Raspberry Pi launches budget-friendly $12 M.2 add-on board
What simply occurred? Raspberry Pi is now accepting orders for its M.2 HAT+, an add-on board that permits Pi 5 homeowners to attach M.2 M-key peripherals to their single board computer systems. The accent sells for $12 and is obtainable to buy from accredited resellers as of writing, as long as yow will discover one in inventory.
When the Raspberry Pi 5 was first launched, the group teased a prototype HAT+ that linked to the pc’s PCIe 2.0 bus. Following months of revisions and testing, that product morphed into the M.2 HAT+ that is now accessible.
The testing course of was intensive, as Raspberry Pi wished to make sure vast compatibility out of the gate. In a single instance, the group labored with an NVMe drive producer to iron out a bug stopping a drive from working accurately.
The Raspberry Pi 5 hit the scene final September and is kind of succesful. It incorporates a 2.4 GHz quad-core, 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 processor alongside a VideoCore VII GPU, which helps OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2. The combo is nice for a 2-3x CPU velocity enchancment and twice the GPU efficiency in comparison with its predecessor, and there is hundreds extra I/O bandwidth.
Pi 5 is able to driving two 4K60 shows concurrently over HDMI and moreover helps dual-band 802.11 ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0. There’s additionally a microSD card interface with SDR104 help, twin USB 3.0 ports supporting simultaneous 5Gbps operation, two USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet jack, and the aforementioned PCIe 2.0 x1 interface to connect speedy storage.
The corporate claims the brand new add-on board allows as much as 500 MB/s information switch to and from linked peripherals, and that linked NVMe drives can be utilized as a boot supply. Raspberry Pi has revealed full documentation on the M.2 HAT+ for these inquisitive about a deeper dive.
These hoping to get their fingers on an M.2 HAT+ within the close to future look to be out of luck. A fast test of a number of accredited resellers turned up zero accessible stock and it isn’t clear when restocks are anticipated.
