You may remember the Turing Pi 2 mini-ITX cluster board that supports up to four Raspberry Pi CM4 modules. It now has some competition with the DeskPi Super6C board, still based on the mini-ITX form factor, and taking up to six Raspberry Pi CM4 modules.
The Super6C offers a much slimmer design since the modules are inserted horizontally instead of vertically, plus each module comes with its own M.2 NVMe SSD socket besides a microSD card slot. The board also features two Gigabit Ethernet ports and two HDMI outputs, as well as four USB 2.0 ports.
DeskPi Super6C specifications:
- SoM – 6x sockets for up Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4
- Storage
- 6x M.2 PCIe Gen2 x1 2280 sockets, one per CM4 module
- 6x MicroSD card slots, one per CM4 module
- Video Output – 1x HDMI 2.0 output, 1x HDMI 1.4a output, both attached to the first Raspberry Pi CM4 module
- Networking
- 2x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports
- Gigabit Ethernet switch to interconnect all 6x system-on-modules
- USB
- 6x micro USB ports, one per CM4 module to flash the OS to the eMMC flash (except for Raspberry Pi CM4 Lite modules)
- 2x USB 2.0 Type-A ports, 2x USB 2.0 interfaces via header, all attached to the first CM4 module
- Misc
- Onboard ON/OFF and Reset button
- PC Case front panel header
- 3x 12V fan headers
- 6x 5V fan header, one per CM6 module
- Some LEDs
- Power Supply – 19V to 24V DC via a power barrel jack or 12V via a 4-pin ATX connector
- Dimensions – 170 x 170 x 21 mm (Mini-ITX form factor)
The DeskPi Super6C ships with a 100W power supply, but you’ll need to source your own Raspberry Pi CM4 module. Good luck with that! The OS is bootable from either the eMMC, SD Card, or the network. There are some more hardware details and instructions to use Ansible open-source software platform for remote configuring and managing computers on Github.
The list of potential applications seems to be copied from the Turing Pi website and includes setting up a home server (homelab), hosting cloud apps, learning about Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Serverless, Microservices, setting up a Cloud-native apps testing environment, learning concepts of distributed Machine Learning apps, prototyping applications, studying parallel and distributed computing concepts, as well as hosting K8S, K3S, Minecraft, Plex, Owncloud, Nextcloud, Seafile, Minio, Tensorflow, etc…
52Pi sells the DeskPi Super6C on their own website for $199.99 plus shipping, but you’ll also find it on Amazon for $249.99.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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So why are WiFi hot spots and USB mobile dongles so much cheaper, is a question that comes to mind?
Even a pine phone is cheaper. Yes there are design development cost and limited run production costs.
Because we’re talking 5G here. That Waveshare HAT is probably the cheapest 5G hardware I’ve found yet. Last time, I wrote about a WiFi 6 board with optional Quectel 5G IoT module, and price for the module was just under $500.
I can’t find 5G USB adapters yet, except some that take M.2 card. Having said that many people use 5G for “5GHz WiFi”, so I may have missed some models during my web search.
Wow 400 USD just for a HAT. Crazy expensive. And also: Who really gives a shit about 5G? Especially on > 6Ghz. I rather use 3G/4G, IEE 802.14.5 and Lora for certain use-cases.
Because 3G will go away, new infrastructure will be built using 5G…
Here already 3G is spotty due to frequency refarming to benefit 5G. It’s not my choice, but the hype around 5G pushed the operators to quickly adopt it.
Yeah, but the price is…painful. We’re trying to do M2M and things like IoT gateways with this stuff. $400 is painful and about 10 times the cost of the compute system we’re attaching it TO.
This isn’t too much at this time for 4G, 5G and gps. The timing for an IOT network cn be had from the GPS.
True. But as past shows us prices will drop. 3G dongles wer very expensive, now they are max 10$
4G dongles were playing in a cost league well above mortal’s capabilities.
Now go figure what will happen with 5G.
At least as long as our friends at the west coast of the Atlantic don’t kill more players besides Huawei in the 5G market…
cancer included ?
As well as the body implantable chip and bill gates’ vaccine!
LOL
I think it’s too early to make a huge investment in 5G. Still a long way to go. But Qualcomm chip whether they are sold for applications only or whatever usually have provisions for radios included in their features. This is a good price for a system which breaks that out and includes the RF parts. FWIW it should also be able to do WIFI, since they are actually phone chips. I didn’t see that broken out, which is sort of odd. Maybe too busy for the GPIO to pi to do that to, and somewhat duplicative of what a… Read more »
The price is quite too high for most use cases. I suggest to wait for operators to deliver their own kits at lower prices. They will have no other choice, after having invested billions in hardware + radio frequency licenses. If accessing them is too expensive they won’t find customers. And most end users don’t care a dime about 5G, a part of the remaining ones are conspiracy seekers who reject it :-/
Agreed with the others commenting that this is probably not good for traditional low-data IOT or M2M.
People interested in this will be 5G routers, robotics knowing it is early days for 5G but want to test it for product concepts.
Having seen the evolution of 5G cards, I can say this is a new low price point for Simcom.
Hi Team,
How we can capture the 5G modem logs?
With Which tool we can capture?
Does it supports Wireshark?