Raspberry Pi 400 Unboxing and Review

the raspberry pi foundation sent me this box and inside of it is the brand new pi 400. this is the pi 400 kit which comes with a bunch of things basically everything that you need to get started with the raspberry pi this is the pi 400 which looks just like a keyboard in fact it's the exact same size shape and style as the pi keyboard but if you look at the back you'll see that there are vent holes and on the back of the body of the keyboard are a bunch of ports so this is actually a full pi 4 computer but it's called the pi 400 because there's a couple differences which i'll get into soon also in this kit you get the official usbc power supply which is helpful for giving power to the pi 400 the official raspberry pi mouse which is nice for being able to use a mouse if you want to control your computer that way technically you could control it with just the keyboard there's a sd to microsd card adapter and the pi 400 comes with a built-in micro sd card this is a sandisk edge 16 gigabyte card it's an a1 class so it should be pretty fast i'm going to do some benchmarking and see how fast it is compared to all the other micro sd cards that i've used in the past so that's nice and then also in the bottom of this box there is a an official raspberry pi beginner's guide and this is a great book if you've never used a raspberry pi or even even if he's used one before it tells you all about how to set it up how to use the software on it and even some some basic programming examples some examples using electronics controlled by the gpio pins it's a really neat book and this is the third edition i believe that there's a fourth edition coming out this is a preview box that i got and they obviously did not have the fourth edition complete by the time that i got this but that's a nice book to have on hand when you're learning how to do everything raspberry pi and in the back don't forget this there's the official raspberry pi micro hdmi to hdmi adapter and this lets me plug the raspberry pi into any tv or monitor that has an hdmi input so i'm going to put these pieces of packaging back in the box and we'll get started with this raspberry pi 400 all right so i have a monitor here this is actually a tv from insignia it's just a tv that i had laying around with speakers in it so i'm going to be able to test out how youtube and other things work in it so the first thing i'm going to do is plug my pi 400 right into the tv so let me see if i can find the hdmi input here this is hdmi one and i'll just pop this right underneath right into this port now one thing you might notice on this first edition of the pi 400 is these two hdmi ports on the back are not actually labeled hdmi zero and one like they are on the pi 4. i have a pi 4 over here also as an example and it says that this one is hdmi 0 and this one's one and it's the same order on this board you can tell that the port layout is different but this is the first port so this is the one that you'll want to usually plug into and then this is the second port if you want to drive two displays or have a monitor and a tv or something like that i have a tear down video where i go into depth i basically take everything apart in here and i show you the guts of it how it all is put together so i recommend go take a look at that video if you'd like anyways i'm going to plug this into the first hdmi port here so now i have it connected to my monitor i'm going to grab this mouse out of here take this little sticky part off and there's the official mouse and i'll plug the mouse directly into the back of the keyboard now this is not a professional gaming mouse or anything like that but it's a it's an acceptable little mouse i've i've seen met much worse so i'm going to plug the mouse into the usb 2 port instead of one of the usb 3 ports because later i'm going to plug some usb 3 hard drives in there and make sure that the speeds are just as fast as they are on the pi 4. so now we got the keyboard well the computer and the mouse and the last thing is to connect the power supply so here's the official pi power supply and it's important to use a good power supply and that's why the kit includes this one this power supply uh provides let's see five volts at three amps and three amps is going to provide enough power for the pi uh for all the accessories you might plug in and even things like external hard drives if you use a lower quality power supply your pie might not get enough power and you'll have problems you'll have errors you'll see the little power icon up here on your screen sometimes so that's always a bad thing so now i'm going to plug this in and i just realized that i don't have an extension cord over here and all my other plugs are taken up so please bear with me for a second as i go grab one of those all right so i got power i grabbed my extension cord and now i have the usbc connector and i believe that the pi keyboard the pi 400 is set to turn on when i plug it in it looks like that's the case the power light came on and it's interesting this power light is actually a power and activity light so when you're using the pi you might notice that flashing that just means that it's performing some activity with a raspberry pi 400 just like all the other raspberry pi's this light's actual functionality can actually be programmed so you could change the way it behaves if you want it so this is the first time i'm booting it up i've actually torn this thing down before i booted that up and that's a good