The Raspberry Pi 400 is an affordable mini-PC especially for schoolchildren: The compact keyboard housing contains the technology of the 1698 featured Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB of RAM. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is now selling the Raspi 400 for around 70 U.S. dollar. The kit for 88 also includes: power adapter, mouse, HDMI Cable (one side with micro HDMI connector), printed manual and a microSD card (16 GByte) with pre-installed Raspberry Pi OS.

In the c’t laboratory, we were able to carry out the first tests the Raspberry Pi 400; in advance we received a sample with a US keyboard. For German-speaking countries (and others) there should be a version with a localized keyboard.

Almost all Raspi-4 connections The Raspi 400 is two centimeters high; its base area of ​​24, 5 centimeters times 12, 5 centimeters is less than 60 percent of the area of ​​a DIN A4 Leaf. The keyboard has dimensions similar to that of a compact (13 – inch) notebooks and a flat hub.

All connections of the Raspberry Pi 400 are located on its back: three USB-A sockets (two USB 3.0, one USB 2.0), Gigabit Ethernet (RJ 45), two micro-HDMI, power supply via USB-C, MicroSD card reader and the typical Raspi GPIO pin header with 40 contacts. Many Raspi plug-on modules do not fit directly on it because of their design.

Raspberry Pi 4xx (5 pictures) The Raspberry Pi 400 has a base area of ​​25,5 times 12, 5 centimeters.

Compared to the Raspi 4, there is no audio jack socket and the internal connections for camera (CSI), display (DSI) and power-over Ethernet (PoE).

Other board, good cooling The Raspberry Pi Foundation has one for the Raspi 400 different board designed than for the Raspi 4. On the one hand the mentioned connections are missing, on the other hand there is an additional keyboard controller.

Below the keyboard there is a large sheet of aluminum that is connected to a thermal pad ARM chip Broadcom BCM 2711 cools. It works so well that, unlike a Raspi 4 without a cooler, it does not throttle even under continuous load. In addition, it clocks ex works with up to 1.8 GHz around 20 Percent higher than on the Raspi 4 (1.5 GHz).

Raspberry Pi 400 tested The commissioning of the kit version of the Raspi 400 is simple: As soon as you plug in the power supply, the initial installation starts from the already inserted MicroSD card. After entering the basic data (localization, time zone, username, password, WLAN password, screen adjustment) it takes a while until all updates are installed.

With the power button The function key F of the keyboard also serves as an on / off switch, the some miss the Raspi 4: The switching function is in the keyboard controller.

Shutting down the Raspi is content 400 with 0, 14 Watt (measured with the supplied USB-C power supply). The F 10 Button then starts the Raspi; to shut down from operation you have to press the key combination Fn + F 10 Press.

The pre-installed Raspberry Pi boots with the supplied MicroSD card from SanDisk, which meets the A1 specification OS (32 – bit) in round 25 seconds.