While ever-so-slightly stressed at the lack of a Raspberry Pi 5 announcement over the last few years, some of our nice social media followers constructively suggested our social media staff cease posting sick memes and instead focus on getting Pi 5 manufactured. We don’t like to clip wings around here, so didn’t think twice before insisting our crack team, who know their way around ellipses better than electronics, design their own Raspberry Pi 5. What’s the worst that could happen, right? Right? Meet FrankenPi 5:
Designing FrankenPi
Dealing with feedback about what the engineers should have put on each new board we release is another absolute favourite part of our job. We collated everything we could remember our followers asked for on the [as yet unreleased] Pi 5 over the years, and tried our best to accommodate all requests. There were a lot of them, so it ended up being massive. Like, three times the size of the real Raspberry Pi 5.
What’s on the board?
As you can see, you’ve us to thank for the highly-favoured new on/off switch. I’m pretty sure James Adams, who designed the real Raspberry Pi 5, didn’t ever see our back-of-an-envelope design, but maybe he also picks up on Twitter X vibes and amended his architecture accordingly.
We also thought that if we put Eben’s direct line on FrankenPi, more of you would go directly to him with technical questions we often don’t know the answer to, thus freeing us up to learn how to use Threads and Mastodon and whatever other new platforms spring up in the wake of the other place transitioning beyond recognition. Spoiler: this feature did not make it onto the final board because Eben said no.
“USB” grumbles kept floating around too so we thought we’d add several to FrankenPi, including a few which don’t actually exist. Same goes for all the Python libraries – just shoved them all on there.
You’re going to have to solder your own GPIO because we only soldered one time each (everyone has to have a go on their first day at Pi Towers as a rite of passage) and we were all terrible.
We just threw the bat signal in there for fun and because it reminds us of the best sticker our illustrator and animator Sam has ever designed:
Bespoke manufacturing
Our friend Ben from HackSpace magazine believes in us and decided to transform our dreams from hastily drawn biro lines on the back of an envelope into a real life PCB. Just like that time Cinderella’s outfit was jazzed right up by that old lady with sprinkles coming out of her wand. (Pretty sure that’s how JLC PCB works?)
Ben foresaw the need to add his own design element — a bottle opener so that we can celebrate our first-ever board architecture project. He warns, however, that it’s probably only good for popping one or two bottle caps due to its flimsy nature. This seems like a good time to remind you not to try and use your Raspberry Pi boards as bottle openers. It will work, but it won’t end well for either of you.
Be kind, we tried
And for our final trick, we decided to drop this blog on the final day before we all leave for Christmas break. We won’t be back until the New Year and by that time, all the comments you post telling us how awful our PCB design is will be so old they won’t sting anymore. Love you, bye.
