Raspberry Pi has been shipping new products at a rapid pace lately. This week, the company is adding several new products to its lineup to expand the functionality of the Raspberry Pi 5.
Raspberry Pi is best known for its small, inexpensive single-board computers that are widely used by hobbyists and schools, as well as industrial and electronics manufacturing companies. The Raspberry Pi 5, the company’s flagship product, has an exposed PCIe 3.0 interface with a 16-pin connector.
The company sold M.2 HAT+ expansion cards which convert the 16 pin connector to a more traditional M.2 connector. HAT stands for “Hardware Attached on Top,” a nice acronym the company uses to refer to the expansion boards you connect to a regular Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi users have taken advantage of this M.2 slot to add NVMe SSDs (more on that below) and other add-ons. For example, Raspberry Pi in June began selling a AI Kit it is essentially an M.2 expansion card with a neural network inference accelerator of Hailo.
Today, the company is launching a brand new HAT+ add-on board with a built-in Hailo inference accelerator. The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ is available in 13 and 26 tera-operations per second (TOPS) variants, selling for $70 and $110, respectively. The 13 TOPS variant features the same module as the existing AI kit.
You’re not going to train a GPT on a Raspberry Pi, but these AI add-ons are a cost-effective way to perform inference at the edge.
Unlike the M.2 HAT+, the AI HAT+ does not have an M.2 interface. This is a unique package designed for Hailo’s inference modules.
This is what the AI HAT+ (left) looks like compared to the M.2 HAT+ when used with the AI Kit (right):
If you’re familiar with PC components, you know that most modern NVMe storage drives also use M.2 connectors. There are different types of SSDs, however, and they come in different form factors and performance speeds.
For the Raspberry Pi 5, you can use any NVMe SSD in 2230 and 2242 form factors compatible with PCIe 3.0. Commercially available SSDs will work perfectly with a Raspberry Pi 5 with M.2 HAT+ expansion.
The company is also launching its own branded M.2 NVMe SSDs: the 256GB variant sells for $30 and the 512GB version for $45. As a reminder, a 256GB SSD with similar specifications currently costs between $20 and $30 on Amazon.
The company also sells SSD kits that include both an M.2 HAT+ and an SSD in a single enclosure. The 256GB SSD kit costs $40, while the 512GB SSD kit costs $55.
These SSD kits aren’t going to revolutionize the Raspberry Pi ecosystem, but they are a good way to make sure you’re buying an SSD compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5 and its M.2 HAT+ attachment.
