Raspberry Pi400

Well, the latest in the line of Raspberry Pi's is here, the Pi 400 ...
Lord knows why people seem to like unboxing videos ... is it a kind of bragging?

No idea. The kids seem to like it , so here's some pictures...

Oh look a box from Farnell...

It's got some packing in it ... the excitement... 

... the product box...

... behold the Pi400...

... the official power supply, and official mouse ... I can hardly contain myself (if you have detected a shade of sarcasm, you're correct)

Our lovely marketing lady, Jilly.. "Where's the rest of it?"

And LP showing the rear panel. 

Plugged in and booted..

Official mouse ...

.. set up and updated...

So that's the silly unboxing rubbish dealt with. I would have made a video, except I couldn't be bothered, just close your eyes and picture it, with some ghastly music playing over the top. 

Now to the real stuff...

What do you really get for your £90? 

It's a Pi4 with 4GB of ram, only rather than running at 1.5GHz, the same ARM v8 Cortex-A72 is running a bit faster at 1.8GHz, all packaged inside a chiclet keyboard, a 16GB memory card, loaded with the Raspberry OS, a 3A power supply and the offcial mouse.

A review... It performs just like a Pi4, so really that's just fine. The chiclet keyboard works nicely. The offical mouse is ,well, barely adequate, it works, but ergonomics had passed this one by. 

You get one less USB than on a Pi4, and the GPIO port is available on the rear. 

Why would you want one?

I actually bought this for two reasons. One is it's easier to set up projects (destined for a Pi4) on this, as it's compact, and avoids having (yet) even more wires and keyboards hanging about in the workshop.. similar reasons I have an arduino uno board for developing projects that will eventually exist on a stand alone ATMEGA328.

The second is to run the excellent HAMPI radio ham image by Dave Slotter W3DJS. This should give me a flexible, small, quiet, low power platform to run some ham radio experiments on. 

Oh, and yes, there's a third reason. It reminds me of the computers I had in the 80's .. the Oric-1 , C64 and Spectrum. It gives me a nice warm feeling.