Day: October 4, 2024

The Raspberry Pi 500 Hints At Its Existence

October 4, 2024 by No comments

It’s fairly insignificant in the scheme of things, and there’s no hardware as yet for us to look at, but there it is. Tucked away in a device tree file, the first mention of a Raspberry Pi 500. We take this to mean that the chances of an upgrade to the Pi 400 all-in-one giving it the heart of a Pi 5 are now quite high.

We’ve remarked before that one of the problems facing the Raspberry Pi folks is that a new revision of the regular Pi no longer carries the novelty it might once have done, and certainly in hardware terms (if not necessarily software) it could be said that the competition have very much caught up. It’s in the Compute Module and the wildcard products such as the all-in-one computers that they still shine then, because even after several years of the 400 it’s not really seen an effective competitor.

So we welcome the chance of an all-in-one with a Pi 5 heart, and if we had a wish list for it then it should include that mini PCI-E slot on board for SSDs and other peripherals. Such a machine would we think become a must-have for any space-constrained bench.

Need High-Power Li-Ion Charging? How About 100 W

October 4, 2024 by 1 Comment

Ever want a seriously powerful PCB for charging a Li-Ion pack? Whatever you want it for, [Redherring32] has got it — it’s a board bearing the TPS25750D and BQ25713 chips, that lets you push up to 100 W into your 1S Li-Ion pack through the magic of USB Power Delivery (USB-PD).

Why do you need so much power? Well, when you put together a large amount of Li-Ion cells, this is how you charge it all at once – an average laptop might charge the internal battery at 30 W, and it’s not uncommon for laptop batteries to be dwarfed by hackers’-built packs.

A 4-layer creation peppered with vias, this board’s a hefty one — it’s not often that you see a Li-Ion charger designed to push as much current as possible into a cell, and the chips are smart enough for that. As far as the onboard chips’ capabilities go, the board could handle pack configurations from 1S to 4S, and even act as a USB-PD source — check the IC configuration before you expect to use it for any specific purpose.

Want a simpler charger, even if it’s less powerful? Remember, you can use PPS-capable PD chargers for topping up Li-Ion packs, with barely any extra hardware required.