Raspberry Pi 500 in the workshop

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The PI 5 has been out for some time. It’s a decent PC for many everyday tasks and can run Carbide Motion. The downside is it really needs a active cooler to shine. This means a fan moving air over the PC. While good for cooling, it could turnout badly with sawdust or fine particles in the mix. Very recently the Pi 500 a variant with a large passive heat sink built in to a keyboard was released. Also a 15 inch HDMI monitor both by the Pi foundation. The pair make a good workstation in a shop in my opinion. The previous Pi 400 had a similar design and many thin rubber keyboard covers are available for it, I suspect the same will be true for the 500 pretty soon. This makes for a mostly dust proof passively cooled system. They should become widely available in the near future. Keep in mind it is shipping with a 64 bit OS on it’s SD card, to run Carbide Motion you need the 32 bit version, so you would have to either reload the 32 bit OS or grab different boot media for the 32 Bit OS, either another SD card or a USB drive.

There are many many youtube videos on the hardware discussed here and how to image the OS for booting.as well.

This maybe a good addition to some folks workshop as a inexpensive controlling computer.

Thank you

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+1

I’ve had a great time using the Pi 400 in my shop to control the Shapeoko! Although I might need to look into one of those rubber keyboard covers…haven’t had any issue (yet) without a cover in the past 3 or 4 years.

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Thanks for the heads up! One of my workshop LattePanda 3 Deltas just died so I’ll be picking up something new soon. Seems like a Pi 500 is going to be top of the list.

If I pick one up, I’ll post about the experience after it has some miles on it. :pray:

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