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Hands-On with the Raspberry Pi 400, the First “Consumer Product” Raspberry Pi

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On December 14, 2022

The body of the docking station was 3D printed in two parts that were glued with polyurethane glue. It includes a Kensington lock design that can be used to secure the Pi 400. There are dovetail rails on the dock’s front for attaching displays. While we are nowhere close to achieving that kind of technology in real life, you can at least create an imitation that serves as a sort of mobile computer. In fact, there is an entire subculture around the creation and modification of cyberdecks.

rasberry pi 400

The heatsink is a “shield” between the keyboard and the Pi 400 board with a depression and thermal pad making contact with the system on chip . This heatsink is remarkable and largely responsible for the great temperatures, and overclocking ability of the Raspberry Pi 400. The Pi400 features a handy security lock port for keeping your keyboard safe. If you’re in the market for a low-cost Six Rules of Thumb for Scaling Software Architectures by Ian Gorton computer for a bit of coding or some web browsing, or even using a basic productivity suite, then the Raspberry Pi 400 will be the machine for you. It’s quick to get going, easy to use, and makes a perfectly credible Linux desktop PC — all at an extremely affordable price. Ask your Support Technician about additional options available through our exclusive Priority Care Program.

Standalone units retail for $70 which is $15 more than a Raspberry Pi 4, but we get an added keyboard and a great CPU speed bump. The range of Raspberry Pi cameras are cheap and effective add-ons that provide a fun stream of projects. If you want to create camera projects, then the Raspberry Pi 400 is not for you. The Raspberry Pi Model B has seen the same board layout since the Raspberry Pi B+ arrived in 2014. Sure the Raspberry Pi 4 swapped the Ethernet and USB ports around, but the same basic design has persisted.

Raspberry Pi 400

Tomisin is a freelance writer with a passion for breaking down complex topics. We have covered the best games you can play on your Raspberry Pi without emulation. Check out our complete guide to Raspberry Pi retro gaming if you’re interested in learning more about emulation. Cat6 Ethernet Patch Cable – Snagless RJ45, Stranded, 550Mhz, UTP, Pure Bare Copper Wire, 24AWG, 7ft, Black Save the time and hassle of building Ethernet cables by using these fixed-length UTP Cat6… You can then install 1 OS per SD card and because the SD card is easily accessible you just shut down change the card and put a different operating system. And after you become enchanted with Linux and all that it offers by using the Pi, you’ll have months of exploration ahead, thanks to Opensource.com’s many Raspberry Pi articles.

rasberry pi 400

I began testing the Pi 400 using its native Raspberry Pi OS Linux distribution—which is basically Debian with LXDE and a lot of middleware optimizing it for the Pi. Unfortunately, there’s almost nothing in the way of standard benchmarking utilities that run on ARM Linux—all I could find was the Phoronix Test Suite, which would have required more time to run than I had to test the device in total. So for the most part, I’m going to talk about my subjective experience, rather than hard numbers. Finally, there’s no 3.5mm audio jack on the Pi—if you’ve got it hooked to a television or a monitor with speakers, it can deliver audio over HDMI; otherwise you’ll need a supported USB audio device. I tested with an inexpensive USB gaming headset, which worked fine.

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Packed with informative tutorials, this book hearkens back to the days when technology provided documentation! For the curious mind, this book is a vitally important key to the Pi, which is best when it serves as a gateway to open source computing. My unit came with 4GB RAM and a stock 16GB microSD card with Raspberry Pi OS installed and ready to boot up for the first time. I only tested the Pi 400 with a 1080p monitor, so I can’t speak to its chops with 4K videos—but it’s absolutely not capable of handling the Costa Rica in 4K 60fps HDRvideo without visible frame drop, even at 720p. The major issue here appears to be the 60fps rate, not the 720p resolution. I also tested the “Forests” episode of Netflix’s docu-series Our Planeton YouTube at 1080p, and that video played back flawlessly.

The Raspberry Pi 400 is ideal for building your own synthesizer because it has enough processing power to handle all the data you need to process in order to emulate an analog synthesizer. This project requires some wiring and coding knowledge, but the steps are detailed enough to follow. Once your Raspberry Pi synthesizer is complete, it’s time to make your own synth-pop music.

The Raspberry Pi 400 has a relatively small but effective keyboard that you can fit into your productivity workflow. LibreOffice comes preloaded in Raspberry Pi OS and includes applications such as LibreOffice Base, Writer, Calc, Draw, and Impress. With this software suite, you can perform word processing, note-taking, spreadsheet manipulation, database management, presentations, and so on.

A $2 PCF8563 breakout board is used to provide the real-time clock/calendar function, while a combination board of the TP4056 and MT3608 provides battery charging and voltage boosting functionality, respectively. The project runs a modified version of this Raspberry Pi battery widget. If that project turns out to be too advanced for you, or you can’t find the time, you can always buy a Cyberdeck HAT from Adafruit and connect it to your Raspberry Pi 400. We’ve covered some amazing Raspberry Pi cyberdeck projects you can build yourself.

