Old BBC Micro Gets Some Disk Help From A Raspberry Pi

December 19, 2024 by 15 Comments

[Peter Mount] had a simple problem. He’d treated himself to a retro purchase in the form of a BBC Master 128—a faster sequel to the BBC Micro Model B. The only problem was he needed a way to get software on to it. Cue a creative hack using a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

When [Peter] received the machine, it already had a GoTek floppy emulator, which pulled disk images off a USB drive. However, he wanted an easier and quicker way to get disk images to and from the machine for development purposes. Swapping the USB drive to and from another machine seemed too tedious.

Instead, he decided to swap in a Pi Zero W for this purpose, setting it up to emulate a flash drive by following instructions from MagPi Magazine. This would allow him to use the SCP tool to copy disk images over to the Pi Zero W via its WiFi connection. Basically, the Pi Zero W was acting as a wirelessly-updated storage device hooked up to the GoTek floppy emulator.

It’s a nifty way of doing things. [Peter] could have set about creating his own floppy emulator from scratch with wireless capability included. However, there was no need. He just needed a wirelessly-accessible USB drive, and the Pi Zero W was more than happy to act in that role.

The BBC Micro is a beloved machine of many in the British Isles, and it had rather an extended family. If you’ve pulled off your own nifty hack on this classic machine, be sure to hit us up on the tipsline!

The added 3.3v rail on the Raspberry Pi 500 PCB. (Credit: Samuel Hedrick)

Enabling NVMe On The Raspberry Pi 500 With A Handful Of Parts

December 18, 2024 by 70 Comments

With the recent teardown of the Raspberry Pi 500, there were immediately questions raised about the unpopulated M.2 pad and related traces hiding inside. As it turns out, with the right parts and a steady hand it only takes a bit of work before an NVMe drive can be used with the RP500, as [Jeff Geerling] obtained proof of. This contrasts with [Jeff]’s own attempt involving the soldering on of an M.2 slot, which saw the NVMe drive not getting any power.

The four tiny coupling capacitors on the RP500’s PCIe traces. (Source: Jeff Geerling)

The missing ingredients turned out to be four PCIe coupling capacitors on the top of the board, as well as a source of 3.3 V. In a pinch you can make it work with a bench power supply connected to the pads on the bottom, but using the bottom pads for the intended circuitry would be much neater.

This is what [Samuel Hedrick] pulled off with the same AP3441SHE-7B as is used on the Compute Module 5 IO board. The required BOM for this section which he provides is nothing excessive either, effectively just this one IC and required external parts to make it produce 3.3V.

With the added cost to the BOM being quite minimal, this raises many questions about why this feature (and the PoE+ feature) were left unpopulated on the PCB.

Featured image: The added 3.3 V rail on the Raspberry Pi 500 PCB. (Credit: Samuel Hedrick)

Raspberry Pi 500 And The Case Of The Missing M.2 Slot

December 9, 2024 by 76 Comments

Raspberry Pi just dropped the new Raspberry Pi 500, which like its predecessor puts the similarly named SBC into a keyboard. In a detailed review and teardown video, [Jeff Geerling] goes over all the details, and what there is to like and not like about this new product.

The new Raspberry Pi 500 with the new Raspberry Pi Monitor. (Credit: Jeff Geerling)
The new Raspberry Pi 500 with the new Raspberry Pi Monitor. (Credit: Jeff Geerling)

Most of the changes relative to the RP400 are as expected, with the change to the same BCM2712 SoC as on the Raspberry Pi 5, while doubling the RAM to 8 GB and of course you get the soft power button. As [Jeff] discovers with the teardown, the odd thing is that the RP500 PCB has the footprints for an M.2 slot, as seen on the above image, but none of the components are populated.

Naturally, [Jeff] ordered up some parts off Digikey to populate these footprints, but without luck. After asking Raspberry Pi, he was told that these footprints as well as those for a PoE feature are there for ‘flexibility to reuse the PCB in other contexts’. Sadly, it seems that these unpopulated parts of the board will have to remain just that, with no M.2 NVMe slot option built-in. With the price bump to $90 from the RP400’s $70 you’ll have to do your own math on whether the better SoC and more RAM is worth it.

In addition to the RP500 itself, [Jeff] also looks at the newly launched Raspberry Pi Monitor, a 15.6″ IPS display for $100. This unit comes with built-in speakers and VESA mount, but as [Jeff] notes in his review, using this VESA mount also means that you’re blocking all the ports, so you have to take the monitor off said VESA mount if you want to plug in or out any cables.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi 500 And The Case Of The Missing M.2 Slot” →

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 Seen In The Wild

November 19, 2024 by 23 Comments

Last Thursday we were at Electronica, which is billed as the world’s largest electronics trade show, and it probably is! It fills up twenty airplane-hangar-sized halls in Munich, and only takes place every two years.

