Box of delights

Elsewhere on the board you’ll find a USB-C power input, speakers, an LED display, GPIO pins, an RFID chip, plenty of sensors and switches and LEDs, and more besides. In the box there’s also a startling array of extra components, including a pair of SNES-like gamepads, a US-style power plug (with a three-pin adapter for UK sockets), servo and stepper motors, an IR remote, LEDs, a small stylus, headphones (3.5mm, so there’s nowhere to plug them in on a Raspberry Pi 5 board) and more. A GPIO ribbon cable is meant to bridge the gap between the Raspberry Pi’s pins and those on the carrier, but one wasn’t included in the package sent to us for review. Something that will fit is pretty cheap and easy to get online, but it would have been nice to have had it included.

It takes a bit of force to successfully mate your Raspberry Pi 5 board with the CrowPi carrier, as the cables put up some resistance to getting it in exactly the right place, and once it’s screwed down the microSD slot is inaccessible. You might also need to rely on Wi-Fi for networking, as the USB cable goes across the Ethernet port, though you may be able to negotiate a fit with a slim cable. Having a power connection enter vertically at the top right of the motherboard feels clunky too – it would have been so much tidier to have it pierce the casing at the rear.

A screw loose

A version of the Raspberry Pi OS with appropriate drivers is available from the CrowPi website – a 3.9GB download – and while the board booted first time, it threw an error when we tried to use the Recommended Software tool and the Terminal (the Terminal text is tricky to read on such a small screen, but that’s not Elecrow’s fault) to install new programs. There was also a loose screw in the case, which fell out when we tried giving it an experimental shake.

These problems are ones that can be fixed via software patches or by updating the package contents for future orders, and don’t affect the fact this is a convenient and well-made electronics board with prolific features. What they do mean is that, in its current state, it’s slightly difficult to recommend the CrowPi Compact Raspberry Pi Educational Kit, which is a shame, as it could be brilliant.