Raspberry PI 5 with NVME Base and SSD

 Pimoroni have recently released a base to interface a Raspberry Pi 5 to a Solid State Drive.

Components

Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM.

A Raspberry Pi 5 Active Cooler (fan and heat sink).

The Active Cooler comes complete with pre-fitted heat sink pads.

A 500GB SSD. 

The Pimoroni NVME base.

The NVME pack contains the base plate itself, a pack of crews and nuts, a ribbon cable and some self-adhesive feet.

Of course you need a power supply.

Assembling the Raspberry Pi 5 with the active cooler

Take the Raspberry Pi 5 out of the box (remember to earth your self before opening the box).

Take the Active Cooler out of its box and check the power cable.

Remove the cap from the fan socket.

Remove the backing paper from the heat sink.
Check the operation of the spring-loaded attachment pins.

Align the pins with the relevant holes in the Raspberry Pi board.
When they are aligned, push the pins through the cooler board until they are attached to the Raspberry Pi board. Ensure alignment before releasing the pins so the heat sink material adheres to the required components. 

This is definitely not something to do when it is very warm as it makes the heat sink material very sticky.

Plug the cooler power lead into the Raspberry Pi board.

Create the OS SD card

The latest installer allows you to select the hardware, in this case a Raspberry Pi 5, as well as the operating system.

The NVME base requires 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS.

Select the 64bit Raspberry Pi OS.

Image the SD card.

Once the OS is ready, slot the SD card in and boot.

Finish the set up for the OS including a full update..

Building the NVME base

Once the Raspberry Pi is updated, shut it down and remove the power supply.

Place the Raspberry Pi 5 and the contents of the NVME pack on your work space.

Check the components:

• • NVMe Base PCB with M.2 Slot (M-Key)
• • 'PCIe Pipe' Flat Flex Cable
• • 4x Rubber feet
• • M2 bolt and 2x nuts for SSD mounting
• • 4x 7mm M2.5 standoffs for base mounting
• • 8x short M2.5 bolts for base mounting 
• • 4x long M2.5 bolts for 'pass-through' mounting with a HAT

The pack is suppllied with a number of spares, just in case.

Fit the short M2.5 bolts through the base and add the stand-offs.

Carefully remove the SSD from the packaging. In this case, there are instructions in the box showing how to remove the SSD (you use one of the finger holes and rotate it out of the plastic carrier). 

Take the M2 bolt and fit to the base for the size of SSD. Fix in place with one of the nuts.

Take the SSD drive and slot into into the slot on the board. Ensure the SSD in aligned properly and square to the connector. Fix in place with the second nut.

Take the Raspberry Pi board. Gently lift the cover on the PCIE connector.

Take the ribbon cable. The image ill face outwards when fully assembled and the Pi end is the smaller (so the text is the right way up when the NVME base is at the bottom.

Hold the cable in place (copper side towards the centre of the board) and push down the latches.

Turn the Pi upside down and bring the NVME base in.

On the NVME board, flip up the connector. Fit the ribbon cable. Once it is correcly aligned, flip the latch down.

Now screw the two boards together carefully.

Turn the Pi - NVME board sandwich (with its SSD filling) upside down.

Apply the self adhesive feet. The left hand end is easy as they can go in the top and bottom corners. The right hand ones can go just in-board of the screws.

Software installation

Switch on your Raspberry Pi.

Log in as normal (you should have already configured the SD card earlier).

The Raspberry Pi needs to have the latest updates including firmware. The normal update should  work, but you can force the update via  sudo raspi-config. Update the firmware using sudo epi-eeprom-update.

You can format the the SSD using the Raspberry Pi Imager. It should allow you to import the settings from the SDD card (locale, WiFi etc).

Once that has completed run sudo raspi-config in a terminal window.

Go to the Advanced section and change the boot order to boot from the SSD.

Reboot.

The Raspberry Pi will boot from the SSD.

Shut down, and carefully remove the SD card and put it in a safe place.

References

Raspberry Pi 5

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-5?variant=41044580171859

Raspberry Pi 5 Active cooler

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-5-active-cooler

NVME Base

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/nvme-base?variant=41219587178579

Assembling the NVME Base video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odG7FbptgWQ

Adafruit RP2040 Prop-Maker Feather board

 The Adafruit RP2040 Prop-Maker Feather combines the RP2040 processor with a driver for Neopixels, QT Stemma socket, speaker and a battery charger socket.

The board uses a USB-C connector. 

It has a six screw terminals for the three leads for the Neopixels, two for the speaker and one for a button. 

There is a three pin connector for a servo.

The battery connection is top left. It is important to note that this board includes a charging circuit so only use chargeable LiPo batteries or follow the instructions to isolate the charging circuit.

