SunFounder Pironman 5 is an enclosure for the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC that looks like a small Tower PC equipped with two RGB LED fans and a tower cooler with a PWM fan for cooling, and support for an NVMe SSD drive through the company’s Pironman 5 NVMe PiP HAT+ expansion board.
The case also includes a small OLED information display, a power button for safe shutdown, two full-size HDMI ports, a spring-loaded microSD card socket for easy insertion and removal, an IR receiver for media center applications, and externally accessible 40-pin GPIO header so users can still play with GPIO while the Raspberry Pi 5 is inside the case.
Pironman 5 key features and specifications:
- Designed for the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC (a board like Radxa Rock 5C could be installed instead, but software for OLED display, RGB LEDs, fan control, etc… might be an issue)
- Storage
- Pironman 5 NVMe PiP HAT+ supporting M.2 2230, 2242, 2260, or 2280 NVMe SSD at up to PCIe 2.0/ PCIe 3.0 speeds due to Pi 5 limitations
- MicroSD card card slot equipped with a spring-loaded socket for easy card removal
- Video Output – 2x full-size HDMI ports
- Display – 0.96-inch OLED Display showing Raspberry Pi’s CPU usage, temperature, disk usage, IP address, RAM usage, etc…
- Networking – Access to the GbE RJ45 port from the Raspberry Pi 5, as well as WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5
- USB – Access to the USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports from the Raspberry Pi 5
- Cooling
- 2x RGB fans with GPIO control
- Tower cooler with PWM fan controlled by the system
- Tower cooler that can cool a Raspberry Pi 5 with 100% CPU load down to 39°C at 25°C room temperature
- Expansion – External 40-pin GPIO extender with pin labels for easy access
- Misc
- 4x WS2812 Addressable RGB LED light up the whole case with light effects
- IR Receiver for multi-media centers like Kodi or Volumio
- Retro metal power button for safe shutdown
- Power Supply – 5V DC/5A via USB-C power adapter
- Aluminum main body with clear Acrylic side panel
The Pironman 5 is fully compatible with all versions of Raspberry Pi OS Desktop/Lite, and can also work with other operating systems but with some limitations:
- Ubuntu Desktop 23.10 – No SPI required by the LEDs
- Kali – No I2C required for OLED screen
- Home Assistant – I2C and SPI interfaces are not supported (for now)
You’ll find instructions to assemble the Pironman case, configure the bootloader and Raspberry Pi OS, and install the Pironman 5 software module on the wiki. You may also be interested in checking out our review of Pironman case for the Raspberry Pi 4 with M.2 SATA storage last year, as while the design is a bit different, it can still give an idea of what to expect with the new model.
The main commands to install the Pironman5 module and dependencies are as follows:
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sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install git -y sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip python3-setuptools -y cd ~ git clone https://github.com/sunfounder/pironman5.git cd ~/pironman5 sudo python3 install.py |
This will start the pironman5.service which can be controlled with systemd, e.g.:
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sudo systemctl restart pironman5.service |
From there, users can access the Pironman 5 dashboard from their preferred web browser by going to http://<ip>:34001. It provides a convenient user interface to configure the fan behavior, set various RGB LED parameters, and more. It also serves as a monitoring solution similar to RPI-Monitor.
SunFounder has started taking orders for the Pironman 5 PC tower case for the Raspberry Pi on their online store for $79.99. The company also has an Aliepress store and an Amazon store, but the enclosure is yet to be listed on either at the time of writing.
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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Can’t wait. Mine has been shipped.
It would be nice to get the display and interface alone.
Probably designed by one of these people who believe that colorful lights and noisy fans make a PC run faster.
s/by one/for all/
And I guess they’re right since many consumers really think the cooler the device the faster it runs (ignoring concepts like thermal throttling that affect only performance above certain tresholds).
And the same might be true for amount of RAM. I know personally at least two people who were able to feel their PC becoming faster with more RAM (even if nothing changed wrt ‘memory pressure’ since they had already enough for their use cases before).
You’re right regarding RAM, I’ve observed the same in the past as well. They felt the PC even booted faster!
Good for the chip industry
I buy lots of RAM… when it’s cheap. Got 64 GB (open box) for about $90.
ironically, there are laptops where the more RAM You have, the slower it is 🙂
This is common on single channel setups: some laptops provide two slots, both on the same channel to ease routing in a tight place, and they can’t reach the highest DDR frequencies when two modules are installed on the same channel (line capacitance etc). So yes, in this case this does effectively make the device run slower when having more RAM.
This is how You can change credit size computer into big box with fancy lights and oversized fans priced same as Your sbc at highest configuration.
I’m sure that few youtubers will now receive that for review and they will be amazed with everything. It looks eye and candy for sure, but same thing can be way more smaller, more portable and removable if needed. If You need something like this it’s just better to get one of fanless terminals.
This is going full circle. At first Pi was used to replace big noisy expensive PCs. Now with this it became one, but still with poor performance, poor expandability and less RAM.