The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released the Raspberry Pi 400, its first all-in-one PC built on a keyboard. At first glance, the Raspberry Pi 400 just looks like another Bluetooth keyboard. Flip it over, however, and you'll notice the ports you'd typically find on the sides of your laptop or the back of a desktop. The keyboard has a pair of micro HDMI ports that can output 4K video, two USB 3.0 ports, a single USB 2.0 port, and even an Ethernet port. There is also a USB-C port to power the device and it also has a microSD card slot for storage. As usual, no Raspberry Pi device is complete with a GPIO header for connecting additional peripherals called a Hardware-on-Top or HAT. After releasing five major iterations of the credit card-sized system-on-chip computer, last year's Raspberry Pi 4 sported everything you'd expect from a modern computer: a quad processor. 64-bit core, tons of RAM, wireless networking, dual display output, and 4K video playback, plus a 40-pin GPIO header for makers and geeks to plug in additional hardware. Simply connect a USB keyboard and mouse and a monitor or TV via its HDMI connector and you're ready to go.
More than the eye can discern
But not everyone has these replacement devices or the skills and time to buy compatible devices on hand. Also, with the power supply cord, all the cables could soon become unwieldy. The Raspberry Pi 400 is designed to overcome all these problems by putting all the peripherals on one keyboard. The Raspberry Pi 400 uses the same Broadcom SoC as the Raspberry Pi 4. However, the one in the new keyboard is now clocked at 1.8 GHz instead of 1.5 GHz as with the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. The Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard is available in a variety of regional layouts including UK and US English, as well as German, French, Italian and Spanish, and you can expect devices with layouts for other languages to be available soon.
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(Image credit: Raspberry Pi Foundation)
Power play
The device is available as a kit or as a stand-alone unit. The kit includes everything but the monitor and costs $94. It comes with USB-C power, USB mouse, microHDMI cable, 16GB microSD card preloaded with Raspberry Pi operating system, and official beginner's guide. If you have the USB peripherals, you can get the Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard for $67. The device also has a number of compatible accessories, such as a Bluetooth mouse and ribbon cable. The 40-pin male to female ribbon cable will help you connect any of the available HATs to the Raspberry Pi 4. While the creators of the Raspberry Pi dock have done a fantastic job integrating the Raspberry Pi 4 inside the keyboard and exposing all the ports . However, the 3,5mm headphone port fell victim to the heavy pressure. The Raspberry Pi Foundation was established in 2008 with the goal of making computer science education more inclusive, through its low-cost RaspberryPi computers. In keeping with this goal, the Raspberry Pi 400 is touted as the perfect educational tool that will appeal to both teachers and students. And it couldn't have happened at a better time. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced students around the world to study remotely from home, and not all of them have access to a computer.