Designing the Raspberry Pi 5: PCIe, Power and Peripherals #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi

It’s been four years between the release of the Raspberry Pi 4 and the announcement of the Raspberry Pi 5 but the Pi 5 has been in development far longer. Raspberry Pi has published an article on how pieces of the Pi 5 came together, especially with all the custom silicon on it.

Raspberry Pi 5 is coming out in October 2023, yet one of its most important new components is a chip that has been in development since 2015; RP1. Technically, it’s the first bit of Raspberry Pi silicon (hence the number) as it entered development long before RP2040. Over the years, we’ve heard inside Raspberry Pi of this ‘Project Y’ device being planned for inclusion first in for Raspberry Pi 3B+, and then in Raspberry Pi 4.

“This is our longest running chip development program,” says James Adams. “I guess it’s the reason that we built ourselves a chip team in the first place… the idea is that we separate out Raspberry Pi I/O away from the main processor. That allows the main processor to be much simpler and you can iterate it more quickly, as it’s almost a purely digital design.”

The processor has a 4 lane PCIe bus, seen on the board traces. Early prototypes broke this out to a standard PCIe x4 connector and a plug-in board was used. They don’t talk about this much, but looking at the picture above, it’s a configuration many enthusiasts would like to test out.

The article also discusses the new power management chip (above, also custom, ingesting a whopping 5 amps) and the connectors. See the full article here.

The RP1, Raspberry Pi’s first custom silicon chip #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi

Raspberry Pi 5 is the most complicated and expensive engineering program ever undertaken at Raspberry Pi, spanning over seven years, and costing on the order of $25 million.

It’s their first flagship product to make use of silicon designed in-house at Raspberry Pi, in the form of the RP1 I/O controller. No, the RP2040 chip came afterwards, unknown to the world (the 2 was not the number of cores on the chip).

Now you can read Raspberry Pi documentation on the RP1, what it is and what it can do (and yes it does have some PIO!).

See the video below and more via a Raspberry Pi article and the initial documentation is here. Bonus video: James Adams and Eben Upton on designing Raspberry Pi 5.

Ouija Robot

A Robotic Ouija Board shared by Ronald McCollum on Hackaday.io. Using a CRICKIT, Raspberry Pi and more!

Ouija boards are spooky but they are extra spooky when a detached hand is being controlled!

This project is a motorized mannequin arm and wooden planchette that spells out tweets it receives on a ouija board.

See the whole project!

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HAPPY HALLOWEEN! All month we’ll be bringing you ideas and projects for an Electronic Halloween!

Working on a project for Halloween this year? Share it with us in the comments below, the Adafruit forums, Facebook, Discord, Instagram or Twitter [aka X]– (tag your posts #ElectronicHalloween). You can also send us a blog tip!

Get inspired with the Halloween Gift Guide

Making a Rube Goldberg Machine with Clay

Pottery to the People decided to make a Rube Goldberg machine that solves the problem of what to do with pots they don’t like. The machine is made entirely with clay including the marbles and dominos!

Synthesize music with animations on a Raspberry Pi Pico

Great new project + write-up from Christophe Favergeon up on Hackster.io:

Learn how to create a real time MIDI synthesizer with spectrum visualization and no RTOS using a Raspberry Pi Pico

The build makes use of our NPN 2222A Transistor and more! See here for more details.

Guillermo del Toro’s Movie Picks for October

Super fun video from Turner Classic Movies! Who better to curate your Halloween-month viewing experience than director Guillermo del Toro who blends horror, fantasy, and beauty together to make the most magical films. From Hell Boy, to The Shape of Water, to Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro’s movies show such a wide range of styles and influences. I was not surprised that although some of my favorite movies were on here (Hitchcock’s Suspicion), there were many I hadn’t even heard of at all (Browning’s Freaks).

Watch the full video here on YouTube.

Fantastic Beasts Emerge from Miguel Arzabe’s Woven Bestiaries #ArtTuesday

At the the Met’s Cloisters museum in New York, there’s an amazing selection of tapestries. One room contains a series of tapestries called The Hunt for the Unicorn, or The Unicorn Tapestries. Unicorns rendered in cartoons or plushies are one thing — these tapestries are another. The tapestries bring out the mystery and strangeness of the unicorn in overwhelming fashion. The bestiary tapestries of Miguel Arzabe attempt to re-create that experience. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:

In Miguel Arzabe’s bestiaries, wide-eyed owls, pink pumas, and whale sharks emerge from planes of woven acrylic. The Oakland-based artist draws on his Bolivian roots and Andean textile traditions as he laces strips of sliced paintings into landscapes occupied by creatures both real and mythological. Arzabe’s most recent body of work, Animales Familiares, brings these beasts to the fore through vivid planes of blurred Earth and sky.

The artist begins each piece by reproducing a pair of modernist paintings, which he cuts into thin lengths and weaves together. Most often unrecognizable in their new forms—Rothko’s clear influence in the color-blocked  “Tiburón Ballena” makes the piece an outlier—the replicas root the works in Western art history. Arzabe distorts these references, though, by layering the paintings into new landscapes, intertwining the varying geographies and cultures to allow both to coexist.

See more!

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Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!