Giving The Pi 4 PCI Express

July 10, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 71 Comments

The release of the Raspberry Pi 4 brought us a new SoC, up to 4 Gigs of memory, and most importantly, got away from that janky USB to USB and Ethernet solution. The Raspberry Pi 4 has a PCI Express interface buried under some chips, and if you’re very good at soldering you can add a PCIe x1 device to the new best single board computer.

[Thomasz] took a look at the Raspberry Pi 4 and realized the new USB 3.0 chip is attached to the PCI Express interface on the SoC. That is, if you remove this chip and you have some very fine wires, you can patch in a real PCI Express slot. Removing the chip is easy enough with a hot air gun, although a few caps did get messed up. Throw that in an ultrasonic cleaner, and you have a blank canvas to work PCI magic.

This hack requires six wires, or three differential pairs, there’s a reference clock, a lane 0 transmit, and a lane zero receive. Working backwards from a PCI Express riser, [Thomasz] traced out these connections and soldered a few wires in. On the Pi side, a few capacitors were required to be compliant with the PCI Express spec, but the soldering isn’t too bad. You can do a lot with a small tip on an iron and a microscope.

The Pi was successfully wired up to a PCI Express riser card, along with the lines for ground, 5V, link reactivation, and a power good signal. The only thing left to do was to plug in a PCI card and test. This didn’t go as well as expected, because the PCI Express adapter didn’t like being enumerated by the Raspberry Pi kernel. In subsequent experiments, an Adaptec SAS controller worked. Does this mean external graphics cards for the Pi? No, not quite; this is only one lane of PCIe, where modern graphics cards require an x16 slot for the best performance. Still, if you’ve ever wanted a SCSI card for a Pi, this is the best option yet.

Raspberry Pi 4 Benchmarks: Processor And Network Performance Makes It A Real Desktop Contender

July 10, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 87 Comments

The new Raspberry Pi 4 is out, and slowly they’re working their way from Microcenters and Amazon distribution sites to desktops and workbenches around the world. Before you whip out a fancy new USB C cable and plug those Pis in, it’s worthwhile to know what you’re getting into. The newest Raspberry Pi is blazing fast. Not only that, but because of the new System on Chip, it’s now a viable platform for a cheap homebrew NAS, a streaming server, or anything else that requires a massive amount of bandwidth. This is the Pi of the future.

The Raspberry Pi 4 features a BCM2711B0 System on Chip, a quad-core Cortex-A72 processor clocked at up to 1.5GHz, with up to 4GB of RAM (with hints about an upcoming 8GB version). The previous incarnation of the Pi, the Model 3 B+, used a BCM2837B0 SoC, a quad-core Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.4GHz. Compared to the 3 B+, the Pi 4 isn’t using an ‘efficient’ core, we’re deep into ‘performance’ territory with a larger cache. But what do these figures mean in real-world terms? That’s what we’re here to find out.

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Five Years Of The Raspberry Pi Model B+ Form Factor, What Has It Taught Us?

July 8, 2019 by Jenny List 84 Comments

With all the hoopla surrounding the recent launch of the new Raspberry Pi 4, it’s easy to overlook another event in the Pi calendar. July will see the fifth anniversary of the launch of the Raspberry Pi Model B+ that ushered in a revised form factor. It’s familiar to us now, but at the time it was a huge change to a 40-pin expansion connector, four mounting holes, no composite video socket, and more carefully arranged interface connectors.

As the Pi 4 with its dual mini-HDMI connectors and reversed Ethernet and USB positions marks the first significant deviation from the standard set by the B+ and its successors, it’s worth taking a look at the success of the form factor and its wider impact. Is it still something that the Raspberry Pi designers can take in a new direction, or like so many standards before it has it passed from its originator to the collective ownership of the community of manufacturers that support it?

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Vintage Philco Radio Looks Stock, Contains Modern Secret: A Raspberry Pi

July 7, 2019 by Jenny List 69 Comments

Antique radio receivers retain a significant charm, and though they do not carry huge value today they were often extremely high quality items that would have represented a significant investment for their original owners. [CodeMakesItGo] acquired just such a radio, a Philco 37-11 made in 1937, and since it was it a bit of a state he set about giving it some updated electronics. Vintage radio purists, look away from the video below the break.

Stripping away the original electronics, he gave it a modern amplifier with Bluetooth capabilities, and a Raspberry Pi. Vintage radio enthusiasts will wince at his treatment of those classic parts, but what else he’s put into it makes up for the laying waste to a bit of ’30s high-tech.The original tuning dial was degraded so he’s given it a reproduction version, and behind that is an optical encoder and two optical sensors. This is used to simulate “tuning” the radio between different period music “stations” being played by the PI, and for an authentic feel he’s filled the gaps with static. The result is a functional and unusual device, which is probably better suited than the original to a 2019 in which AM radio is in decline.

