Hi, in a previous video, you've seen these Orange Pi ones that I've got. I've got like ten of these things for use as potentially a Raspberry Pi, in this case Orange Pi, uh,, little ARM Supercomputer. And These are actually quite popular projects with where people get Raspberry Pi's and cluster them all together. you know it's so to speak, make a super little ARM supercomputer with them.

I mean, it's not nearly as powerful as you know, the latest modern Intel CPUs and things like that, but it's fun. and this one in particular. this is the Orange Pi 1 model and it's got a 4 core ARM processor in it and it's not a bad little basis generally speaking faster than the Raspberry Pi and it does a reasonable job and it's fun, but most importantly, it's cheap. This is only 10 US dollars for a 4 core, 1.2 gig or 1.3 gig is it I'm ARM Cortex-m processor in it, so it's a little bit of a beast to especially for the money.

Ten bucks. and so I thought it'd be fun to make a little are WOPR computer Yes, I might even not sticking inside like I something that looks like the water. That would be fantastic. So I thought I had started out with just a video outlining my concept art for this thing I Haven't built it yet, but hey, let's have a look at the ideas because it could be quite interesting now.

Quite a lot of people have built these at Raspberry Pi cluster or supercomputers before and they generally all that involves is basically a case. You know, some people laser cut their own acrylic cases and stuff like that and they'll either map and they look all fancy and everything else. And hey, I could do this in a day. No problems whatsoever.

All I'm going to do is basically I get a whole bunch of these, stick them together, maybe with some much standoffs or you know, something like that. and then I get power for each one. There's a little DC jack for each one, so you just apply power, hook it up to a pretty beefy yeah power supply like a UPC power supply or something like that, and then just hook up the ethernet, get yourself one of these ethernet, which is here. You know you don't need a fast one, just a 10/100 type one and Bob's your uncle.

Basically you've got yourself a class, the computer so it's just basically just arranging these are physically. There's nothing special there at all, but I thought, hey, you know that's not very elegant. You got the ethernet cables hanging out and you got routing problems and dinky little DC jacks and things like that. Wouldn't it be nice if actually designed like a custom motherboard like this and these can just plug in.

You can just have a whole bunch of a plug-in no cables, No, nothing. That would be fantastic. So let's take a look at doing that. And yes, before you mention it, I Know this is not going to be as powerful as a modern Intel CPU and GPU and things like that for like, for my intended application, running our boy incarnate and doing that said, he and other computer research I know it's not as powerful as that in terms of dollar per watt potentially and in terms of performance / what is basically one of the more are critical things for this sort of thing.

But hey, these things are fun. So I'm just gonna have some fun with this. I know it might not be the most efficient thing. you know an Nvidia GPU card will likely kill this array in terms of our performance per watt.

but hey, I want to do it just because? That's it. Just because. Now the first thing to note is that the Orange Pi 1 is not compatible with the Raspberry Pi 2 in terms of its physical plug-in ability. Why? Because the header connector here is actually reversed.

Its the same pin out and functionality, but its reverse. They physically reversed it so that the shield things that hats or whatever they are I'm go actually don't sit over the board like this like they do on the rise. Reply: they're sitting here. This one actually reversed it.

So they sit outside here and the reason for that is a smaller form factor board and the ethernet and USB connectors actually getting in the way here. so that's really annoying. So any solution we make where we can plug these into I'm any sort of motherboard or something like that, it's not gonna be compatible with the Raspberry Pi the connectors going to be four physically back-to-front bomber Now of course. The first thing is, how do you plug this into a motherboard? Now you know we can put it upside down maybe and have a 14 vertical head on the board and then you can stack them like that.

But that takes up a lot of board space. That's a lot of physical space on your motherboard actually wasted if you've got multiple boards side-by-side that like that. You know your motherboard this big, you might only be able to fit five in, but if you mount them vertically like this, you can potentially get much greater density for a given motherboard. sighs.

and that's what we want now. Unfortunately, this thing comes out with the header pre-sold it on like this, so you know we're not going to go suck off the header and put a right angle one in on there. That would have been awesome if we had a right angle. Could just went bang bang bang bang bang on a motherboard.

