When Raspberry Pi released the Pi 500, as essentially an RPi 5 integrated into a chiclet keyboard, there were rumors based on the empty spots on the PCB that a better version would be released soon. This turned out to be the case, with [Jeff Geerling] now taking the new RPi 500+ to bits for some experimentation and keyboard modding.
The 500’s case was not designed to be opened, but if you did, you’d find that there was space allocated for a Power-Over-Ethernet section as well as an M.2 slot, albeit with all of the footprints unpopulated. Some hacking later and enterprising folk found that soldering the appropriate parts on the PCB does in fact enable a working M.2 slot. What the 500+ thus does is basically do that soldering work for you, while sadly not offering a PoE feature yet without some DIY soldering.
Perhaps the most obvious change is the keyboard, which now uses short-travel mechanical switches – with RGB – inside an enclosure that is now fortunately easy to open, as you may want to put in a different NVMe drive at some point. Or, if you’re someone like [Jeff] you want to use this slot to install an M.2 to Oculink adapter for some external GPU action.
After some struggling with eGPU devices an AMD RX 7900 XT was put into action, with the AMD GPU drivers posing no challenge after a kernel recompile. Other than the Oculink cable preventing the case from closing and also losing the M.2 NVMe SSD option, it was a pretty useful mod to get some real gaming and LLM action going.
With the additions of a presoldered M.2 slot and a nicer keyboard, as well as 16 GB RAM, you have to decide whether the $200 asking price is worth it over the $90 RPi 500. In the case of [Jeff] his kids will have to make do with the RPi 500 for the foreseeable future, and the RPi 400 still finds regular use around his studio.
I ordered one, as the Pi 500 is already a good compile + hardware test bed, and the only thing it lacked was NVMe and more ram. The only real struggle I’ll have is to decide whether the Argon40 One Up or the Pi 500+ will be more useful in this role.
No, please freakin’ no with the extra buttons on the right of the Return key. As a touch-typist I’m far too frequently hitting PgUp or PgDn instead of Return and scarily jumping up or down a page.
Do people simply not test those keyboards on touch-typists??!?!!?!?!?
It’s only us old fogies who can touch type these days.
The rest of the world only learned to use their thumbs while holding their phone.
And the award for condescending post of the week goes to…
I think you mean the award for the most “accurate observation” of the day….
Doesn’t make it any less true.
At least it has full-sized arrow keys. My bugbear with compact keyboards these days is half-height arrows, particularly when they put PgUp and PgDn on the top half. A real concentration breaker for the same reasons.
How wildly are your pinkies flying to overshoot the 2nd widest key on the keyboard??!?!!?!?!?
That looks to me like a normal, full-sized return key. If you’re overshooting it regularly, you may need to work on improving your touch typing.
i got a laptop with this feature and i can confirm the problem you are having. but i mostly got used to it. i like it because i wanted page up / down.
for a keyboard meant to be used on a desktop, it doesn’t seem like such a great trade off…could just have a proper keyboard if it isn’t constrained by a laptop form factor
I like keyboard computer…
Plugin the eGPU is fun but meaningless as using a simple dedicated rpi5 and wireless input would be wiser…
WTF is going on?
Why is this article missing the one essential link to the official announcement?!
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/the-ultimate-all-in-one-pc-raspberry-pi-500-plus-on-sale-now-at-200/
just to some I guess clickbait YT video?
That’s a Jeff Geerling video. He doesn’t really do clickbait. He also does a ton of work for the community as a whole, great guy.
Mmmm his channel seems 90% raspi clickbait? This thing is same price as second hand M1 air. No thanks
Seems like it would be a great Picotron. Now, if only it had a standard 60% layout and hot-swappable switches.
I do wonder, what would the POE use case be?
Oof I attempted to make a new comment…. not reply. Apologies.
at that price and specs it’s starting to really stand out as being exceptionally more closed than a PC, and less performant and less expandable and probably (i’m guessing) with a worse cooling system
but for real at that price you can get a used nuc that doesn’t force you to use a kernel that was fused to a closed and broken firmware. if the firmware wasn’t so severely dysfunctional, or if its interfaces were stable, it wouldn’t be so easy to dismiss it.
raspberry pi is a closed source cancer eating at computing.