The Pi 500 is hot off the press. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Pi 100 series, it's a Raspberry Pi built into a keyboard. I see it as sort of a competitor to the idea of a laptop. You throw it in your backpack, haul it around, move it around your house, whatever you need to do, then you whip it out, plug it into a monitor and start working. It's a full computer inside a keyboard.

This is the Pi 500 Plus though, the premium version of the Pi 500, which came out at the end of last year. And it has a few nice features like a slight hardware revision, an NVMe SSD, and a mechanical keyboard. Welcome back to Core Electronics. Today we are doing a teardown of the Pi 500 so we can see what makes it. Alrighty, in our box we have a Pi 500, as well as it looks like some tools here. We've got a keycap puller and a spudger doohickey to take this thing apart.

First things first, it is pretty solid. The build quality overall feels really good. I'm unable to flex it at all, which was something you could kind of do with the Pi 500s. And I would say it weighs about 606.51 grams. So not super heavy, but definitely has a bit of heft to it. Let's start by taking a look at that mechanical keyboard though, one of the big things about the Pi 500 Plus. We've got some nice and low profile keycaps and switches on a compacted 75% keyboard layout, which Raspberry Pi, that happens to be my favorite size and layout.

Let's peel a cap off though and take a look-see to see what is underneath. Underneath, it looks like we have a low profile Gateron Silver something. I'm going to guess here that's a KS33 in silver or something like that. I do like that it has that sort of box or stability ring around it. I would feel a lot more confident chucking this in my backpack and not worrying about keys breaking off or falling off or whatever. Unfortunately, we're not going to be doing a durability test today though. Unless of course we get a billion likes and then we'll do a durability test.

Alright, what does it sound like though? Let's try and get some nice and clean audio of that. Pretty clicky, very short on the travel and very speedy linear switches. I know there are a billion different preferences for keyboards, but this seems pretty nice. All righty, let's see that RGB though. I'm going to go ahead and plug it in to see what's up. All we really need is our USB-C power supply, but I'm also going to go ahead and plug in our HDMI and mouse, which is really all we need to operate this thing.

I've just gone through and done our first time setup to get to desktop, but the RGB works as long as the keyboard is powered on with USB-C. I assume this is our RGB hotkey and we've got a white brightness control, pretty standard keyboard. We've got red, we've got static RGB, we've got rainbow gaming RGB mode. That's really nice, I like that. Pretty standard. And we're back to there. Nice and bright keyboard, it's not really apparent with our giant studio lights beaming down onto it, but I really like the white theme in general and it just kind of makes everything pop. It's a really clean design, I like it.

Now that power button, from the first time I laid my eyes on this, I was like, oh, I might have a bone to pick with this. I hate laptops with a power button in the corner because you so easily accidentally press it, but unlike a normal Pi 5, no matter how much you press the power button, it doesn't shut down at all, it just brings up the power menu. You have to physically press and hold it to shut down your Pi, so crisis averted. Also, we have our usual Pi desktop experience here, it's pretty much the same as any Raspberry Pi 5 computer experience, it's just all built into your keyboard. Also, the NVMe SSD comes preloaded with Pi OS, which is nice.

Alrighty, let's shut this down and have a look-see inside of it. On the bottom, we have five screws holding everything together, and with a little bit of spudging around the edges, the keyboard came off. Very generously long ribbon cable holding it on, I've done a lot of laptop repairs and usually they're so short, they're just so finicky. Thank you, Raspberry Pi, for making this so easy. Just gonna pull that up, and there is our keyboard, and there is our bottom. On the bottom of our keyboard, pretty standard, there's not really much going on. The switches are soldered on, so you could probably very easily swap out the caps for whatever you want, but you're gonna have to, you know, re-solder everything if you want to swap out your switches, but you can't ask for the world here.

We can, however, see a little RP2 chip here, I'm gonna assume that's a 2040. This is the same chip on their Pico microcontroller series, and it looks like they're using it here to handle all the keyboard IO. Pretty flexible on that, it's definitely the lower section that's giving its rigidity. More importantly though, we have our lower section with this giant aluminium heatsink here, I'm gonna assume that's a heatsink. Let's peel it off and see what's underneath. Thermal pads on the other side, I'm gonna say that's definitely a heatsink. This is massive for a Raspberry Pi when you think about it. It feels like it weighs about 71.68 grams, give or take a little bit.

Editor, can you please cut to the thermal test? I'll probably do it later today to see, is this cooling? How well is it cooling? Hey there, Jared from the future.