sign you can take it apart and put it back together and it will still work so it's resizing the pi file system and now it's rebooting itself getting everything ready and we'll just wait for it to start up the first time here all right so it says welcome to the raspberry pi desktop just like every other raspberry pi when you boot it up it brings you to this friendly ui it automatically logs you in there's a lot of things that i'm not going to cover in this video because it's basic raspberry pi usage but like i said this book covers all these important things like setting up your account and setting up security and then getting to use the pie tons and tons of different ways now for a few minutes in the rest of the video i'm going to answer some questions after i've used the raspberry pi 400 for a few different tasks and these are things that i think a lot of people who are interested in the pi 400 might be interested to know so i'm going to answer those questions and then i also have a blog post and the blog post is linked in the description and it's in a card right above me so go ahead and read that blog post it's going to have a lot more detail and i'm actually going to keep it updated as i go i'm going to learn new things about the pi 400 over the next few weeks and i'll keep adding to that blog post so please check that out please leave some comments in the video and i'll answer some of your questions here and any other questions you have i might put them into my blog post as time goes on all right so here are some of the most common questions i think people have about the pi 400 will you please let red shirt jeff cut the pie 400 with a hacksaw no red shirt jeff just stop okay all right how much does it cost well the kit that i have with all these parts here except for the monitor costs a hundred dollars but you can also buy it for 70 bucks just by itself i think that's a pretty good deal for all the different parts that you get it's basically a full computer in a box and i don't know if you remember the old imac commercials where it's like you set it down you plug it in and you turn it on well this thing has the same amount of connections as that imac did and it's a fraction of the price that it was but it's also way more powerful and can do many more things today so i think it's a pretty good value especially if you're looking to get a second computer or have a computer for one of your kids or have a computer that you can literally grab the keyboard and go anywhere and plug it somewhere and be able to network with things um also it's the the cpu in this is 1.8 gigahertz which is faster than the pi 4's 1.5 gigahertz the question is is the actual chip that's used in here different than the one in the pi 4 that's interesting it is and it isn't they're both using the broadcom bcm 2711 system on a chip but the pi 400 i took it apart and i saw that there's a new revision to this chip it's called a new stepping and it's c0 instead of b0 on the pi 4. so this new chip can actually control the cpu a little bit better it gets a little bit better thermals for the same performance so i think that's how they overclocked it a little bit from what was in the pi 4. also there's a giant heat shield and really you should go check out that video that i have the tear down of it and you can see the size of it almost the entire thing is basically a heat sink inside of it and that heat sink can dissipate the heat which i'll get to in a minute uh let's see what ports does it have on the back um i'll i'll go through the ports i'll i'll show you a little overlay here because i have it running and i don't want to just break it first it has a gpio on on the far left side and that gpio has all the same pins as a normal pi 4 so you can actually use pi hats and things like that with this although you might need an adapter cable because it's literally on the back of the keyboard another thing you might want to do is put a little piece of tape over it just in case you spill some coffee on it and it kind of explodes because there's actually some energized pins back here and it wouldn't be good to short them out or i think in the future the pie the raspberry pi company might include some sort of cover for it then you have the microsd card slot which i'll talk about in a minute then there's the two hdmi ports you can use up to two monitors with this and and you can drive them i believe 4k at 60p although your hdmi cable and monitor would have to support that if you want to do that otherwise it works great at 1080p which i'm using here then there's the usbc power port which can also be used for otg to be able to control the pi and access it from another computer which would be an interesting use case for this little guy then there's two usb 3.0 ports that can put through five gigabits total bandwidth although what i've found in my compute module reviews that i'm doing is that you can really only get about 3.2 gigabits per second total so if you have a 5 gigabits per second device like a super fast hard drive you're only going to get 3.2 gigabits maximum out of it due to the way the pci bus inside the pi system on it chip works then there's one usb 2.0 port the other port that normally would be on a pi 4 is actually used by the keyboard internally and then there's a gigabit ethernet jack which is cool i think the pi foundation or the pi company could have cheaped out here and not included that port and saved a little money on this but i like that they included it one thing to note is it doesn't have any