Regretfully: $3,000 Worth Of Raspberry Pi Boards

September 20, 2025 by 53 Comments

We feel for [Jeff Geerling]. He spent a lot of effort building an AI cluster out of Raspberry PI boards and $3,000 later, he’s a bit regretful. As you can see in the video below, it is a neat build. As Jeff points out, it is relatively low power and dense. But dollar for dollar, it isn’t much of a supercomputer.

Of course, the most obvious thing is that there’s plenty of CPU, but no GPU. We can sympathize, too, with the fact that he had to strip it down twice and rebuild it for a total of three rebuilds. One time, he decided to homogenize the SSDs for each board. The second time was to affix the heatsinks. It is always something.

With ten “blades” — otherwise known as compute modules — the plucky little computer turned in about 325 gigaflops on tests. That sounds pretty good, but a Framework Desktop x4 manages 1,180 gigaflops. What’s more is that the Framework turned out cheaper per gigaflop, too. Each dollar bought about 110 megaflops for the Pis, but about 140 for the Framework.

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It’s A Pi, But It’s Not Quite A Raspberry Pi

August 17, 2025 by 17 Comments

When is a Raspberry Pi not a Raspberry Pi? Perhaps when it’s a Pi Pico-shaped board with an RP3A0 SoC from a Raspberry Pi Zero 2, made by [jonny12375].

Back in the early days of the Raspberry Pi, there was a offering from the Korean manufacturer Odroid, which wasn’t merely a similar machine with a different SoC, but a full clone in a smaller form factor featuring the same BCM2385 chip as the original. It was electrically and software-wise identically to the real thing, which we suspect didn’t go down very well with the Pi folks in Cambridge. The supply of Broadcom chips dried up, and ever since then the only way to get a real Pi has been from the official source. That’s not quite the end of the unofficial Pi story though, because a few hardy experimenters have made Pi clones like this one using chips desoldered from the real thing.

It’s the fruit of a reverse-engineering project to find the chip’s pinout, and it’s a proof of concept board rather than the intended final target of the work. The process involved painstakingly sanding down each layer of a Zero 2 board to reveal the traces and vias. The current board has a few quirks but it boots, making this an impressive piece of work on all counts. We’re looking forward to seeing whatever the final project will be.

If you’re hungry for more Pi-derived goodness, we’ve also seen one using the part form a Pi 3.

Raspberry Pi RP2350 A4 Stepping Addresses E9 Current Leakage Bug

July 31, 2025 by 31 Comments
The RP2350 MCU in A4 stepping.
The RP2350 MCU in A4 stepping.

When Raspberry Pi’s new RP2350 MCU was released in 2024, it had a slight issue in that its GPIO pins would leak a significant amount of current when a pin is configured as input with the input buffer enabled. Known as erratum 9 (E9), it has now been addressed per the July 29 Product Change Note from Raspberry Pi for the A4 stepping along with a host of other hardware and software issues.

Although the PCN is for stepping A4, it covers both steppings A3 and A4, with the hardware fixes in A3 and only software (bootrom) fixes present in A4, as confirmed by the updated RP2350 datasheet. It tells us that A3 was an internal development stepping, ergo we should only be seeing the A4 stepping in the wild alongside the original defective A2 stepping.

When we first reported on the E9 bug it was still quite unclear what this issue was about, but nearly a month later it was officially defined as an input mode current leakage issue due to an internal pull-up that was too weak. This silicon-level issue has now finally been addressed in the A3 and thus new public A4 stepping.

Although we still have to see whether this is the end of the E9 saga, this should at least offer a way forward to those who wish to use the RP2350 MCU, but who were balking at the workarounds required for E9 such as external pull-downs.

IR Point And Shoot Has A Raspberry Heart In A 35mm Body

July 7, 2025 by 25 Comments

Photography is great, but sometimes it can get boring just reusing the same wavelengths over and over again. There are other options, though and when [Malcolm Wilson] decided he wanted to explore them, he decided to build a (near) IR camera. 

The IR images are almost ethereal.
Image : Malcom Wilson.

