Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am re-evaluating my Raspberry Pi 400 unit I covered last week. Let’s get started!
The Story So Far…
Raspberry Pi 400, is the Pi 4 rearranged and built into a Raspberry Pi keyboard unit, available with multiple standard keyboard units from around the world… but not quite. I already knew about some changes they made to the CPU, but in theory, that shouldn’t have affected the 400’s wireless abilities like I was observing on my 64 bit installations: LibreELEC and ManjaroARM.
But a sample size of 3 (32 bit Raspian images work properly) is too small to claim manufacturer defect. If I was going to pay for warranty shipping, I wanted to see the failure on their own software. That is why I went looking for the elusive Raspberry OS 64 bit. I kept finding the 32 bit version, and had to call it quits last week.
Installation and Testing
But this week, I tried an official card imager with a list of 1st and 3rd party images to install; none were 64 bit Raspberry OS. There’s plenty of stuff out there about Raspberry OS 64, but the download link is well hidden from people who won’t understand what beta software is all about. In the end, I located the correct image, and between downloading, flashing, and testing, it took half an hour of low engagement.
Finally, I booted the Pi 400 using that chip, and it worked unexpectedly. I went ahead with the setup ritual — telling it the country, time zone, passwords, and the like. Options for making Wi-Fi connections came up before I even got around to asking it how many bits it was running on (see last week’s post): 64.
Further Testing
I honestly was expecting to cover the Pi 400’s exchange before this point. I just so happened to have updated my Manjaro card in an attempt to fix a problem keeping us from streaming my church’s Christmas program on Sabbath (turns out https was complaining about system time being set manually, and a couple months behind at that). The freshly updated card worked as well.
At this point, I was convinced it was just a matter of software. I booted into LibreELEC, which amusingly requires inserting the card part way through booting, and ran into the same problem as before. I even tried with an Ethernet cord we used to download the service, and saw no evidence of the clock updating.
Conclusion
The Raspberry Pi 400 is a relatively new product. With a better idea on where to look, I landed on this LibreELEC forum post. It states that the Pi 400 has a “somewhat different [Wi-Fi/Bluetooth] chip,” but by manually updating the kernal somehow, it is possible to hack something together. Honestly, I have other projects I’d rather do, and according to the same post, they’re already planning on supporting the Pi 400 in the next major release. I can wait.
Final Question
Have you ever looked at something as you were about to replace it just to poke at it a bit, only to find there was nothing wrong with it in the first place?