Raspberry Pi has launched a extra compact tackle its M.2 HAT+ for the Raspberry Pi 5, taking cues from third-party options with an L-shaped board design that leaves extra room for cooling followers to do their work.
The Raspberry Pi 5 launched in late 2023 as the primary mannequin within the consumer-oriented single-board laptop household to function a user-accessible PCI Categorical lane — uncovered on a flat versatile circuit (FFC) connector which required a breakout board and a handful of parts to interface with PCIe {hardware} like Non-Unstable Reminiscence Categorical (NVMe) storage gadgets and high-performance machine studying and synthetic intelligence (ML and AI) accelerators.
The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ now has a brand new Compact sibling, designed for improved cooling of the Raspberry Pi 5’s SoC. (📷: Raspberry Pi)
That board, although, would not launch till Might the next 12 months, having been overwhelmed to market by a variety of third-party options. Often called the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+, the add-on connects to the Raspberry Pi 5’s general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header and the PCIe FFC connector and offers an M-key M.2 slot able to accepting 2230 and 2242 footprint modules. Nearly the total footprint of the Raspberry Pi 5, minus its connectors, the board works nice — however does not play properly with the built-in cooling fan within the official Raspberry Pi 5 case.
That is the place the brand new Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ Compact is available in: it is the identical {hardware}, however in a way more compact design — an L-shaped structure, already adopted by a lot of third-party accent makers, which retains the realm above the Raspberry Pi 5’s Broadcom BCM2712 system-on-chip free and clear. Efficiency, the corporate says, must be equivalent between the 2 fashions, although the Compact variant solely helps the smallest of 2230-footprint M.2 modules.
The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ Compact is now out there from the corporate’s reseller community, priced at $15 — a $3 premium over the unique M.2 HAT+, now referred to as the M.2 HAT+ Customary.
