Maker Mehrdad Majzoobi has introduced the discharge of an open supply “Aspect Connector Board” for the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5, which relocates the most important ports in order that they’re on the identical aspect because the USB and Ethernet ports — after designing it for the Ubo Pod undertaking.
“I designed this connector board to re-arrange all connectors on the aspect of [a] Raspberry Pi to the again,” Majzoobi explains of the board. “It really works with each Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, however on 5 the audio plug should not be populated. That is half of a bigger open supply undertaking (Ubo undertaking) that’s aiming to construct an open supply ecosystem of gadgets powered by Raspberry Pi. I’ve additionally designed a customized enclosure for this.”
Uninterested in wrangling cables on two sides of your Raspberry Pi? The Ubo Aspect Connector Board solves that. (📷: Mehrdad Majzoobi)
The format of ports on the Raspberry Pi household of single-board computer systems is decided by footprint: the need to have the most important fashions within the household, wedge-system Raspberry Pi 400 and Raspberry Pi 500 motherboards not included, match within the footprint of a regular bank card signifies that ports need to be unfold throughout a number of sides of the board. The Aspect Board Connector sacrifices that compact footprint in favor of tidying up cabling, relocating ports in order that they’re all on the similar aspect of the board.
Becoming to a Raspberry Pi 4 or Raspberry Pi 5 with a friction-fit, the board converts the 2 micro-HDMI ports to full-size HDMI, relocates the USB Kind-C energy connector, and even features a flat versatile circuit (FFC) to relocate the microSD Card slot. For the Raspberry Pi 4, there’s additionally a 3.5mm audio-video (AV) jack connector — not accessible on the Raspberry Pi 5, which dropped the AV jack from its design.
The board additionally gives an influence button, fan connector, two STEMMA QT connectors of which one is accessible externally, an inner USB Kind-C connector linked to the info strains on the USB Kind-C connector, and a 16-pin header that gives energy, I2C, proper and left analog audio, fan management, energy change, audio plug insertion detection, an audio enter on the Raspberry Pi 4, and one user-addressable general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pin.
The board was developed for the Ubo Pod, which delivers a better technique to deploy headless Raspberry Pi gadgets. (📷: Mehrdad Majzoobi)
“I’m planning on doing a brand new design with this board that converts one of many HDMIs to USB-C Alt mode that carries video,” Majzoobi explains of the way forward for the Aspect Connector Board design. “This variant could have one full HDMI and two USB-C connectors. One of many USB-C connectors might be power-in solely and the second might be power-in, power-out, video/audio out, and carries USB 2.0 knowledge.”
Extra data is accessible in Majzoobi’s Reddit publish; KiCad design information for the Aspect Connector Board can be found on GitHub below the reciprocal GNU Common Public License 3.
