I’m looking for an M.2 board for Pi 5. I want to plug one of those Coral AI things into the PCIe. Is the Pimoroni NVMe board just a PCIe passthrough/adapter? In such a case, you’d expect other devices to work as well. Or does it really only support SSDs?
I do know the Coral AI works with other M.2 adapters on Pi 5. It’s just that the Pimoroni board has better availability.
The Coral AI has an E-key, so it will not fit into the NVMe-base. You can buy an adapter board from pineberrypi.com
There is also a B+M key model. And Pimoroni seemed easier to get, local availability versus international shipping and whatnot.
Oh, I did not know that. The connector on the NVMe-base is M-key, but I have never tried if a B+M device would fit mechanically. Otherwise, Pimoroni explicitly states that the adapter is not limited to SSDs. The adapter more or less only provides the physical connection (and of course the power), but otherwise it is just transparent for the attached devices.
Ah, I had missed the part where Pimoroni says that. That’s excellent then.
Just in case anyone else stumbles across this in the future (as I did), I’ve managed to pull together a bunch of related info and got a Coral M.2 B+M key Edge TPU running alongside an NVME SSD (which I’m booting from) on the NVME Base Duo!
It’s a bit of a process at the moment unfortunately, but hopefully this will be useful for someone: