Pi400

[Dave Rice]

I am in need of another Pi, 3 or 4 doesn’t matter much. So I have a look an Amazon and they’re silly prices, I soon found out why when I went to the major suppliers, there aren’t any!

What I was in stock most places was a Pi400, basically a 4 built into a keyboard, and at normal prices. The starter kit is ~£100 including charger, HDMI lead, mouse and a 16Gb SD card preloaded with Raspian. So everything you need bar a monitor. I have always toyed with getting one but held off due to the size, but then having something in the bag that just needs a power socket and monitor has also appealed.

So it arrived this morning 🙂

It’s smaller than I expected and the keyboard is better than I expected. Plugged it all in and 5 minutes later Raspian was installed and I had a working desktop. The updates have taken an hour, but there are a lot of them. I’ve always bought decent SD cards but this one boots amazingly quickly, I don’t feel the need for a USB stick boot at all.

It’s certainly small enough to fit in the work rucksack, just need to find a protective bag.

[keith with the teef]

Dave you watched way to much Joe 90 when you was a kid.

What else you got in that ruck sack.

BTW whats yellow and writes.

[Ed P]

SD cards are ‘OK’, but if you plan to use the Pi on a frequent basis then it could pay to make sure that you have a full backup SD card somewhere handy. I normally use Win32DiskImager as I find it better than the Linux tools. I use this to make a copy of the working SD card and save it on my PC, then use the PC version as a master to put it on SD cards or other media.

Unfortunately unless they have redesigned the Pi400 it looks like the better option of sticking in a cheap SSD is rather messy and has to be via the usb3 port.

[Dave Rice]

As usual this has tweaked my interest in what could be possible. From previous tinkering I have some USB 3.1 NVMe caddies and SATA drives hanging around, plus a 2.5″ SATA enclosure with SSD and a tiny San Disk Ultra fit that I use in my existing 4 as it can safely be left in.

It looks like a powered hub may be required for the NVMe adapter and SATA enclosure, so for a portable device that isn’t a practical solution. However, the Argon One M2 case doesn’t need a different power supply for it’s USB 3 M2 slot so we’ll see.

This is more academic in nature. How much difference will it really make? Will it make it closer to an every day hack? I may try overclocking as well.

I still have the original mid range Hynix NVMe in the new Thinkbook, but it’s only being used as a backup device which is a total waste (the system drive is a Crucial P5). I’ve always intended swapping it for the SATA WD Green M2 in one of the caddies and can then use the brilliant free Acronis from WD.

The Hynix is 1176 R / 1603 W and I’ll benchmark it in the caddy on a Wintel as well as seeing what the Pi can make of it. Should keep me quiet over Easter.

[Drezha]

From what I’ve read, it can overclock quite well, because it has a large chunk of aluminium in to act as a heatsink.

I toyed with one for a while, but decided my current Pi was fine for the time being.

 

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[keith with the teef]

A couple of photos would help with digestion on what you are on about.

That would make a nice Easter egg.

[Ed P]

Pi-Top is the full ‘laptop’ setup for a Pi. The Pi-400 is a bit like the old Commodore 64. i.e. the processor sits within a keyboard. The keyboard has a USB3 connector which you can use to attach an external SSD and use that for booting etc. Unfortunately to stick the SSD neatly inside the keyboard needs some major dentistry to the insides of the keyboard and afaik there is no easy way of making an internal connection between the SSD and Pi CPU. This link shows how someone cobbled together an SSD and Pi-400.

Attaching a small standalone hdmi screen to such a setup is relatively cheap and easy but eliminating the rats nest of wires is unfortunately the difficult bit.

I went in a very different direction, and used a small Geekworm X825-C8 enclosure to hold the Pi and SSD. This eliminated the messy SSD link, but left me having to add keyboard and mouse wiring, and of course a monitor. As the Pi setup was not meant to be portable the solution was the easy one of plugging it into my main monitor which easily switches sources and using a switchable keyboard and mouse. (both the keyboard and mouse have switchable Bluetooth or WiFi inputs and I just assigned wireless to the Pi as Pi4 Bluetooth can be very erratic)

[keith with the teef]

All built into the keyboard. I see said the blind man.

Sounds eloquent but as soon as I saw the ssd connected, its plain to see that pi 400 could do with a little refinement.

But then I guess thats a little harsh as nower days you see most folk on their lappies with all sorts of peripheral stuff plugged in inc a big display .

Goes with the territory as they say

I guess its a case of how cost effective pi 400 set can be. 🙂

[Dave Rice]

For the plain Pi you get the Argon M2 case, the bottom half has the M2 slot and it has a double headed USB 3 plug to connect the two.

It also has 2 x full size HDMI ports which makes life easier, and the case acts as a heatsink. £50 though.

[keith with the teef]

Well it looks like some on is adding some dynamism to the platform and for a small price.

I draw the line at hologram: But usb 3.1 to keyboared and roll display monitor to a smart phone is the where things should be heading.

[Ed P]

keith with the teef wrote:

smart phone

As the Pi is a hdmi Linux box and quite command line heavy, I think a mobile screen may be a little small to use. I have connected a Pi to a 4 inch hdmi screen, and it was very difficult to use.

Imo the smallest usable screen is a 7 inch IPS Touch Screen Capacitive 1024×600 HDMI  Monitor (cost about £60), but that required that I programmed in some touch buttons to do anything useful. I think getting that to work on a mobile or Android pad would be one challenge too many for me! Without programming any on-screen functions a laptop screen would be the smallest practical setup for me.

