Bandi Ba Shows How to Upgrade a Vilros PiDock 400 for Raspberry Pi 500 Support

Maker Bandi Ba has a project sure to interest any Vilros PiDock 400 owners with an urge to upgrade: a guide to converting the laptop-style docking station to support the newer, and considerably more powerful, Raspberry Pi 500 wedge-format single-board computer.

"The [Vilros] PiDock 400 was designed exclusively for the Raspberry Pi 400," Ba explains. "However, with the release of the new Raspberry Pi 500 many of us hoped to use the same docking station since the two devices share nearly identical form factors. Unfortunately, the PiDock 400 doesn’t supply enough power for the RPi 500. When connected, you’ll see multiple warnings such as: 'This power supply is not capable of supplying 5A. Power to peripherals will be restricted.' While the RPi 400 only needed a 5V 3A power source, the RPi 500 requires 5V 5A."

The Raspberry Pi 400 was the company's first attempt at a true consumer product, packing a wider variant of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer into a wedge-style keyboard housing inspired by classic eight-bit home computers like the Commodore 64 and Atari 400. The launch of the Raspberry Pi 5, with its dramatically more powerful processor, brought with it the unsurprising release of the Raspberry Pi 500 — and later the upgraded range-topping Raspberry Pi 500+, which doubles the RAM to 8GB, adds an internal M.2 slot with 256GB SSD, and moves to a mechanical keyboard with RGB backlighting.

Vilros' PiDock 400, meanwhile, launched shortly after the original Raspberry Pi 400 as a relatively high-price add-on designed to convert it into a true all-in-one — providing a laptop form-factor in which the wedge nestles with access to a touchpad and a display, though no internal battery. Power is fed from the PiDock 400 to the Raspberry Pi 400, but there's a catch: the PiDock 400 can only supply the 5V 3A the Raspberry Pi 400 expects, and not the 5A required by the more power-hungry Raspberry Pi 500.

Ba's solution: a little hackery in which the existing 5V power input is bypassed for a 12V DC input on a barrel-jack, fed into a buck converter capable of dropping it down to the required 5V at 5A. It's not the trickiest of modifications, but does require taking the PiDock's case apart and soldering new power connections — plus a little, wholly-reversible, modification to the Raspberry Pi 500's firmware to have it recognize the power supply as being able to sustain 5A at 5V.

The full process is documented over on Instructables.