Seaberry Pi Packs a Wealth of PCIe Connectivity in a Mini-ITX Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 Carrier
Designed to adapt to a range of use cases through add-ins, this carrier board can play host to four Google Coral Dual Edge TPUs and more.
Alftel Systems is preparing to launch a new carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and compatible systems-on-modules, designed with artificial intelligence workloads in mind — and packing enough expansion for four Google Coral Dual Edge TPUs, an NVMe solid-state drive, four mini-PCI Express (PCIe) boards, one 1x PCIe card, and one x16 PCIe card: The Seaberry Pi.
"The Seaberry Pi is a full-featured Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 carrier board in Mini-ITX form that exposes the PCIe bus to a variety of different connector types," Alftel Systems explains of its unusually connectivity-heavy carrier board design. "One M.2 Key M slot for NVMe SSD. Four PCIe Mini connectors. Four PCIe M.2 Key E connectors that work with Google Coral Dual Edge TPUs for AI applications. One x16 standard PCIe add-on card connector. One x1 PCIe side connector."
All this connectivity is placed into a board format designed to comply with the mini-ITX requirements, allowing it to fit in existing chassis unmodified. In addition to the wealth of PCIe-based connectivity around the board, the Seaberry Pi breaks out the 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, both HDMI display outputs, Ethernet, RS232, two USB 2.0 ports, a microSD slot, adds a real-time clock with optional external battery, pulse-width modulated (PWM) fan header, SATA power connector, and Display Serial Interface (DSI) and Camera Serial Interface (CSI) ports, as well as Power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities up to 100W.
The company has already built a conceptual prototype with 12 M.2 slots, proven on the CM4 platform by YouTuber Jeff Geerling, and is hoping the wealth of connectivity in its latest design — yet to be produced — will appeal to a range of use cases from Internet of Things (IoT) and edge AI systems to industrial and smart home automation, security appliance, networking appliances, and cloud computing. There will be, however, an as-yet unspecified upper limit to performance: All PCI Express hardware connected to the carrier board will be sharing a single PCIe Gen. 2 lane to the Raspberry Pi Compute Module installed on the board.
Another key caveat for those looking to use the board for edge-AI work is in a hopefully soon-to-be-resolved compatibility problem. "There are currently issues with Raspberry CM4 module and Google Coral PCIe TPU," the company admits. "Both Raspberry and Google are working to solve it, so we hope that by the time our campaign will come to a close, it will be resolved."
The Seaberry Pi Crowd Supply campaign page has more information on the board, and a link to be alerted when the campaign goes live. Pricing has not yet been announced, though Alftel Systems has pledged to publish high-resolution schematics and board layout files "during or after a successful campaign."