That would be fantastic. but we're not going to go suck those out. So we have to come up with some other solution if we want to use this. Orange Pi 1 or arise reply for that matter.

it's just because the pinouts different. They both got these vertical headers on them. Now you can actually get right angle female header sockets for PCB So instead of plugging in vertically, it like the connector will be like this, he is a true image of it. I'll get an image and then you just plug it in on the side like that.

So you might think hey, there's our solution, but that trap the young players. You'll notice that this header sits significantly off the board like that. And this is actually if you go look at the data sheet for the header that it's actually I'm going to be much smaller than this. Gap here is either have to grind off some of the board and be careful not to get the traces in, you know, hit any traces, or short out any ground planes or anything like that.

or cut any ground planes and so you don't want to do that. That's just a ridiculous solution. All we've got to come up with some other way to get these things physically lifted off the board. Now of course, you could get the header connector female header connector for the board, put something under it, and then you know, right, lift it off the board or something.

some sort of space set. Yeah, that's a solution, but there's another way to now. Please excuse the crudity of this model. I Didn't have time to build up the scale.

Auto paint. What you do is you have your right angle female header connector. actually you know through hole could be well, probably not surface map because they're going to have the pins coming out the side which is going to be troublesome so probably a through-hole version here. And they've got the holes basically on either side of the connector and then you just ran out.

pass like this on one side of the connector and you get your board and then you just put it into the slot like this so that it goes down into the board and then slide it in like that. Bob's your uncle beauty but of course it's not as dense a solution as it could be because the width of this has to cater for the fact that you've got to put this in and then slide it across like that so you know the slot actually doesn't have to come all the way up and you could use the surface mount one. Actually the pins coming out here and here this sides not a problem, but coming out this side the slot doesn't have to go right up to the connector like this. You can have the right at the surface mount pins coming out like that and then the slot only because you've got a distance in there so you actually see there's a thickness of the plastic base of this header so it doesn't actually come all the way in.

so you've got so the pins on here can actually see any surface mount pins and the slot can actually be further out from the connector than what I've shown there so you don't have to sit and put it in and then slide it in like that. So you know the slut basically has to be the width of these opinions so to speak, set out somewhat. and then the distance between boards is going to be set by these pain-in-the-ass Ethernet connectors and USB which we're not going to use. so it's not the densest solution, but it's better then flipping this board upside-down plugging it into a verdict into a vertical, head out like that, and then having two three like you know, on a board that size.

We're only going to get three in there, but this one, we can potentially get one, two. Oh yeah, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and I'm just eyeballing this. but I basically double the density. Easy.

Now a nice solution to this is the rise: Raspberry Pi Zero Now it's only five bucks. It's half the price of this, but in terms of our dollars per what and it's not as good. this is a fork or 1.3 gig processor or greater than one gig and the Raspberry Pi Zero is only one gig at with a single core. but it comes with the header connected not populated so you can sold it in your own right angle header connector.

and then you can use those vertical standard vertical connectors and you wouldn't need two are putting any slot like this. so in a just bein bay and you can get and because they don't have the big ethernet connector and USB connector on there there much thinner and you can get double the density again. So the Raspberry Pi Zero It's not too bad if you can get twice the density for half the cost, but you lose ultimately going to lose like half of your performance in the end. So yeah, I don't know which one do you go for? Hmm.

the Raspberry Pi Zero is nice. A solution could be lower power because hey it's You know it's not running any of the Ethernet are functionality and it's just generally a lower power board then this one I believe. But this motherboard idea, it's all gonna come to naught unless we can actually get Internet connectivity through these header pins and the Orange Pi 1 Ethernet over. To hear these ethernet pins do Not come.

These physical Ethernet pins are Do Not come down to this header. It doesn't have it. So we're in trouble there. But uh huh.