The housing is an old Yashica Electro 35 — apparently this model was prone to electrical issues, and there are a lot of broken camera bodies floating around– which hides a Pi NoIR Camera v3. That camera module, paired with an IR pass filter, makes for infrared photography like the old Yashica used to do with special film. The camera module is plugged into a Pi Zero 2 W, and it’s powered by a PiSugar battery. There’s a tiny (0.91″) OLED display, but it’s only for status messages. The viewfinder is 100% optical, as the designers of this camera intended. Point, shoot, shoot again.

There’s something pure in that experience; we sometimes find stopping to look at previews pulls one out of the creative zone of actually taking pictures. This camera won’t let you do that, though of course you do get to skip on developing photos. [Malcom] has the Pi set up to connect to his Wifi when he gets home, and he grabs the RAW (he is a photographer, after all) image files via SSH.  Follow the link above to [Malcom]’s substack, and you’ll get some design details and his python code.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s NoIR camera shows up on these pages from time to time, though rarely so artistically. We’re more likely to see it spying on reptiles, or make magic wands work.  So we are quite grateful to [Malcom] for the tip, via Petapixel. Yes, photographers and artists of all stripes are welcome to use the tips line to tell us about their work.

Follow the links in this article for more images like this.
Image: Malcom Wilson

Chasing A Raspberry Pi Bottleneck

June 30, 2025 by 9 Comments

The Raspberry Pi has been used for many things over its lifetime, and we’re guessing that many of you will have one in perhaps its most common configuration, as a small server. [Thibault] has a Pi 4 in this role, and it’s used to back up the data from his VPS in a data centre. The Pi 4 may be small and relatively affordable, but it’s no slouch in computing terms, so he was extremely surprised to see it showing a transfer speed in bytes per second rather than kilobytes or megabytes. What was up? He set out to find the bottleneck.

We’re treated to a methodical step-through of all the constituent parts of the infrastructure between the data centre and the disk, and all of them show the speeds expected. Eventually, the focus shifts to the encryption he’s using, both on the USB disk connected to the Pi and within the backup program he’s using. As it turns out, while the Pi is good at many things, encryption is not its strong point. Some work with htop shows the cores maxed out as it tries to work with encrypted data, and he’s found the bottleneck.

To show just how useful a Pi server can be without the encryption, we’re using an early model to crunch a massive language corpus.

Header image: macrophile, CC BY 2.0.

Dummy Plug Gets Smarter With Raspberry Pi

June 16, 2025 by 21 Comments

[Doug Brown] had a problem. He uses a dummy HDMI plug to fool a computer into thinking it has a monitor for when you want to run the computer headless. The dummy plug is a cheap device that fools the computer into thinking it has a monitor and, as such, has to send the Extended Display ID (EDID) to the computer. However, that means the plug pretends to be some kind of monitor. But what if you want it to pretend to be a different monitor?

The EDID is sent via I2C and, as you might expect, you can use the bus to reprogram the EEPROM on the dummy plug. [Doug] points out that you can easily get into trouble if you do this with, for example, a real monitor or if you pick the wrong I2C bus. So be careful.

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What Use Is An Original Raspberry Pi?

June 2, 2025 by 53 Comments

Almost uniquely among consumer grade computer manufacturers, the Raspberry Pi folks still support their earliest boards. We’re guessing that’s in part due to the much more recent Pi Zero using the same 32-bit system-on-chip, but it’s still impressive that a 13-year-old single board computer still has manufacturer OS support. With so many of these early boards out there, is there much you can do with them in 2025? [Jeff Geerling] gives it a try.

His test Pi is unusual in itself, the 2013 blue special edition that RS gave away in a social media promotion. Sadly we didn’t win one back in the day and neither did he, so he picked it up in an online auction. We’re treated to some very slow desktop exploration, but it’s clear that this is not where the strengths of a Pi 1 lie. It was reckoned at the time to be roughly equivalent to a Pentium II or Pentium III in PC terms, so that shouldn’t be a surprise. Instead he concludes that it’s better as a headless machine, though he notes how projects are starting to abandon 32 bit builds. The full video is below the break.

We asked the same question not so long ago, and the Hackaday Pi 1 now quietly analyses news content on its two-watt power budget. It’s still a useful little Linux box for your script-based projects even if it will never win any speed prizes.

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