Maker Mehrdad Majzoobi has launched one more open-hardware Raspberry Pi 5 accent, developed as a part of the Ubo Pod undertaking — this time a {Hardware} Connected on the Backside (HAB) PCI Specific M.2 adapter.
“Despite the fact that comparable boards are broadly accessible for buy beneath $10 these days, I’ve had points with some inflicting interference with Wi-Fi, missing LED indicators, FPC [Flexible Printed Circuit] cable blocking microSD Card reader, and many others.,” Majzoobi explains of the rationale for going the DIY route over shopping for off-the-shelf. “Since I’m designing an entire system with enclosure, I wanted extra management over board dimensions and flex cable positioning and size.”
Fancy an open-hardware manner so as to add M.2 modules to your Raspberry Pi? Properly, right here it’s. (📷: Mehrdad Majzoobi)
The Raspberry Pi 5 launched final 12 months as the primary mainstream mannequin within the fashionable single-board pc vary to supply entry to a PCI Specific Gen. 2 lane — the efficiency of which will be boosted to Gen. 3 charges, when you do not thoughts working exterior official specs. Delays within the launch of an official adapter to take the in-house flat versatile circuit (FFC) connector to an M.2 slot noticed third-parties pop up with their very own designs — a lot of which flip the basic {Hardware} Connected on High (HAT) idea and as an alternative sit beneath the single-board pc as a {Hardware} Connected on the Backside (HAB) gadget.
It is this latter fashion that Majzoobi picked, basing his board design on the work of George Good who was the primary to construct an adapter by reverse-engineering the Raspberry Pi 5 FFC pinout — even earlier than Raspberry Pi had launched official specs. It additionally comes scorching on the heels of Majzoobi’s launch of a passive M.2 A/E-key adapter board, designed to make it simpler to swap between high-speed Non-Unstable Reminiscence Specific (NVMe) modules and accelerators for machine studying and synthetic intelligence workloads.
Majzoobi has even designed an FFC to take a seat between the board and the Raspberry Pi 5. (📷: Mehrdad Majzoobi)
“This was my first expertise with high-speed PCIe and I realized so much about PCIe customary,” Majzoobi says of the undertaking. “I additionally designed the flex cable that goes with this board.”
Extra data is obtainable in Majzoobi’s Reddit put up; KiCad undertaking recordsdata have been revealed to the Ubo Pod GitHub repository beneath the reciprocal GNU Basic Public License 3, together with an FFC for connecting it to the Raspberry Pi 5. “I’m engaged on V2 of this board,” he notes of this latter design, “that includes a number of enhancements.”
