The Raspberry Pi 4 board was launched in June 2019 and was roughly forty times more powerful than the original Raspberry Pi open hardware platform. With a world of peripherals and expansions available for Raspberry Pi platforms, it is now possible to use it as any other personal computer, including for home working and studying. And that is why RPi Trading decided to launch the Raspberry Pi 400, an all-in-one personal computer based on a Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer.
Recalling the design of the early home computers that inspired a generation of children to become engineers, the new Raspberry Pi 400 takes the form of a keyboard. Users simply plug in a USB-C based power supply, mouse and micro-SD card configured with a suitable operating system, such as Raspberry Pi OS, to start exploring the world of computing and electronics.
At the heart of Raspberry Pi 400 is the 64-bit BCM2711 system-on-chip, which integrates a quad-core Arm Cortex-A72 CPU running at 1.8GHz, and a VideoCore VI graphics processor supporting OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan graphics, H.264 and H.265 video, and sophisticated image processing capabilities. 4GB of LPDDR4-3200 DRAM provides space for the most demanding use cases.
And the Raspberry Pi 400 offers a variety of connectivity and interfacing options: two USB 3.0 ports and a single USB 2.0 port for peripherals; two micro-HDMI ports, supporting up to 4k resolution; Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac wireless networking and Bluetooth 5; and a standard 40-pin GPIO port, supporting Raspberry Pi HAT expansion boards. In many ways, far more advanced in this regard than most Windows PC currently available on the market, and certainly much better than any available Chrome-based Internet-shell.
With so many available Linux music players, including the powerful Volumio and the advanced connectivity supported by the Raspberry Pi 400, this will be the perfect machine for audio enthusiasts looking to start building an affordable networked music system. And this is certain to be followed with many new audio-focused hardware options. And as our colleagues from Linuxgizmos detail, Canonical recently released Ubuntu 20.10 with optimized Raspberry Pi images for all major Pi SBCs and modules, including a full Desktop version that runs on higher-end models (meaning, it will run on this one).
The Raspberry Pi 400 is available on its own, or as part of a kit containing a power supply, a mouse, an HDMI lead, a 16GB micro-SD card with Raspberry Pi OS preinstalled, and a copy of the Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide. English (UK and US), French, Italian, German and Spanish keyboard variants are shipping now, with more language keyboards to follow in 2021. It's already available across Europe, the US and Canada, with availability being extended to include India, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and South Africa in November 2020.
The Raspberry Pi 400 can be ordered from OKdo, the global technology company from Electrocomponents (RS Components/Allied electronics). www.OKdo.com
Other resellers across the world are listed at
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400/
