Greetings! Has anyone actually gotten this to work? It flashes the green LED and looks like it’s booting, but didn’t actually boot for me with a working Pi 4B 8GB, and it seems to be that connecting the cooler/bridge to the GPIO header is the problem. A LOT changed with the new SOC in the Pi 4, so I’m not shocked. I dropped back to a Pi 3B+ and it boots and runs the OS fine. I don’t have the mechanical issues because I’m building a Pi-Top powered breadboard with the proto-board and a proto+. I took the boards and rails out of the case. I’m just sad that it didn’t work. But, really, for a proto-board work? It doesn’t need a Pi 4. If you think of anything I might be missing, ideas are welcome. I’ll give the Pi 4 another shot tomorrow. It seems close to working.
There’s no reason why it shouldn’t work - do you have the GPIO Cooling Bridge connected properly from pi to hub? One pin on there is required for detection of the raspberry pi - I posted about this pin here
Are you sure the Pi didn’t boot? I’m wondering if it’s just an issue with the display not working - maybe try to SSH into the Pi
Also, might be useful to send some photots of your setup again - I can more easily see what’s going on that way
Oops, I was wrong. I knew I had to retest today. My setup boots. Pi 4B with Pi-Top [3] hub and bridge boards. For some reason, I don’t get HDMI video out of the Pi 4, but I don’t need it. I do get HDMI video out of the Pi 3B+ in this configuration. I was able to do that because I removed the HDMI connector from the hub board (required to attach the Pi 4. There’s absolutely no reason to need a Pi 4 here. I’ve just switched totally to Pi 4s for everything. After a long search, I found Pi 3B+ that I could order at the Best Buy retail chain here in the states. Ebay prices are high and the usual Pi suppliers are out of stock. I ordered a couple of the 3B+s because it’ll just be easier. Because of the good work by the Pi Foundation, I was able to just pull the SD card out of the Pi 4 and put it in the Pi 3. 64-bit. Everytime I play with Pi-Top hardware, I get a bit frustrated trying to do something that was never intended, but I notice the cleverness and solid engineering. I intend to get a piece of wood and mount the whole Pi-Top [3] guts, including the rails to this strip of wood. I think it will be a nice rig. I’ll be able to use hats, because the basic proto board enables that, and I’ll have the proto-plus, too.
In case you want to use a RPi CM4, rather than RPi4B+, without having to physically modify your pi-top [3], you could use this:
https://www.waveshare.com/product/cm4-to-pi3-adapter.htm?___SID=U
I’m so ecstatic I discovered this today (after a pretty poor attempt to design my own) that I’m posting about it in all the relevant threads aha.
I’m not playing with my Pi-Tops at the moment, but I followed your link because that’s so cool!
It might allow a Pi 4 in my expensive paperweight, AKA Astro Pi machined aluminum replica–the mounting there is suspended, not right up against the case. But, in the Pi-Top, I’m concerned about the clearance. The CM4 mounts to the bottom of that Pi3-shaped motherboard. I think there isn’t much clearance to allow that in the Pi-Top. Maybe you file down the spacers or whatever the attachment point is like, I’m just offering a word of caution.
Sorry to hear you haven’t done much with them lately but maybe this can reignite your interest? That “paperweight” sounds pretty cool though, what have you been running on the AstroPi?
I think it’ll be ok because the CM fits in between the RPi3B+’s mounting holes (and thus in between the support pegs in the pi-top [3]’s chassis) but I’ll let you know when it all arrives!
I’m not saying this is a perfect solution - particularly since it’s only USB2, not USB3 - but it’s a good start at providing an upgrade without having to physically modify the pi-top [3]’s chassis (think all the schools that bought pi-top [3]’s and found the RPi3B+ slightly long in the tooth with, e.g. ‘net browser performance under only 1Gb of RAM, they’re not going to want to have to fiddle around with hand files, Dremels, soldering irons etc. just to modify all their 100’s of laptops and void their warranties).
Next, I really hope Waveshare comes up with a RPi CM3 SODIMM compatible carrier board in both RPi3 and RPi4 form factors because there are so many SOM’s out there with even greater specs than the CM4 2 x 100 Hirose connector form factor…