activity or link indicator lights so you might have to um you might have to check on the computer itself when it's running to see if it's it's connected that's a little annoying to not have those but i'm guessing it's because that way that this little connector can be a little bit cheaper and fit in here a little better finally there's actually a kensington lock which is cool one thing that's interesting about it is it's not actually connected to any part of the metal chassis inside of the pi 400 so if you put a kensington lock on here a thief could probably pull really hard and just break the plastic off but to be honest for a computer that costs less than a hundred dollars i don't think that's going to be a big concern for most people and most people that would want to use this would just want to deter people from from trying to steal it quickly so that's all the ports on the back and it has it has plenty of connectivity in fact it has more connectivity on it built-in than my macbook pro which costs i don't know maybe 20 times more money than this thing so not 20 times probably yeah no about 20 times more money than this so that's that's a nice little uh victory on the pi's side how heavy is it this is 384 grams or if you're american like me it's 0.85 pounds so less than the weight of a pack of twizzlers and the regular pi keyboard is 269 grams so it's about 100 grams heavier than the keyboard but really it's it's so light it um the nice thing is that unlike the pi keyboard it's just heavy enough that it won't move around as much that was one complaint that i had with the pie keyboard is sometimes when you're typing it's so light that it would kind of move a little bit how are the thermals is it going to overheat if you overclock it well in my tear down video again go check that out the heatsink is massive and it can handle a lot of thermal load and that chip is newer and the chip can handle the higher speeds without getting as hot so it's interesting the the pi 400 typically idles right now i'm looking at it it's 33 34 degrees celsius the pi 4 that i have is usually 38 to 42 degrees celsius when it's idle so not only is the chip helping but that heat sink is helping to dissipate that heat a lot and i haven't done very long term overclock testing i plan on doing that with it to see if the keyboard itself can heat up a little bit i'm going to try maxing out the network maxing out the usb and the processor all at the same time for a few hours and see if i can actually get the pi keyboard to heat up a little bit and see if i can see that on a thermal camera we'll see but so far in my basic testing and the basic overclocking and a few short-term tests it doesn't really overheat it's it's kind of amazing how how well designed the heatsink must be compared to on a regular pi 4 some of the issues that i've had with it overheating and even the compute module for let's see how fast is the microsd card that is included with it this micro sd card isn't bad it's it's not it's it's definitely a thousand times better than some of the no name cheap ones that you get with a drone or something like that but it's definitely not the best either it has 17 megabytes per second sequential right when i use my dd test uh it has 9.24 megabytes per second random read 4k and 2.13 megabytes per second random write now comparing that to all the other cards that i've tested mostly in a raspberry pi 4 which is very similar to this with the same clock speed for the micro sd card slot um it's it's in the middle of the pack so it's not a bad card by any means and and i would be happy to use it for a computer that i'm i'm using mostly to browse the web and things like that but if you're going to do more disk activity if you're going to save files to it if you're going to do any videos work on it or photo work or anything like that i would recommend either getting the fastest micro sd card you can afford which would be a very quick and easy upgrade a way to get at least fifty percent maybe a hundred percent more performance out of the disk right away uh or for many times that performance gain get a usb 3.0 hard drive an ssd and use that it's way way faster and speaking of that can you use usb boot to get better speeds and faster startup and all that and yes you can it has two usb 3.0 ports and you can plug in a hard drive or ssd to there and you can actually boot off that and bypass the microsd card entirely what kind of things could you do with it well i mean it's a computer you can do anything you can do on a computer with it obviously it's linux and i have another video that i i posted a little bit earlier this year where i tried using the new pi 4 8 gigabyte model to replace my macbook pro for a full day and i i got into it and for a lot of things it can do anything that a normal computer can do there are some workflows and things that i have using my media production tools and my photoshop and things like that that you just can't do and most of those aren't problems with the raspberry pi it's just a linux issue but every day things are getting better and another thing that's nice is that since apple is moving to arm processors and since amazon now has arm processors and servers a lot more software is available for the raspberry pi today that wasn't even available a year or two ago so you can do a ton of things with it you could use it for zoom to to do video conferencing you can write documents on it you can program on it you can administer servers on it one of the things that i'm planning on