And what did we see on the wall in the Raspberry Pi department? One of the relatively new AI-enabled cameras running a real-time pose estimation demo, powered by nothing less than a brand-new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5. And it seemed happy to be running without a heatsink, but we don’t know how much load it was put under – most of the AI processing is done in the camera module.

We haven’t heard anything about the CM5 yet from the Raspberry folks, but we can’t imagine there’s all that much to say except that they’re getting ready to start production soon. If you look really carefully, this CM5 seems to have mouse bites on it that haven’t been ground off, so we’re speculating that this is still a pre-production unit, but feel free to generate wild rumors in the comment section.

The test board looks very similar to the RP4 CM demo board, so we imagine that the footprint hasn’t changed. (Edit: Oh wait, check out the M2 slot on the right-hand side!)

The CM4 was a real change for the compute module series, coming with a brand-new pinout that enabled them to break out more PCIe lanes. Despite the special connectors, it wasn’t all that hard to work with if you’re dedicated. So if you need more computing power in that smaller form factor, we’re guessing that you won’t have to wait all that much longer!

Thanks [kuro] for the tip, and for walking around Electronica with me.

Gloriously Impractical: Overclocking The Raspberry Pi 5 To 3.6 GHz

November 18, 2024 by 9 Comments
The Raspberry Pi 5 board strapped to a liquid nitrogen cooler and with ElmorLabs AMPLE-X1 power board attached. (Credit: Pieter-Jan Plaisier, SkatterBencher.com)
The Raspberry Pi 5 board strapped to a liquid nitrogen cooler with an ElmorLabs AMPLE-X1 power board attached. (Credit: Pieter-Jan Plaisier, SkatterBencher.com)

As impractical as most overclocking of computers is these days, there is still a lot of fun to be had along the way. Case in point being [Pieter-Jan Plaisier]’s recent liquid nitrogen-aided overclocking of an unsuspecting Raspberry Pi 5 and its BCM2712 SoC. Previous OCing attempts with air cooling by [Pieter] had left things off at a paltry 3 GHz from the default 2.4 GHz, with the power management IC (PMIC) circuitry on the SBC turning out to be the main limiting factor.

The main change here was thus to go for liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling, with a small chipset LN2 pot to fit on the SBC. Another improvement was the application of a NUMA (non-uniform memory addressing) patch to force the BCM2712’s memory controller to utilize better RAM chip parallelism.

With these changes, the OC could now hit 3.6 GHz, but at 3.7 GHz, the system would always crash. It was time to further investigate the PMIC issues.

The PMIC imposes voltage configuration limitations and turns the system off at high power consumption levels. A solution there was to replace said circuitry with an ElmorLabs AMPLE-X1 power supply and definitively void the SBC’s warranty. This involves removing inductors and removing solder mask to attach the external power wires. Yet even with these changes, the SoC frequency had trouble scaling, which is why an external clock board was used to replace the 54 MHz oscillator on the PCB. Unfortunately, this also failed to improve the final overclock.

We covered the ease of OCing to 3 GHz previously, and no doubt some of us are wondering whether the new SoC stepping may OC better. Regardless, if you want to get a faster small system without jumping through all those hoops, there are definitely better (and cheaper) options. But you do miss out on the fun of refilling the LN2 pot every couple of minutes.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

FLOSS Weekly Episode 809: Pi4J – Stable And Boring On The Raspberry Pi

November 13, 2024 by No comments

This week, Jonathan Bennett and David Ruggles chat with Frank Delporte about Pi4J, the friendly Java libraries for the Raspberry Pi, that expose GPIO, SPI, I2C and other IO interfaces. Why would anyone want to use Java for the Pi? And what’s changed since the project started? Listen to find out!

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Raspberry Pi OS’s Wayland Transition Completed With Switch To Labwc

October 28, 2024 by 88 Comments

With the latest release of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) the end of the X Window System has become reality, completing a years-long transition period. Although this change between display servers is not something which should be readily apparent to the casual user, the change from the client-server-based X11 protocol to the monolithic Wayland protocol has a number of implications. A major change is that with the display server and window manager no longer being separate units, features such as network transparency (e.g. remote X-sessions) are no longer a native feature, but have to be implemented separately by e.g. the Wayland compositor. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi OS’s Wayland Transition Completed With Switch To Labwc” →