We’ve all been there: a Raspberry Pi mission grows bigger and bigger as new concepts come to thoughts. Subsequent factor , you’ve run out of USB ports and you’ll want to add a USB hub to the combo. Between that and the HDMI adapter, energy cable, and different parts wired to the GPIO pins, issues are actually beginning to get out of hand. If solely Raspberry Pis got here with just some extra USB ports…
Now they do—or no less than they do when you hook them as much as a brand new enlargement board from Suptronics. The X1013 expands the USB port depend of those little computer systems to an nearly ridiculous 14. It’s appropriate with the Raspberry Pi 5, and provides 4 USB 3.0 ports and 6 USB 2.0 ports to the 4 ports already onboard. As a bonus, the USB 2.0 ports are break up between the back and front of the board to make wire routing just a bit simpler for complicated initiatives.
The again of the board (📷: Suptronics)
The X1013 connects to the Pi’s 16-pin FFC PCIe connector with an included cable. A PCIe-to-USB chipset provides the extra USB 3.0 ports, whereas one other USB hub chip provides the USB 2.0 ports.
The Raspberry Pi is put in on high of the enlargement board. A barrel jack on the X1013 provides the whole system with energy, and a pair of pogo pins are used to move energy by way of to the Pi.
It is a very slick method so as to add extra USB ports to a Raspberry Pi 5, however since all 10 of the extra ports share a PCIe Gen2 x1 connection, the theoretical bandwidth of the mixed USB ports exceeds the bandwidth of the PCIe connection. As such, you shouldn’t anticipate nice efficiency if you’ll want to transfer lots of information. However for many functions, this in all probability gained’t matter—it is going to deal with a number of gadgets utilizing average quantities of bandwidth simply fantastic.
The underside of X1013 (📷: Suptronics)
Take a look at the product web page for extra particulars on the X1013 enlargement board.