General discussion • Re: how much would it have cost per pi500 to fit the M.2 components?

Now, if you're OK with a drive and cable sticking out of the back of the Pi, all of this does not matter. I dislike all the spaghetti that goes along with it and the extra $2 + vat to avoid it is more than worth it. So given the choice I'll pay the extra, every time as it does not make sense otherwise.

I had hoped that the Pi500 would be a cure for the spaghetti. Unfortunately this proved not to be the case. If you power your monitor with it then you will run four separate cables out of the back of your desktop device. Five if you use Ethernet. If you don't power the monitor with it then it reduces to 3 or 4 cables and two power adapters. You could reduce this with a BT mouse.

A Pi 5 can be moved out of sight behind the monitor and short cables used. If you use a keyboard with an internal USB hub (like the Raspberry Pi one) then you can run a single cable to behind the monitor. Or none with BT.

I should have known before because I have the 400, but something about powering the monitor from the Pi did actually give me hope until I thought it through.

If I used them as a desktop right next to a monitor it would not bother me too much because I'd just use some zip ties to make it more manageable.

Pretty much all my Pis are headless and get setup somewhere out of the way and out of sight. But having just 1 cable is the holy grail, be it 400/500 or 4/5. For the 4 and 5 it's even worse, because those the cables stick out on 2 sides of the board.

Perfect setup for all of them would really be nvme and poe on the same hat. Set them wherever with just 1 cable that takes are of both power and better network while keeping foot print really small. It's too bad the 500 comes with the footprint for those parts already on the board, but they're not populated, it would solve all of that for me.

Statistics: Posted by memjr — Thu Jan 02, 2025 8:00 pm

---