Raspberry Pi400: great for designing

With this article I want to introduce you to a new toy from the Rapsberry Foundation: the PI400.

Everything you need as a testing platform inside a keyboard that is convenient, durable, practical, and quick to use. You connect power, a monitor via the included HDMI cable, and you can start designing and testing right away.

It is practical because you no longer need to have a raspberry in the middle of your desk with 12000 wires and peripherals attached, it is all concentrated there. A mini computer inside a simple keyboard, with GPIO connections so we can test our code by exporting it to the main project et voila, it’s done!

What it looks like

The Raspberry PI400 looks like a simple keyboard, comes with power supply, HDMI cable to connect to a monitor, SD card, power supply and Mouse. To start playing with it, all we have to do is download the new Raspberry OS (Raspbian has been discontinued) from the official site and in no time, we find ourselves with a fully functioning Linux computer. On the back are the USB ports, which are inconvenient for right-handed mouse users (practically most people) especially with the supplied mouse that does not have a very long cable, but the designers should have turned all the tracks upside down so that the position of the ports could be changed… Not too bad.

The colors are typical raspberry cover white keyboard and keys and red bottom. The plastics despite seeming of questionable quality at first glance are instead very durable.

Designed to be open

There are no screws in the Raspberry PI400; everything is designed to be disassembled as quickly as possible. Only inside there is an iron anchored plate that serves both as a support to improve the rigidity of the device and as a heat sink. There are in fact no fans, which is why it does not emit any kind of noise. There is an increasing move toward a fan-free perspective. Even in the new Apple laptops with Chip M1, the fan is completely absent.

GPIO Expansion Bay for PI400

It comes in very handy to purchase on Amazon this Expansion Bay for GPIO at this link that allows you to make connections conveniently, without having to operate on the pins of the PI400 that are located inside a recess that is not exactly easy to reach.

It thus becomes very easy to connect any kind of external sensor.

Hardware

Hardware-wise it is virtually identical to the 4Gb Raspberry PI4 except for the size of course.

• Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.8GHz
• 4GB LPDDR4-3200
• Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5.0GHz) IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac wireless LAN
• Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
• Gigabit Ethernet
• 2 × USB 3.0 and 1 × USB 2.0 ports
• Horizontal 40-pin GPIO header
• 2 × micro HDMI ports (supports up to 4Kp60)
• H.265 (4Kp60 decode); H.264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode); OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.0
• MicroSD card slot
• 78- or 79-key compact keyboard (depends on language variants)
• 5V DC via USB-C connector
• Operating temperature: 0°C to +50°C ambient
• Dimensions 286 mm × 122 mm × 23 mm

Raspberry PI400 GPIO extender

Honestly, I really appreciated this product, which saved me a lot of time in the prototyping phase of my projects with Raspberry PI. I highly recommend it to all designers working with this tool.

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