Awful title from Hackaday, makes it sound like the Raspberry Pi itself is growing in size. It’s actually just an oversized accessory you can attach a Pi 5 to. The article body itself doesn’t do a whole lot to make that clear, either, until you click through the links and see better pictures of the product.
Seems like the use-case would be if you wanted to add a GPU to the Pi, which seems to be becoming more popular to use for a NAS, transcoding, and local LLMs.
No
This…seems completely insane. Like buying a pickup truck to drive a motorcycle around because you don’t want to bother getting your M-class license.
That PSU is insane for a board that can run off 5V.
…a microwave?
I thought one of the selling points of Raspberry Pi was its small form factor…?
- This isn’t actually a Pi, it’s an accessory for a Pi 5
- Potentially this enables non-electrically-savvy folks to use external GPUs with the Pi following some build guide
Whether or not it’s worth it remains to be seen, but that’s the main use-case I can see that this board adds that appeals to more than just tinkerers.
But why? Especially looking at the power supply.
I guess you might want to link the psu to a bunch of relays that controlled by the gpio, and use it to deliver medium amounts of power to various peripherals. i guess lots of motors or maybe fairly powerful led lighting arrays, or weak heaters , comes to mind.
So what seemed most daft to me is exposing the 3v and 5v lines on that breadboard like thing, but not using the psu’s +/-12v lines - that could let you run 12 and 24V stuff. plenty of space to allow for a bunch of relays and some connectors.
But even so its a strange form factor for that.
Neat! I hate it
Edit: It has come to my attention that it isn’t actually the people behind the Pi doing this. I really should read more rather than jumping to conclusions. There’s a few obvious rewrites I could make, but I think the prediction at the end is still valid even if the route I took wasn’t the right one.
This would appear to indicate that someone in charge of product design at Pi HQ is a Gen X-er or Boomer desperate to relive computing history through their own products.
Computer on a board. Bigger computer on a board. Computer entirely within a keyboard.
And now a computer in a PC-like case.
Prediction: The next step will be some kind of ARM-based cloud service.
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AIO PCs were and remain a terrible idea…the keyboard PC is a cool novelty reminiscent of the Commodore 64/128 era but kinda stupid nowadays. Would be cool in a C64 shell as a dedicated emulation device tho.
This doesn’t appear to be made by the people from either the Raspberry Pi Foundation or Raspberry Pi Holdings.
You’re better off with a Beaglebone if you want GPIO. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t have any analog pins, for one thing.




