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Pi 500 Desktop by Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi 500 is a fast, powerful computer built into a high-quality keyboard, for the ultimate compact PC experience. It features the same quad-core 64-bit Arm processor and RP1 I/O controller found in Raspberry Pi 5. With a one-piece aluminium heatsink built in for improved thermal performance, your Raspberry Pi 500 will run fast and smoothly even under heavy load, while delivering glorious dual 4K display output.

Normally you’d need to pick up a keyboard and other accessories to turn the Pi 5 into a functioning desktop - but since most keyboards have empty space in them, you can just cram the Pi 5 inside to make an all-in-one kit. Think of it like a modern Apple IIe, but super light and powerful.

There’s 3 USB ports, for adding USB mice, disk drives, or really any accessories that work with Linux. For video output, two HDMI ports can drive driving up to two monitors of any resolution up to 4k! There’s built in Bluetooth and WiFi for internet connectivity, or plug in an Ethernet cable for fast wired networking.

Hackers can rejoice - you still get the classic 2x20 IDC port that can be used to connect to a breadboard or HAT/PHat/Bonnet. To connect to a breadboard for wiring up buttons and LED, use our T-Cobbler! To connect to a Bonnet/HAT, we recommend a 2x20 IDC cable + Mini HAT Hacker (the cable plugs in at the top of the HAT hacker, giving you two spots for accessory HATs. Or our CYBERDECK Hat which has a nice angled connector to create a pop-up display

  • 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, with cryptography extensions, 512KB per-core L2 caches and a 2MB shared L3 cache
  • 8GB LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM
  • Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5.0GHz) IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi®
  • 32GB Class A2 microSD included
  • Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
  • Gigabit Ethernet
  • 2 × USB 3.0 port and 1 × USB 2.0 port
  • Horizontal 40-pin GPIO header
  • 2 × micro HDMI® port (supports up to 4Kp60)
  • H.265 (4Kp60 decode)
  • OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics
  • SD card support: microSD card slot for operating system and data storage
  • Keyboard: 78-, 79- or 83-key compact keyboard (depending on regional variant)
  • Power: 5V DC via USB connector

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Adafruit Blinka Installation

We use a special library called adafruit_blinka (named after Blinka, the CircuitPython mascot) to provide the layer that translates the CircuitPython hardware API to whatever library the Linux board provides.

For example, on Raspberry Pi we use the python RPi.GPIO library. For any I2C interfacing we'll use ioctl messages to the /dev/i2c device. For SPI we'll use the spidev python library, etc. These details don't matter so much because they all happen underneath the adafruit_blinka layer.