What you’ll learn:
- Raspberry Pi AI HAT+
- Raspberry Pi 500
- Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and Pico 2 W
- Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5
Today is Pi Day. 3rd month, 14th day.
It's not the 314th day of the year; that’s November 10th.
We’re talking about old Albert Einstein’s birthday, 3/14. It’s even older than Archimedes’s number (250 BCE). “Pi Day” was first coined by physicist Larry Shaw in 1988 and celebrated for the first time at the “Exploratorium Science Museum” in San Francisco. In 2009, Congress made it a formally recognized day. So, it took 2,239 years to go from Archimedes to the first Pi Day?
On this special day, we should see what’s new from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Raspberry Pi AI HAT+
The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ functions as an add-on board for Raspberry Pi 5 with a connected Hailo AI accelerator. Two versions are available: 13 TOPS and 26 TOPS. The 13-TOPS version has a Hailo-8L neural network inference accelerator. Meanwhile, the 26-TOPS board includes a Hailo-8 accelerator for larger networks and improved multitasking.
Generally, the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ uses Raspberry Pi 5's PCIe Gen 3 interface for connectivity. It's also compatible with PyTorch, ONNX, Keras, TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lite, and other frameworks. This integrates into Raspberry Pi's camera software stack for object detection and image segmentation. Overall, the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ is ideal for robotics, security, home automation, and process control.
Raspberry Pi 500
The Raspberry Pi 500 is an all-in-one computer with a Raspberry Pi 5 integrated into the keyboard. It features a BCM2712 SoC with a 2.4-GHz, quad-core, 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU. The device runs on 8-GB LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM and an 800-MHz VideoCore VII GPU that supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2. For the display, it uses dual 4Kp60 HDMI output with HDR support.
Network connectivity is provided via Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 5/BLE. Raspberry Pi 500 comes with one USB 2.0 port and two USB 3.0 ports.
Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and Pico 2 W
The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and Pico 2 W are the latest versions of Raspberry Pi’s microcontroller boards. They run on the RP2350 with dual Cortex-M33 processors at 150 MHz. The boards also feature 520-kB SRAM and 4-MB flash storage. Along with that, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and Pico 2 W have 26 multifunction GPIO pins (3 ADC-capable).
For communication, each device uses USB 1.1 (device/host support), 2x SPI, 2x I2C, 2x UART, and 24x controllable PWM channels. Both also come with low-power modes to help preserve energy as well as three programmable IO blocks with 12 state machines for custom peripherals.
Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5
Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 is a system-on-module (SOM) for custom applications. It features a BCM2712 with a 2.4-GHz, quad-core, 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU. It uses the VideoCore VII GPU at 800 MHz, which supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2. Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 has up to 16 GB of LPDDR4X SDRAM and up to 64 GB of eMMC flash storage or MicroSD card (Lite).
In addition, there are 4Kp60 dual HDMI outputs, MIPI camera/display transceivers, and a PCIe Gen 2 x1 interface. For networking, the device relies on a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module or Gigabit Ethernet via an IO board.
Here’s a fun pi number note: Babylonians and Egyptians had an estimate for pi as well—their number was 3.1605 roughly back in 1650 BCE. Humans are so smart!
The last few times I used pi, the number, was for a 3D model I was drawing and getting the circumference of a hat.
When was the last time you used pi to calculate something? Leave a comment below.