It is important to note that as a power saving feature the Neopixel driver, the servo and the speaker amplifier are only powered when the GPIO23 pin is high (I spent a while trying to find out why the Neopixels were not lighting up until I remembered).

Here is the board operating a Neopixel strip. 

Code to follow.

ADAFRUIT Metro RP2040 Arduino UNO format microcontroller.

 The Adafruit Metro RP2040 takes the Arduino format and adds the Raspberry Pi RP2040.

In addition to the normal UNO I/O, there is a micro-SD socket and Stemma QT socket.

PIMORONI PicoVision dual RP2040

 PIMORONI have released a clever board that combines a Pico W with a second RP2040 chip and supporting electronics complete with an HDMI shaped output, a 3.5mm headphone socket and a micro-SD card reader.

It is available on its own or as part of a complete box set.

I bought the complete box set.

The Pico Vision uses a complete Pico-W board as the main microcontroller, which is attached to the Pico Vision board.

The second RP2040 acts as a GPU.

One of the clever items in the box is a USB splitter cable which allows a USB device to be plugged into the board while the socket is also powering the board.

Now to actually use it.

Raspberry Pi 5 8GB

 The Raspberry Pi 5 was made available for pre-order on the 28 September 2023, with the first ones being released on the 23 October 2023. There was a bit of a demand, and I did not get mine until the 24 November.

THer board comes in the traditional box (note that in deference to one of the designers the chip at 45 degrees to the board is not shown on the picture).

From the outset it was designed to require active cooling, so unlike my three Raspberry Pi 4s in their passively cooled aluminium cases, I bought the official Raspberry Pi 5 case (only the red and white ones were available at that time) which is fitted with a computer controlled fan.

The Rapberry Pi 5 is power hungry, and so a 27W power supply was also bought.

Here is the board.. Note the chip at 45 degrees which is not shown on the box art.

The white object to the left of the top USB socket stack is the fan control socket. It did not mention that you have to remove a cover plug from this socket (the socket is labelled on the board)

Ther case is in thre parts, the white top cover, the white upper cover and the red base.

There are holes to take bolts to hold the Raspberry Pi board and any HATs in place

Here are the three parts of the case. The top showing the bit that covers the GPIO pins.

The packet top right holds the feet and an aluminium heat sink to stick on the CPU.

You can just see the cable that connects the  fan to the boar.

The contents of the packet.

Assembly is easy. 

After removing the board from the packaging, get the heat sink out of the packet. Remove the backing paper from the bottom of the heat sink and carefully apply it to the processor cover.

Then remove the blanking plug from the fan connector by the USB port. Fit the cable connector from the fan. 

Fit the board into the bottom of the case.

Add the top part of the case ( the USB and Ethernet ports are an obvious indicator of which way round everything goes).

It may be possible to run the Raspberry Pi 5 with an older edition of Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS, but the recommendation is to use the Bookworm edition which includes all the latest drivers.

The Raspberry Pi Imager makes writing the OS to a microSD card quick and painless.

Once the SD card was written,, the Raspberry Pi 5 was connected up and the SD card inserted.

The first boot can take a bit of time while everthing is set up. I did find that it did not find my WiFi, bor my neighbours for that matter), but I had the Ethernet plugged in to speed things up so it was not really an issue.

Once the update had completed, the machine was restarted and I could set the WiFi up in the usual way.

I have no idea if that was something odd in my Pi 5, my set up or a general issue. If you are without an Ethernet connection, this might be an issue.

Cosmic Unicorn

 Pimoroni's Cosmic Unicorn is one of their range of Pico W Aboard products and comprises a 32 x 32 smart RGB LED matrix. 

There is a complete Pico W attached to the back of the board. The use of a complete Pico W means that you can use the existing certification of the board, which means you can bring Wifi powered products to market quicker as you do not need to get your product certified, it is all off the shelf.

There are four general purpose buttons, a pair of volume up/down buttons, a pair of brightness buttons, a Sleep button and a Reset button (to save wear and tear on the USB socket). There are two STEMMA/QWIIC sockets for I2C breakout board and a speaker.

There is a hanger at the op, four holes in the corners and two holes to take a stand.

Out of the box there is a simple demo application. It suggests you press one of the four buttons (but does not tell you where they are or what they do). The four options were a fire simulator, a supercomputer style display, a rainbow and a calendar (requiring WiFi credentials).

This was a simple UI upgrade, listing the options and tracing the location of the relevant button.

As you might of noticed the options displayed do not reflect that list, but include a clock.

Pimoroni have developed a graphics library that works across a range of display devices. 

The original work on the clock was for an Inky Frame eInk display board. As this seven colour display takes thirty seconds to update the display, the development took place on a LCD Display Pack.

It was very easy to port the code to the Cosmic Unicorn.

Integrating it into the supplied program required some minor changes - which will be detailed later.

Three of the original effects are still available.

The fire effect display.