I think I found a solution for this. As luck would have it, if you have a look at the pin out for the Raspberry Pi it's the same on the Orange Pi 1. Here there is an SPI port that actually comes out on these pins. So uh huh, can we convert the SPI into an Ethernet interface? Yes, we can.

Now as it turns out, the Raspberry Pi Linux build I believe has a built-in driver for the microchip ENC28J60 SPI to Ethernet converter chip. So all we need is to put one of those chips on our board for each one. We can have one for each one and these things are cheap. They're available from Digi-key there are only a couple of bucks we can solder those are nowhere motherboard here And bingo we can get connectivity to each one of our boards.

Be an Orange Pi 1 or a Raspberry Pi Zero or whatever other our board that we want to plug into the system. Beauty. And although I haven't tried this I believe that all you gotta do is adding one law into the boot config file in your build and then Bingo! It just automatically works this. um ENC28J60 tip just handles that you plug into ethernet and away you go.

Now of course it's not gonna be the fastest solution by the spi by she can change the speed in the configuration and stuff like that, but it's not gonna be nearly as fast. But you know this thing is basically I compute system. you know it's not really I You know high-throughput a high beam with typepad system so hey you know a few make bits or something is fine or pick-up line of cabinets as fine. As long as we got an Ethernet connection especially for the use I want to make it to.

Its just gotta download stuff from the . server. It can do that slowly in this. Just going to report its results back and things like that, not hi bandwidth stuff.

Most of the time it's basically not talking at all. so we just need an ENC28J60 chip for each one of our modules like this. Just wire that in no worries. But I Of course we need an ethernet switch up here to connect all these ones into so we don't want to use a physical ethernet switch like that because well that's just ugly.

Because we got the cables again. we'd have to have like I You know an Rj45 on they're going off for each one and then up. I got that. It ruins your nice solutions.

So we take a look at a typical 10/100 Ethernet switch here. You see that this bugger all in these things. We've just got the main ship said here. this is a real quick one and then got the magnetics.

You can see the see their differential traces going off their two pairs. For each ethernet port. this is an eight port chip. It's only one is a power supply and the main ship and that's it.

There's no E Squared problem, there's no programming l though. These things are programmable and they just work by default I believe. Anyway, I've never actually are designed and Ethan it I switch into something before. but hey and then the legs just hook up there for the monitoring and everything else.

So all we need in theory is and one of these Ethernet switch chips and yes you can just buy from DGK You can't get this Realtek one. Yeah and you can't buy this chip from DG case. I'm not going to use this Realtek one but a microchip have one. Other Other companies have similar sort of chips just got to choose one that is a design for standalone application so it doesn't need boot configuration and all that sort of stuff.

and it's got to have the Far I built in as well. But what do we do with these pesky magnetics here doing need the magnetics? I don't think so. I think we can get away because we're going directly. This chip would be directly on our board over here and there will be parent site or four depending on how many are you needed, how many you designed to have on your motherboard.

There it's going directly chip-to-chip As like these are current driven differential outputs so all we need is to is some output resistors tied to ground. Basically I see couple of the ground and then we should get a wife. Should be able to get away without the magnet Magnetics there are only designed for driving the lines Now once again I've never actually tried this but I I think in theory it should work. but I stand to be corrected.

So in theory what should need is just some termination resistors on the line. He often these RAC coupled down the ground but you have to read the particular our data sheet that you're actually I got and we should be able to connect the ethernet switch directly through the ethernet switch chip directly through to our Spi to a the net interface. so they go. Then we've got one, two three.

