

Just remember that the PCIe slot on the compute module comes at the expense of all USB ports. It's one or the other, not both.

ohazi3• 6 years ago

Not all of them -- Only the USB3 ports

akmittal• 6 years ago

You can connect Pi to this and get a laptop experience. It has full HD screen, Built in battery and can connect Both SBC and any Samsung Dex/Huawei Easy Projection phone.

https://nexdock.com/

rglullis• 6 years ago

I'd take the idea of using the PCIe lane for an SSD but I would take in the opposite direction. What I would like to see is a board in this form-factor and a slot for the Compute Module. The board could then be a (hopefully cheap) dock for the CM that we could have as the basis for different modes of computing. The CM + disk could be a portable "puck" that should be easy to plug into the dock.

What would that gives us? Well, I could get multiple of these docks and I'd just have to carry the CM puck around. If I am working I'd still like to use an external keyboard, mouse and a big display. I could have a dock on my TV if I want to play games or have "smart TV" functions. We could also have a "laptop version" of this dock and it would be like the Atrix lapdock. One could even imagine a dock in the form-factor of a smartphone/tablet.

Such a system would help a lot in fighting e-waste (we would be able to upgrade only the things that need upgrading, instead of being played into planned obsolescence) and it would also be an intuitive way to get back things from the cloud and make computing "Personal" again - the "puck" with the brains and memory would be the physical representation of the things that we have, the docks would just be the different ways to interact with it.

jliu70• 6 years ago

As someone already mentioned - there's the nexdock which gives you the ability to have a laptop form factor for the Raspberry Pi. There's also a kickstarter from Elecrow offering a nifty laptop form factor called the CrowPi2. The CrowPi2 emphasis is on learning so there's a PCB with lots of sensors and other devices built-in.

avhception• 6 years ago

If there only was a version of this thing with a more serious storage (like a small onboard NVVMe or something) and a boot path like coreboot or EFI... is there mainline 2d / 3d acceleration nowadays? Could even release a USB-C dock so we have power, ethernet and displayport with one connector...

ohazi3• 6 years ago

I'd be shocked if coreboot ever supports the Raspberry Pi... the boot process on the Broadcom SoC is completely insane. The GPU is actually responsible for starting the CPU on power up, and it needs several firmware blobs in order to do that.

unnouinceput3• 6 years ago

And here is your prayer answered, by the same author:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/im-booting-my-raspber...

floatboth2• 6 years ago

There is indeed EFI https://rpi4-uefi.dev – even with ACPI tables, but if you choose ACPI you won't get all the Pi-specific devices (i.e. the GPU I don't think has an ACPI attachment yet).

And there has been 3d acceleration drivers in mainline linux for even the previous Pies too for a few years. But only in Linux.

rbanffy3• 6 years ago

This is remarkably like our 8-bit computers of the late 70's and early 80's. Just add a TV and have fun. It's 2020's "Commodore 4194304".

I wonder if adding a cassette recorder is a possibility ;-)

unnouinceput3• 6 years ago

If by cassette recorder you mean the modern cheap SSD instead of in-built SD card then yeah, it's possible.

rbanffy3• 6 years ago

No. I meant (jokingly, of course) an actual cassette recorder. It can be attached to the GPIO's analog pins.

Someone is probably still making them.

Legogris2• 6 years ago

A new generation is about to experience the brittleness of micro-HDMI.. It's one thing in a mostly static device but something like a keyboard? This will break. I wish they had made it full-size or at the very least mini-HDMI (given that they don't go the TB dongle-route).

I've lost count of the number of cables and adapters I've had to throw away, apart from the couple of device-side connectors that either take minutes of fiddling before connecting or are now practically useless.

00deadbeef• 6 years ago

Reminds me of the Amstrads, BBC Micros, Acorns, and Amigas I used to love.

ghostDancer• 6 years ago

The first thing I thought of when I saw the GPIO were the Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum computers.

GekkePrutser• 6 years ago

Too bad they still kept the micro-HDMI :( They could have provided at least one full-size one. Space is at much less of a premium in this thing than in the pi board.

Otherwise, this looks like a pretty nice device for travelling. Might get one (though for the same price you can get an 11" pinebook which is a full laptop - much heavier though!)

pulse7• 6 years ago

The 11" pinebook has only 2 GB RAM and 1.2GHz CPU... and a MUCH smaller community...

aequitas• 6 years ago

I can't make it up from the documentation but the USB-C seems only to be for power. Which is a shame as well. As it would be ideal if you could plug this in with one cable using a USB-C dock or USB-C compatable monitor.

Vogtinator• 6 years ago

It has USB 2.0 as well.

morsch7• 6 years ago

Does anybody know if this is fast enough to run a browser with a Jitsi client? As a standalone conferencing terminal.

alias_neo6• 6 years ago

At a guess I'd say yes. The Pi 3 model could run Chromium and play YouTube at a reasonable-ish speed in a full desktop environment.

The Pi 4 is faster with more RAM (if you get the larger RAM models which go up to 8GB). This one is faster again than the Pi4B.

morsch7• 6 years ago

Thanks, however playing YouTube only requires decoding video which is less difficult than encoding it. You need both for Jitsi, and at a non-trivial resolution (>=720p) to boot.

gorgoiler• 6 years ago

The Pi has come of age.

With this form factor, it is truly the grandchild of the BBC Model B and I love it.

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/76/...

If they made one with big black mechanical switches and deep cherry red status LEDs, I would happily pay whatever they asked.

CarelessExpert• 6 years ago

Honestly, taking the Pi itself (which has a very keyboard-friendly PCB layout) and using it in a custom mechanical keyboard build could be a fun little project!

In fact, this would make the perfect guts for something to feature on /r/cyberdeck!

Which, to no ones surprise, is why I see this thing has hit the top of that subreddit...

Nginx487• 6 years ago

My dream is RPi laptop. Laptop which is thin and lightweight enough to be handy, but having real RJ-45 and access to the pinout, and having battery large enough for 24+ hours of uninterrupted work.

Could be a great tool for engineers working "in the field", allowing to connect any device to pinout and check how it works on the spot, with simple Python script. Shame such an idea did not implement yet, I feel pity for not having proper background in electronics.

Dreaming on, I also can imagine Arduino co-processor, like it has been done in Latte Panda (Arduino Leonardo on SBC). It would've been an ultimate tool for prototyping, testing or studying electronics, Embedded and IoT.

Kliment4• 6 years ago

@dang this is not a duplicate of the raspberry pi announcement article - it's a separate review and teardown

metaphor2• 6 years ago

Why was this marked dupe? It's a lot more interesting and informative than the OG announcement.

m-p-3• 6 years ago

Mods: This isn't a [dupe] at all, and provide interesting info that the official blog post doesn't.

dznodes• 6 years ago

The next obvious upgrade is to make the pi-400 headless, right? Why have wires at all? It should have a rechargeable battery like most keyboard/mouse combos do.

Then you just plug it in to charge it and every other perf connects via bluetooth or wifi.

Raspberry Pi 400 teardown and review

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