If you think of a high-end set like this Philco as being the ’30s equivalent of perhaps an 8K TV set, you can imagine the impact of AM radio in those early days of broadcasting. We recently took a look at some of the directional antenna tricks that made so many AM stations sharing the band a possibility.

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Raspberry Pi Catches The Early Bird

July 4, 2019 by Sven Gregori 11 Comments

If you live in an area with high bird activity, setting up a bird feeder and watching some hungry little fellows visit you can be a nice and relaxing pastime. Throw in a Raspberry Pi with some sensors and it can also be the beginning of your next IoT project, as it was the case for [sbkirby] with his Bird Feeder Monitor project.

To track the arrival and departure times of his avian visitors, [sbkirby] attached a set of capacitive touch sensors to each side of his bird feeder, and hooked them up to a Raspberry Pi Zero W via a CAP1188 breakout board. The data is published via MQTT to another Raspberry Pi that serves as backend and stores the data, as well as to an optional additional camera-equipped Pi that will take a picture of each guest along the way. Taking into account that precipitation might affect the sensor readings, he also checks the current weather situation to re-calibrate the sensors if necessary, and also to observe a change in the birds’ presence and eating behavior based on weather conditions.

It seems that sensor-based animal feeding will always serve as inspiration for some new projects, whether feeding the animal itself is the goal, like most recently this fish feeder has shown, or whether the eating behavior is monitored and used for further research such as this squirrel-based weather forecast system.

A Briefcase Pentesting Rig For The Discerning Hacker

July 3, 2019 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

In the movies, the most-high tech stuff is always built into a briefcase. It doesn’t whether whether it’s some spy gear or the command and control system for a orbiting weapons platform; when an ordinary-looking briefcase is opened up and there’s an LCD display in the top half, you know things are about to get interesting. So is it any surprise that hackers in the real-world would emulate the classic trope?

As an example, take a look at the NightPi by [Sekhan]. This all-in-one mobile penetration testing rig has everything you need to peek and poke where you aren’t supposed to, all while maintaining the outward appearance of an regular briefcase. Well, admittedly a rather utilitarian aluminum briefcase…with antennas sticking out. OK, so it might not be up to 007’s fashion standards, but it’s still pretty good.

[Sekhan] has crammed a lot of gear into the NightPi beyond the eponymous Raspberry Pi 3B+. There’s an RFID reader, an RTL-SDR dongle, an external HDD, plus the 12V battery and 5V converter to power everything. All told, it cost about $500 USD to build, though that figure is going to vary considerably depending on what your parts bins look like.

To keep things cool, [Sekhan] has smartly added some vent holes along the side of the briefcase, and a couple of fans to get the air circulating. With these cooling considerations, we imagine you should be able to run the NightPi with the lid closed without any issue. That could let you hide it under a table while you interact with its suite of tools from your phone, making the whole thing much less conspicuous. The NightPi is running Kali Linux with a smattering of additional cools to do everything from gathering data from social media to trying to capture keystrokes from mechanical keyboards with the microphone; so there’s no shortage of things to play with.

If you like the idea of carrying around a Pi-powered security Swiss Army knife but aren’t too concerned with how suspicious you look, then the very impressive SIGINT tablet we covered recently might be more your speed. Not that we think you’d have any better chance making it through the TSA unscathed with this whirring briefcase full of wires, of course.

PiTop, Makers Of Raspberry Pi Laptops, Release Something That’s Not A Laptop

July 2, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

The Raspberry Pi the closest thing to a modular laptop. That’s the idea behind the Pi-Top, a laptop with a Raspberry Pi as a brain. Need an upgrade? No problem, just get the latest Pi, they’re up to four now.

Now the people behind the Pi-Top are releasing what can best be described as a brick of computing. The Pi-Top 4 is a designed as ‘The Sony Walkman for Making’, in which the form factor becomes a building block of anything you can imagine and probably a lot of things you can’t. Inside is a Raspberry Pi 4, a small OLED display, and a few buttons. On the bottom is a detachable ‘foundation plate’ that allows the Pi-Top 4 to connect to sensors, LEDs, and switches. The idea of all this building is that the brick-shaped Pi-Top 4 becomes a building block in anything you can imagine, be that a drone, a humanoid robot, or a portable photo booth. All of this is powered by the Raspberry Pi 4, no slouch when it comes to computational power.

The Pi-Top 4 doesn’t have a release date or a price just yet, but the company says it will be offered on Kickstarter.

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