Again, keyboard is back together and I've gone ahead and installed Stressberry and I went and run a synthetic benchmark that basically runs the CPU at 100% and it did it for 30 minutes. And if we take a look at the graph, the editor, can you put the graph here? Thank you very much. It looks like the giant passive cooler is more than enough. From our previous Pi 5 testing, we found that you get thermal throttling at about 80 degrees and under a synthetic workload, we didn't even get close to that on this thing. So I would say maybe even with an overclock, you would probably be hard pressed to overheat this thing in regular day-to-day usage. It was also a little bit warm on the bottom, but everywhere else was pretty cool. It's more than enough. It does a good job.

And at the bottom of all of this, we have our actual single board computer. Honestly, it looks like they've just gotten a Pi 5 and kind of smooshed it out and incorporated an M.2 hat in there with an SSD. It also looks like it's the same PCB as the Pi 500, just with a few extra bits and bobs. We've got our Broadcom chip up there. That's where our CPU, GPU and whatnot is. And this appears to be the D0 chip revision, the D0 stepping. This is the same that our regular Pi 5 16 gigabyte rolls out with. It's a bit more power efficient here and there and just smaller. It's just a revision of the Pi 5.

This also comes with 16 gigabytes of RAM, which is above it just there. Now, 16 gigs has kind of become the new minimum standard for desktop computers, but single board computers like the Pi need a lot less just for day-to-day tasks. So this is probably a bit tad extravagant in the RAM department. However, there is a quickly growing list of applications that can utilize this much RAM on a Pi. Vision language models like Moondream, for example, can easily use a good seven gigabytes or so. And if you run any LLM on a Pi, easily, easily chew through this much RAM.

We also have here an RPi branded SSD. At the time of writing, they haven't officially released one in this size here. They're usually in the smaller format. If you can put in basically any size you want. And it looks like it'll fit any standard NVMe size SSD. I'm assuming you can bring your own here, but out of the box, it comes with 256 gigabytes. And just looking around, it looks like we have all of the usual suspects on a Pi 5 board. We've got our power management circuitry, a debug probe, RTC battery connector, if you want to connect that, and the RP1 IO chip. And this is what controls all of our IO, which looks like we have all of our standard ports on a Pi 5 minus a USB.

We also have a nice little cover for our 40 GPIO pins that you can go ahead and plug all your hardware and whatnot into. And it also looks like we have an option to boot off our micro SD card here, which is really handy if you ever need to reinstall OS onto that NVMe. Another thing that's missing is those MIPI connectors, which are usually used to connect something like a camera or touchscreen to. I don't think a Pi 100 series board has ever had one though. I think it might be in the minority here, but if it did, this would make for a little killer Cyberdeck starter or something like that. You could just 3D model the bottom panel here, 3D print a new one, put a hinge on it, put your screen on it, put that keyboard on top, and you've got like a nice little starter for a Cyberdeck. No MIPI is not end of the world there. It's still entirely possible to do that through a HDMI touchscreen. And you can plug in a USB camera if you want. I'm just saying, very tempting Cyberdeck project right there.

I plugged in the Pi, booted it up, and once it's gotten to the desktop in idle, you can see we're using about two watts of power, maybe just a little bit more. This is a little bit lower than what we've typically seen from this D0 stepping. So I don't know if they're just extra, extra power efficient in the Pi 500s, or probably more likely we've just won the silicon lottery here and gotten a really power efficient chip. When we turn on that keyboard though, you can clearly see it jump up. Like that is using nearly seven watts with the full white brightness scheme and more or less depending on what colors you're using. It is quite funny that we have like a computer idling at two watts and then we just turn on the keyboard and it jumps up, you know, two and a half fold power usage. It's ridiculous. It's just, it's so power efficient.

Well, that about wraps us up here. Overall, pretty nifty little device. When the Pi 5 came out a couple of years ago, one of the things that I really stressed and was really happy to see was that the Pi 5 is fast enough to be a computer for light day-to-day tasks. You know, it can be your daily driver depending on what you're doing. Pi 4, just a little bit too slow for that. Because of that, something like the Pi 500 makes sense. You know, a computer and a keyboard, you bring it, plug it into your monitor in one place and then plug it in somewhere else and, you know, it's like a laptop. It's an alternative to the idea of a laptop. And this is just the nice premium plus version of that Pi 500 idea.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, but having something nice like this that's Linux-based and Pi-flavored to chuck in your bag and go is pretty appealing to me, especially a computer that has, you know, GPIO pins exposed that you can use. A nice little, you know, maker accessory. Let us know what you think below about this thing or over on our community forums. If you do build a Cyberdeck, please post it in our community forums. I'll go and give you a like up and I'll rate your Cyberdeck.

Until next time though, happy making.