Compatiblity between BrickPi3 and Raspberry Pi 5?

BrickPi
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Hi, I’ve not been actively using the BrickPi3 for a while, but am interested in resuming since RPi5 is coming out with a much more powerful SoC.

Does anyone know if:

  1. The physical layout of RPi5 seems to be similar to RPi3B, can it be used as a drop in replacement for the BrickPi3 Acryllic case?
  2. Are there any compatibility issues in terms of the BrickPi3 drivers and libraries with RPi5 (Rasberrpy Pi OS and/or Ubuntu)?
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To take advantage of that extra power requires the Pi5 cooler, which will require adding a GPIO extender meaning: No it cannot be “a drop-in replacement”. You would need to be familiar with 3D printing to make a special “BrickPi5” case. Additionally, the BrickPi power-supply will not deliver the 5 volts at 4-5 amps needed by the new Pi5.

You can create a PiOS Bookworm SD Card for your current processor using the current Raspberry Pi Imager, and attempt an install. It most likely will not go well.

If you are willing to get into creating your own install script for Bookwork, there may still be some limitations which may affect your desirability of a using the Pi5 for the BrickPi.

What I suggest as the easiest solution - create a hardware stack:

  • RaspberryPi5 in the official Pi5 case (which has a temperature controlled fan)
  • Pololu 5v 5A power supply board
  • 12v PowerBank
  • BrickPi with your current Raspberry Pi processor

And create a software “Brick Pi Remote Network Interface” to forward sensor data to the Pi5, and execute BrickPi commands from the Pi5.

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Additionally, the BrickPi power-supply will not deliver the 5 volts at 4-5 amps needed by the new Pi5

Ouch. The power limitation of the BrickPi power supply would probably be the most limiting issue.

What I suggest as the easiest solution - create a hardware stack:
[…]
And create a software “Brick Pi Remote Network Interface” to forward sensor data to the Pi5, and execute BrickPi commands from the Pi5.

I suppose that would be a cleaner solution. It still is quite a significant undertaking given the software architecture needed for distributed processing.

Thanks for the reply!

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