The Ubo Pod's Side Board Connector Is an Open Source Way to Tidy Up Your Raspberry Pi's Cabling

Maker Mehrdad Majzoobi has announced the release of an open source "Side Connector Board" for the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5, which relocates the major ports so they're on the same side as the USB and Ethernet ports — after designing it for the Ubo Pod project.

"I designed this connector board to re-arrange all connectors on the side of [a] Raspberry Pi to the back," Majzoobi explains of the board. "It works with both Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, but on 5 the audio plug must not be populated. This is part of a larger open source project (Ubo project) that is aiming to build an open source ecosystem of devices powered by Raspberry Pi. I have also designed a custom enclosure for this."

The layout of ports on the Raspberry Pi family of single-board computers is determined by footprint: the desire to have the largest models in the family, wedge-system Raspberry Pi 400 and Raspberry Pi 500 motherboards not included, fit in the footprint of a standard credit card means that ports have to be spread across multiple sides of the board. The Side Board Connector sacrifices that compact footprint in favor of tidying up cabling, relocating ports so they're all at the same side of the board.

Fitting to a Raspberry Pi 4 or Raspberry Pi 5 with a friction-fit, the board converts the two micro-HDMI ports to full-size HDMI, relocates the USB Type-C power connector, and even includes a flat flexible circuit (FFC) to relocate the microSD card slot. For the Raspberry Pi 4, there's also a 3.5mm audio-video (AV) jack connector — not available on the Raspberry Pi 5, which dropped the AV jack from its design.

The board also provides a power button, fan connector, two STEMMA QT connectors of which one is accessible externally, an internal USB Type-C connector linked to the data lines on the USB Type-C connector, and a 16-pin header that provides power, I2C, right and left analog audio, fan control, power switch, audio plug insertion detection, an audio input on the Raspberry Pi 4, and one user-addressable general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pin.

"I am planning to do a new design with this board that converts one of the HDMIs to USB-C Alt mode that carries video," Majzoobi explains of the future of the Side Connector Board design. "This variant will have one full HDMI and two USB-C connectors. One of the USB-C connectors will be power-in only and the second one will be power-in, power-out, video/audio out, and carries USB 2.0 data."

More information is available in Majzoobi's Reddit post; KiCad design files for the Side Connector Board are available on GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.