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Raspberry Pi Model B Schematics
- rollypolly 14y agoThis has to be one of the most hacker-friendly companies out there. Kudos!
- A1kmm 14y agoIt is worth noting that they are an educational charity, not a for-profit organisation. I think it is great that they have released this - and I think that Broadcom also deserves credit for allowing them to release a schematic giving away the pin-out of the BCM2835 SoC - it makes the Raspberry Pi so much more useful to know what the outputs of the system are. This opens up the possibility of trying to work out how to use the unused pins on the BCM2835 based on the names. I haven't been able to work out what the HD pin group does (probably not SATA or PATA based on the number of pins, and HDMI has its own pin group). There seems to be a CAM0 not connected to anything - given CAM1 seems to be a camera, it looks like it is for an additional camera. It also has CCP2 outputs for a CCP2 camera. I also haven't been able to work out what SLIM is - but given it has two pins, CLK and DAT, I guess it is some kind of serial data protocol.
- A1kmm 14y agoAlthough they look like they are in the middle of the BGA ball array, and probably on a pad that is just floating, so actually connecting anything to the pins that the board isn't designed to allow access to is probably effectively impossible.
- joezydeco 14y agoPandaboard (okay, TI) has gotten pretty damned hacker-friendly. They have a nice schematic set too. http://pandaboard.org/node/223/ http://pandaboard.org/node/223/
- zdw 14y agoWow... 17 unattached GPIO pins off the CPU. I wonder if they just ran out of room to put them on the board, or if they have lack alternate pin-specific capabilities that the used pins have. I kind of wish there was a harder to use card edge connector for these - they could likely implement an additional 2 SD card slots or similar I/O.
- joezydeco 14y agoMan...two unused pins on the external LVDS display header. They could have thrown an I2C pair on that and made it really easy to add an external touchscreen or other kind of display device. Shame.
- chj 14y agois there anybody specialized in circuit design? i mean, how hard is it to build a cheap Pi equivalent board? If this is so popular, why no commercial version?
- lwat 14y agoMake no mistake, clones are on the way. For example this device: http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/ http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/ is supposedly both cheaper and more powerful than the Pi.
- joezydeco 14y agoWhen you say "clone", do you mean pin-equivalent or just another SoC-based board with similar features and performance? If you're trying to duplicate the RPi exactly, you won't be able to. Nobody else can get the BCM2835 chip except the RPi guys.
- lwat 14y agoNo this device has a faster CPU, more RAM etc. It's not an exact duplicate of the Pi.
- elliotanderson 14y agoThe Pi has kicked off some interest in hardware hacking for myself too. My question is how hard would it be to embed an 802.11 radio into the same board for a discreet sensor project
- stephen_g 14y agoI haven't looked at the schematics yet, but generally a SoC based design like this needs at least a six layer board, which combined with the speeds it runs at is pretty advanced electronic design... Coupled with that, it can be really hard to get low volumes of some of the parts they use, like the SoC, PMIC (power management IC) and so on (although you can get free samples if you ask sometimes - but they generally won't give them to you unless there's a chance you'll put through a big order with them in the future). And soldering the BGA parts onto the board would be a pain unless you pay for it to be assembled for you... Unless you know a lot about that sort of thing, it would probably be more successful to design something that interfaces with a Pi.