“We’ve been doing bits of outreach to help kids who’ve been sent home from school with no computer,” Upton explains. “This is a program called Pi Drop, that the Foundation is running.” “It’s a nod to a pretty common naming convention, the sort of three digit number that ends in zero,” Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton tells us in an interview. The wireless chip on the Raspberry Pi 400 is NOT supported by nexmon, so if you are planning on doing wireless attacks or research, you will need to use an external wireless device. We recommend using the 32-bit image on Raspberry Pi devices as that gets far more testing, and a lot of documentation out there expects you to be running RaspberryPi OS which is 32-bit.

The awkward GPIO access and lack of camera and display ports are the only negatives for the Raspberry Pi 400. All in all, this is a fantastic Raspberry Pi for those new to the platform. Retailing as a single unit for $70 or as a complete $100 kit with mouse, power supply, cables, micro SD card and a copy of the Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, the Raspberry Pi 400 could be the ideal way to introduce the Raspberry Pi to your home. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards.

Evaluating the software and user experience

However,Liliputingnotes that the Orange Pi 800 should compete with theRaspberry Pi 400, which retails for around US$70. Supposedly, the Orange Pi 800 will support Orange Pi OS , as well as Chromium OS. If it requires power, you need to know how much, what all the pins do, and how to hook it up. You may need to reference datasheets, schematics, and know the ins and outs of electronics. To me, “complete” means including everything needed, hardware and software, to use the Pi 400 as an everyday computer. There are places where a Raspberry Pi 400 will replace the standard Raspberry Pi 4, though — beginning with the Foundation’s charitable efforts.

What a pity the haven’t use full size HDMI for one of the video outputs. I see this as a potential weak point in an otherwise great design. Get instant access to breaking news, in-depth reviews and helpful tips. The Raspberry Pi 400 is, at heart, a Raspberry Pi 4 and as we know the Pi 4 can get rather warm in use. Manipulating the DOM in JavaScript with innerText and innerHTML In general use, the CPU will stay cool enough to remain well under the thermal throttle limit of 85 Celsius, but overclockers eager to squeeze extra performance from the CPU will often push those limits. If you are of a “certain age” then you will remember a time when computers were hidden underneath a keyboard.

Performance overall was good, with aGeekbench 5single-core score of 212 and a multi core score of 642. That’s a nice boost over the 8GB Pi 4 we tested , even with only 4GB of RAM. There’s a BCM2711 SoC with four Arm Cortex-A72 cores and a VideoCore VI graphics processor, 4GB of LPDDR4 memory — both the minimum and the maximum, with no sign of a 2GB or 8GB model at launch — and a microSD slot for storage. The Raspberry Pi 400 has a quad core 1.8GHz processor, with 4GB of RAM, in a keyboard formfactor.

  • The Raspberry Pi 400 is a complete Raspberry Pi 4-based personal computer, integrated into a keyboard.
  • Much like the Pinebook Pro, the Pi 400 exhibits heavy latency while opening applications that’s perhaps possible to live with but impossible not to notice.
  • Before getting to the extra 300MHz of stock clock speed — a figure every Raspberry Pi 4 should be able to reach through custom overclocking, using either the fan in the official Power over Ethernet HAT or a third-party cooler — there are some key caveats to address.
  • The CPU is a Broadcom 1.8GHz 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU, overclocked to make it even faster than the Raspberry Pi 4’s processor.

We were able to use LibreOffice for most productivity tasks, along with the default Chromium browser. Sadly, Google has removed sync capabilities from Chromium, which means your Chrome extensions and passwords won’t migrate to your new desktop. You can still install extensions from the Chrome Store, but it may take a little longer to get set up. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay.

Reviews

The single-board Raspberry Pi devices have gone a long way to delivering on that promise, via kits that bundle keyboard and mouse for a full computing experience. ZDNET’s recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. The GPIO pins remain accessible, so if you want to explore beyond the desktop, you can connect components and prototype your projects.

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The operating system recognized the Logitech webcam, but I could not get the microphone to work with Jitsi. I solved this problem by updating to the latest Raspberry Pi OS release with Linux Kernel version 5.4. This OS version includes many important features that I love, like an updated Chromium browser and Pulse Audio, which solved my webcam audio woes. I can use open source videoconferencing sites, like Jitsi, and common proprietary ones, like Google Hangouts, for video calls, but Zoom was entirely unsuccessful. The software included on the microSD card was the August 2020 Raspberry Pi OS release. After initial startup and setup, I connected a Logitech C270 webcam to one of the USB 3.0 ports.

Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers. Those aside, and understanding that at launch there’s no option for anyone looking for more or less than 4GB of RAM, there’s a lot to recommend the Raspberry Pi 400 over a Raspberry Pi 4 for all but embedded and space-constrained uses. At stock speeds, the performance gain is obvious in both synthetic and real-world workloads — anything a Raspberry Pi 4 can run, the Raspberry Pi 400 can run faster. First, there’s no Camera Serial Interface or Display Serial Interface header to be found — meaning no compatibility with the Raspberry Pi Camera Module range. Before getting to the extra 300MHz of stock clock speed — a figure every Raspberry Pi 4 should be able to reach through custom overclocking, using either the fan in the official Power over Ethernet HAT or a third-party cooler — there are some key caveats to address.

Many of the early 1980s classic computers, from the Apple II to the Commodore 64, placed all of their internals in the same chassis as the keyboard. We do not store credit card details nor have Open-source software Wikipedia access to your credit card information. A kit is also available which includes everything you need in one box . You have several different operating system options, beyondRaspberry Pi’s own OS.

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