using this for is i will have it with me everywhere and it's great that it has that built-in ethernet jack i can pop it into any network where i go and be able to connect to that network and do things on it work on devices on that network it's a lot more convenient for me to do this with a tv which everywhere you go there's a tv somewhere and then i can do this and i'll have my laptop which i can do for for other things but this is great for that kind of purpose too i don't think a lot of people use it for that most people probably use it as their primary computer the people that get it but it is cool to think about doing that who do i think this is actually for it's not necessarily for me i i'm not i i don't know i wouldn't call myself a maker per se and i wouldn't call myself somebody who's deep into hardware stuff but i do a lot of projects where i do want to integrate the pi with some other devices and i might need to use some gpio i might have a custom case for it i might mount it some place and not be using it and you can't i mean a keyboard you're not going to mount a keyboard on a wall and have a tv over here and be typing on your wallet you could do that but i don't think that would be that convenient so the pi 4 is still the most general purpose single board computer that i enjoy using and the compute module offers its own type of form factors where you can plug it into other devices and then you have the pi zero and things like that for low power consumption and a lot of other uses i think that this is going to be best for people who want to use the pie as a computer which is a lot of people like for instance this year with the pandemic a lot of people had trouble getting access to a computer this is a hundred dollar computer inside a keyboard and it's a decent quality keyboard and a good quality computer that can do almost everything that anyone would ever want to do on a computer browsing the web and watching videos and and sending emails and and writing and doing social media and the great thing about it is it's running linux and you can really get into the system and learn how the computer works and program and things like that i love that about the raspberry pi so i think it's it's going to be really good for kids for education for a family computer another thing that i might do with this is just set it upstairs and when i uh when i'm working on keyboarding lessons with my son or when i'm you know showing my daughter how to program or something like that i'm gonna be able to use this and it's it's really convenient and it stores really easily also the last question i guess is do i like this would i pay a hundred bucks for this for me personally maybe i i think for a lot of people this is an instant purchase just because of the fact that it's such a nice convenient package for a computer no longer do you have to buy one of these set it over here have a bunch of cables hanging out from it maybe buy a case and then have to modify the case because the official case causes the pie to overheat a little bit but it's not going to be such a big ordeal to get one of these working literally take this out of the box plug a couple cables in and as long as you have a tv or monitor which you can usually get one you know on craigslist i see them all the time for 50 60 70 for less than 200 bucks you have a computer a whole computer system that's adequate for almost anything that people do on computers these days so i i really like this i'm i'm happy with um how it turned out when i heard of the concept i was like oh maybe they'll stick a pie zero in here or maybe it'll be a taller keyboard and and it'll just have like this on the back and sides i've seen some people do that but i like how they put it in the same form factor and that also is helpful for the pi foundation because they have this top keyboard is probably the exact same hardware in the factory that they can make and all they have to do is change the silk screen on top so that saves them money in manufacturing which saves us money when we buy these things because they don't have to pay more money to build a new product line this is the same keyboard as the pi keyboard and the shell is a similar shell so there's definitely a different mold there but the engineering that goes into these devices i think is top notch and i as as a fellow engineer one who's not into pcb design and hardware and things it impresses me to see those things and not really have some of the weird flaky hardware issues and things on some of the other boards that i've had with the raspberry pi system so great job the raspberry pi foundation i think the biggest thing that detracts me from buying one is just the fact that it's stuck inside of a keyboard and i like to be able to take my computer apart and modify it and change it but anyways like i said please check out my blog post it's linked in the description please check out my teardown video and until next time i'm jeff gearling and inside of it is an a400 a400 it's not an a400 what is going on here now i can hear myself again actually i can't hear myself the recording device can hear myself anyways drop this back here without knocking oh there it goes that time zone 8 that's not it

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 300,644

Keywords: raspberry pi, pi 400, pi400, keyboard, unboxing, setup, review pi 4, sbc, single board computer, pi foundation, bmc2711, broadcom, all-in-one, computer, release

Id: 3A7pQN5W08E

Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020