Embedded and hobbyist electronics specialist Waveshare has launched an add-on for individuals who cannot fairly determine what to make use of the Raspberry Pi 5’s PCI Specific lane for — by increasing it to help as much as 4 units directly.
“[The] 4-Ch[annel] PCIe FFC [Flat Flexible Circuit] Adapter Board for Raspberry Pi 5 expands the PCIe interface of the [Raspberry] Pi 5 to 4 […] FFC connectors [and] helps stacking a number of PCIe HATs,” Waveshare writes of its newest Raspberry Pi add-on. “PCIe Gen. 2 transmission velocity: the theoretical transmission velocity of the Gen. 2 mode is as much as 5Gb/s; the measured studying/writing velocity is approx 500MB/s.”
Cannot determine the right way to use your Raspberry Pi 5’s PCIe lane? Waveshare’s new adapter quadruples your choices. (📷: Waveshare)
The Raspberry Pi 5 launched again in October 2023, and got here with a giant shock: a user-accessible PCI Specific Gen. 2 lane, which may very well be run out-of-spec as a Gen. 3 lane in some cases, introduced on a 16-pin flat versatile circuit (FFC) connector to the board’s left-hand edge. The official Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ turns that into an M.2 interface, well-suited to Non-Unstable Reminiscence Specific (NVMe) storage and accelerators for machine studying and synthetic intelligence (ML and AI) workloads — however what if you cannot determine which of the 2 you need? Enter Waveshare’s newest add-on.
The Waveshare board, dropped at our consideration by CNX Software program, sits on high of a Raspberry Pi 5 and splits that PCIe lane into 4 FFC connectors by way of an on-board passively-cooled ASMedia ASM1184e change. Every of those connectors gives its personal PCIe Gen. 2 lane — which means it is attainable to create a “tower of energy” with a complete of 4 PCIe-based HAT boards plus the enlargement HAT itself.
The board is powered from the Raspberry Pi’s general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header, however channels all knowledge by way of a single PCIe Gen. 2 lane. (📷: Waveshare)
There are a few caveats, nonetheless. The most important is that each gadget related by way of the HAT nonetheless communicates with the Raspberry Pi 5 by way of a single PCI Specific Gen. 2 lane — which means bandwidth is shared, so for those who’re attempting to entry 4 full-speed units on the similar time every will run at roughly one-quarter the throughput. It is also not attainable to run the board at PCIe Gen. 3 speeds, which is able to affect the efficiency of NVMe drives and AI accelerators.
The 4-Channel PCIe FFC Adapter Board is on the market on the Waveshare retailer, priced at $21.99 earlier than quantity reductions.