[Dave Rice]

The results are in. I used two Fideco M2 USB Enclosures, they both have the same Realtek RTL9210B-CG controller but different formats (I’ve mentioned them before), to test the M2 drives. There are 2 SATA and 1 NVMe Gen 3 x 4.

I also tried a Silicon Power 2.5″ SSD in a Sabrent enclosure and it will not boot. The Pi had issues writing to it, although it managed it in the end, and I also used my W10 PC. Lots of flashing lights but no boot. The drive / enclosure work just fine as a backup target and has been formatted in NTFS, various forms of FAT and ext4. I also tested the generic Class 10 SD card in the Pi 3B+, the official card supplied with the P400 and the USB SanDisk 3.2 Gen1 Ultrafit in my Pi 4.

The tests were completed with the Pi Diagnostics in Accessories and run a couple of times to rule out exceptions.

Unsurprisingly USB 3 maxes out the Integral SATA and Hynix NVMe drives, I wanted to see if there was any effect on the IOPS. But the WD Green performed very poorly and wasn’t constrained by USB3.

The USB Ultrafit wasn’t as good as I was expecting, indeed it failed one test, which was a surprise. The only reason to use one over the official SD card is reliability. I have lost count of the number of SD cards I’ve got through over the years.

Will I be getting an Argon NVMe case? Maybe. It’s still not quite up to use as an everyday hack but it’s getting there. For the uses I put them to disk i/o and lots of storage isn’t that important but reliability is. USB thumb drives are so cheap now I’ll probably get a few likely looking physically small ones and give them a test.

 

[Ed P]

I have found one unfortunate issue with using an SSD with the USB3 link – it stuffs up 2.4 GHz WiFi.  Apparently this is a known USB3 issue (even Intel acknowledges it). In order to fix it, move the USB3 cable as far away as possible as it acts as an aerial. One other possible ‘fix’ is ferrite beads on the cable and extra (earthed) cable shielding. (USB3 cable with extra shielding is available on-line but I have not tried it)

My ‘fix’ was to abandon WIFI and use Ethernet.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve just re-tested the WD Green as it seemed odd. There didn’t seem to be anything running in the background that would affect the results, but clearly there was.

That’s more like what I was expecting, slightly down on the competition. I used it as a system drive in my R5 3600 over Christmas when daughter needed a PC to play online games with her siblings & mates and whilst it was noticeably slower than my Kioxia, it was still miles better than a spinner.

Might try a bit of overclocking, see how much difference that makes to the feel of the system.

 

[Dave Rice]

Interesting Ed, I too rarely use PiWiFi, especially on a 3B+

I suppose a fix would be an external USB adapter on a longer lead, but that’s moving even further away from the whole point of cheap and small. Price wise it would be easy to be approaching low end NUC territory with all these adaptions.

Then there’s power consumption and bandwidth sharing of the USB 3 sub-system to consider.

[Ed P]

As I understand it, the interference is not so much chip to chip, but USB3 cable electrical noise, hence a ‘cure’ is to route the cable away from the WIFI aerial which is easily visible on the Pi mobo. SSDs are supposedly the worst offenders because of the large amount of high frequency data going to and fro (assuming the Swap file is on the SSD).

[Dave Rice]

Makes sense.

[Dave Rice]

The latest Amazon delivery brought with it a £9 “Integral Fusion 32GB USB Flash Drive 3.0 with 200MB/s Transfer Speed and a Tough Metal Casing”. Promising a much better read speed than the Sandisk Ultrafit in the same size (but tougher) casing. Unfortunately, despite several attempts and re-imaging, it just won’t boot, falling over in a slew of disk i/o errors at different stages. It’s now formatted with FAT32 and attached to my key ring.

I have another Sandisk Ultrafit that I use as my Windows installation drive, imaged that and it booted straight away. The performance stats were, as expected, the same as the other Ultrafit, which means it failed on Random read IOPS. Subjectively it seems perfectly acceptable in use but no faster than the Official SD card.

I mostly use RPi’s headless on customers premises and use RealVNC or Anydesk to connect. For reliability I think I’ll be sticking with the Ultrafits rather than an SD card.

I did look at the WiFi, but at 34mbps vs the 200+ mbps my PC gets I’ll stick to Ethernet. That was with the SD card BTW, no USB drives plugged in. But a few years ago we would have killed for 34mbps and it’s fast enough for every day use (but not for my network monitoring). On a customer premises I’ll often be using a PoE adapter anyway, keeps it all neat.

[Ed P]

Normally Ethernet is also my first port of call, but I did have to use WIFI for a pond thermometer that I attached to a Pi4, and that was where I first discovered the pi4 interference problem. That one was actually cured by just using an SD card and a Pi Zero which was actually a much better solution all round! In this case the Pi4 was only used to write the code and I was too lazy to take things apart for an in-situ trial (nearby shed used to house Pi and electrics with a long waterproof lead to thermometer sensor)

[Dave Rice]

Here’s an alternative – an EMMC card that fits in the SD card slot. £21 for 16GB or £30 for 32GB at PiHut.

Real world benchmark in the reviews puts it between an SD card and a SATA SSD and I imagine won’t interfere with the WiFi.

Looks a bit exposed though.

[Author]

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