Then we got out SPI bus come get out of there into Well Connector and Bingo! We should be able to get a low-bandwidth internet connectivity through the wage board on the motherboard and we can do this pretty cheaply. And then of course you have your Rj45 your external internet connection coming into the ethernet switch. And of course you know we want a decent number of these on a born, eight, or ten, or twelve or so, even more depending on the density that we cannot get in here. and you know power requirements and things like that and what we can.

of course we're gonna have our Ethernet switch just going off to yet another one and then that just drives more and they are Kaskade from the one like that. So you might actually have the one ethernet switch driving like you know, two or three other ethernet switches now. of course these boards have a lot of other Io on them as well and you might still want to use those depending on you know how you want this thing to work so you might actually have some. And of course you want some LED status Leds or something so you might have some leads and these all going to hear and you might actually have another header next to each one or something so that you can actually I'm it like some Io on and get some Io in and out of each one.

Saying because you might want this: either it's like a super computer computer module and everything just goes self-contained You don't look anything else up to it or you might use it as I You know, a a 25 or 50 processor. That thing that's our processing that's doing I Oh, and stuff like that and basically just a big embedded computer that controls 40 separate things or 50 separate things or whatever. you might have a processor for each task. I Don't know, use your imagination for something like that, but I don't really want any of that time.

I Oh Staff: although I might add it just for kicks, I just want this thing to actually be an arm supercomputer cluster. right? Thing about Bob And that's the thing. This is not really a supercomputer as such. h process on here or each board it because this is a 4 Call one here.

but let's just say each one has a single-core they're running their own linux OS and everything else. They're entirely separate the only way they can communicate is via the ethernet switches here, so you might have like at some it may be some dip switches on each one that can sit in a dress for each one or you could that program them in of course, individually. stuff like that so that have h board would have its own name on the network and stuff like that and they're all networked together. You can talk like that.

or we could potentially try and tie some I/O between them. Perhaps maybe you can have a bus running between them if you want to do something fancy like that, but then we get him into basically multiple processor computer architecture and stuff like that. and that's not really what we're what I'm trying to achieve here anyway. I Just wanted a nice a solution than just whacking these in a box and wiring up the power and the ethernet.

I Just want to put the pair in the ethernet basically all 121 motherboard just to make it neat. and then if we have a look at our power consumption here in the previous video I actually measured this running with the full four cores at a hundred percent running city processing on the blank engine and always get it was drawing about 3.7 What's so that's .75 amps and 5 volts roughly. So if you've got a motherboard with that 10 of these Raspberry Pi Zeros on it, you need a 7.5 amp. Ah, 5 volt capable supply and well, you can get those in various solutions you could use like a little tiny pc.

what is it a micro? ATX power supply or something like that? perhaps, but probably better to use some sort of off-the-shelf are customized well after shell fire, power brick or something like that. Perhaps you can actually get modules that will I do that? You know, 240 volts in five volts out basically just depends on our price, availability and form factor. Because we haven't even talked about like a case for this thing, I was thinking maybe it would be nice to have say a big extruded aluminium case that this whole motherboard just lead into on the rails. You know something like this already a photo here and you know I don't know if you can Actually you can probably get them this big and you know it, Sliding that just look really sexy but then you know you probably are Now you can have all leads at one end or something like that and I don't know that would be makers.

We gotta talk about power dissipation as well. This thing gets quite hard. I can't remember the temperature I've done in the previous video but it was too hot to touch I think and you've got a basically will arm glue on with some are thermal adhesive, just hating on the H1 and then you know just passive a larger shades heatsink. we don't have to, then couple that hating out to the external aluminium our case.

we can probably just let the know, let the thing passively do. That should work. Ok anyway I like the idea of the Raspberry Pi zero because it's super cheap. It's only five bucks each.

Yes it's only a one call one gig processor on the thing, not nearly as our grantee as this fork or at 1.2 gigs. but you know there and that they're nice and small form factor they only draw about points7 what's each I Believe somebody's actually have measured the Orangemen, the Raspberry Pi zero and running at full tilt and about points7 what? So they're about so you know it is potentially lower power than this one but near not as powerful. But the density you can get in there are beauty. And of course for this sort of carrot you'd need a big beefy traces on there like it found out.

evil, one big bus running along like that. you know huge traces on there you probably you know you wouldn't need like to announce copper anything like that for this sort of character. couldn't just run little piece and traces over 2h connected. You get dad too much drop on the things so yet nice big fat buses there and maybe dropping off like that or you could a star arrange it depends on how much a space head on the board layout something like these slots a bad thing about having slots in your board like this is that it just kills your routing spacecraft around everything around it powered at everything else it you know it can become a real pain.

