Give Your Raspberry Pi 14 USB Ports

We’ve all been there: a Raspberry Pi project grows larger and larger as new ideas come to mind. Next thing you know, you’ve run out of USB ports and you need to add a USB hub to the mix. Between that and the HDMI adapter, power cable, and other components wired to the GPIO pins, things are really starting to get out of hand. If only Raspberry Pis came with just a few more USB ports…

Now they do—or at least they do if you hook them up to a new expansion board from Suptronics. The X1013 expands the USB port count of these little computers to an almost ridiculous 14. It is compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5, and adds four USB 3.0 ports and six USB 2.0 ports to the four ports already onboard. As a bonus, the USB 2.0 ports are split between the front and back of the board to make wire routing just a little easier for complex projects.

The X1013 connects to the Pi’s 16-pin FFC PCIe connector with an included cable. A PCIe-to-USB chipset adds the additional USB 3.0 ports, while another USB hub chip adds the USB 2.0 ports.

The Raspberry Pi is installed on top of the expansion board. A barrel jack on the X1013 supplies the entire system with power, and a pair of pogo pins are used to pass power through to the Pi.

This is a very slick way to add more USB ports to a Raspberry Pi 5, but since all 10 of the additional ports share a PCIe Gen2 x1 connection, the theoretical bandwidth of the combined USB ports exceeds the bandwidth of the PCIe connection. As such, you shouldn’t expect great performance if you need to move a lot of data. But for most applications, this probably won’t matter—it will handle lots of devices using moderate amounts of bandwidth just fine.

Check out the product page for more details on the X1013 expansion board.