In fact, this was one of the most frustrating electronics projects I’ve done to date – and now you get to come with me in my adventures (and misadventures) in microsoldering on the Atomic Pi (or was it Kuri? The jury seems to be out on the nomenclature). With my previous experience with fine-pitch electronics work, I figured that this would be a fairly easy modification to make. A few people have attempted to remove the chip and wire in an external PCIe riser, without success. Unfortunately, the RTL8111G Ethernet chip is soldered to the board, with no easy method to replace it with an external card. The NIC’s usage of the Z8350’s single PCI Express (PCIe) lane is what caught my attention. 12-volt barrel jack input is converted to 5 volts with a DC-DC converter module.
PFSENSE RASPBERRY PI 2018 WINDOWS 10
The 16 gigabytes of eMMC storage proved to be too cramped to run Windows 10 directly, and the Realtek RTL8111G Gigabit Ethernet chipset is often frowned upon by those in the pfSense (a free firewall/router OS) community. This is compounded by the board’s need for clean, well-regulated 5 volts at 2-4 amps, with 12 volts being optional to power the onboard speaker amplifier. This is because – unlike almost every other SBC – you can’t just plug in a barrel jack or USB cord to power it! Instead, it uses a 2×13 pin header, which many users did not have on hand, nor had the skill and/or resources to build their own solution. With some investigative work, members of the community found out that the “Atomic Pi” board actually belonged to the Kuri robot from Mayfield Robotics the company shut down in late 2018, and the liquidated stock of these SBCs were snatched up by Digital Loggers with the help of a Kickstarter campaign, who then developed breakout boards to make using them easier. Recently, the Atomic Pi made waves in the electronics hobbyist space, boasting an Intel Atom Z8350 quad-core CPU with 2 GB of RAM, 16GB of eMMC storage, Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, USB 3.0, built-in speaker amplifiers, and lots of general-purpose I/O (GPIO) pins – all for less than $40 USD!Īs one might expect, there were caveats to this little computer, with some dismissing it very harshly, if not unfairly. However, some use the x86 architecture, which is used in higher-end tablets, laptops and desktop computers. Most of these computers use the ARM architecture, found on almost all mobile devices today. SBCs are compact computers, carrying their own CPU and memory, and usually some on-board storage and various I/O connections (e.g. Single-board computers (SBCs) are all the rage nowadays, with the Raspberry Pi being the most well-known in this category. I accept no responsibility for damages arising from attempting this modification. Reenacting what I’ve done requires significant experience with SMT (surface-mount technology) components, some barely larger than a grain of sand (I consider 0402-size components to be “oversize” in this instance). Let’s just say it’s a long story…ĭISCLAIMER: The modification performed in this blog post can, and has, caused permanent hardware damage to my Atomic Pi, albeit repairable with much skill and effort. It’s just a massive pain to do so, even if you have steady hands. TL DR: The Atomic Pi single-board computer CAN be expanded through PCIe.
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