So if I was to do this elegantly in terms of our power, I would get a like a proper PCB mount power brick or something like that or a module that actually you could mount on the boards. have this one big board as I said maybe slide into an extruded aluminium case and the power supply would melt on the end of it like this and you have like 240 volts coming in, one in and then give you the five volts at you know 10 amps out or whatever and then that just why is directly into the board. Then you have the huge buses running here and that it all just slide in as one big solution into the extruded aluminium case that it would be like a nice sexy solution. So there you go.

I hope you enjoyed that and this is just like a first thought kind of thing of how I would integrate these into a you know a Raspberry Pi supercomputer array or an Orange Pi supercomputer right and like it which is a bit more elegant then the solutions other people have done where they're just physically wired these together with the ethernet, have a switch and everything else and the wires running everywhere. they can look funky. your line them all up, they're big and they're bulky and you know this is if you can do it like on one big motherboard like this. you can get some quite high density in these things depending on the type of board you use and you could use some other computer module for example.

There's lots of compute modules on the market, but you basically got to get one that is armed that has ended compatible United plug-in type things. So even like an SODIMM based our system yes Raspberry Pi do make the Raspberry Pi computer module, but it's like you know, 25 30 bucks each and it's basically just like a an original rosary pie. It's not that great. So in terms of our banker back, it's very, very poor.

These Orange Pi 1 absolutely kills it for ten bucks for the four cores at 1.2 gig. So yeah, those computer modules unless you picked him up for a song and I don't think they ever sold really well. I mean I just checked out fine l have a Element14 have like you know, tens of thousands of these things in stock or something I don't know, thousands in stock. So yeah, I don't think they sold too well.

that was a bit of a file that the Raspberry Pi computer module. but the idea, the concept really good if you just getting just had an SO connector on their bang bang bang bang and The density you can get is absolutely incredible but nobody's You know. if you know of any I'm linux you know that sort of is compatible. like what that has a linux billed for it like Raspberry Pi's probably got the best and most refined build out there because there's so many people using that, they got so many people working on it etcetera as I saw as you saw in the previous video for the Orange Pi 1 and the software builds for it out that great and up-to-date and stuff like that we can make it work I've yet to know if the Spi one will work for the Orange Pi 1 the microchip in ENC28J60 but I'm I believe it does work and people have done this and it does work for the raspberry pi so no worries.

But yeah if you know of any other our computer modules that might be more suitable at a low cost, you can get them. You've been able to get these computer modules. I was using them back in the nineties and is nothing new about these things that plug in my computer modules in so in DIMM module format and stuff like that. They go way way back and but the problem is the price.

You know the good thing about that say they read this or inch by 1 or the Raspberry Pi Zero five or ten bucks per board I mean it's so compelling I mean you're going to add a couple of bucks for these are SPI to ethernet are encoded ships because you're not buying I Mean you know a hundred thousand, ten thousand volume or something like that? So yeah, it had significantly, but I think that's a nice could be a nice elegant solution. So hopefully I get the time in the motivation to actually start laying out this thing and get something working so I can enjoy it. If you and discuss it, links down below all that sort of stuff. Catch you next time.

The Broadcom processor used on the Raspberry Pi 2 famously can't get the data sheet for you to sign an NDA and all that sort of crap. But with the allwinner H3r chipset here, they're both Cortex A7 by the way. so the same Arm Cortex accept your winner a 3 is actually are faster. Now if you take a look at the Orange Pie website are very briefly.

it looks kind of impressive at the top surface, but that's pretty much where it stops. I Found a lot of issues with this thing trying to set it up.