Four-slot Raspberry Pi cluster board starts at $80
Mar 4, 2020 — by Eric Brown 68,233 views
IPTerra’s “CloverPi” cluster board starts at $80 on Kickstarter, supporting up to 4x Raspberry Pi SBCs with power, switches, LEDs, and network headers for each plus a 5-port GbE switch with uplink port.
Most Raspberry Pi cluster kits we’ve seen support the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, such as Turing Pi’s $128, 7-board Turing Pi Clusterboard or MiniNodes’ $259 5 Node Raspberry Pi 3 CoM Carrier Board. There’s also Pimoroni’s, 4-board, $49 RPi Cluster HAT v2.3, which instead supports the Raspberry Pi Zero. Like BitScope’s Blade boards, IPTerra’s new CloverPi can cluster regular-sized Raspberry Pi boards.
CloverPi with (left) and without the Raspberry Pi boards
(click images to enlarge)
Houston-based startup IPTerra is a fifth of the way to its $15,000 all-or-nothing Kickstarter goal for the CloverPi, starting at $80 or $90 early bird prices through April 30, with shipments due in June or August, respectively. This is actually the CloverPi 1.4 — the first version IPTerra has sent to production — and if this doesn’t work, it’s already worked on a CloverPi 2.0 model.
The CloverPi, which we saw on Geeky Gadgets, consists of a backplane for connectors that house up to four Raspberry Pi SBCs, including any model with a 40-pin connector. There’s also a board that fits in the fifth slot with a 12 or 19V power supply that supports all four SBCs and a 5-port Gigabit Ethernet switch, with one of the ports used for uplink.
CloverPi side views
(click images to enlarge)
Each Pi board has its own dedicated power switch, network header, networking link light, and individually addressable LED. Mounting holes are also included. Applications are said to include K8s, Docker swarms, OpenStack development, and small office server or Open Flickr stacks.
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Further information
The CloverPi is available on Kickstarter in $80 or $90 early bird prices through April 30, with shipments due in June or August, respectively. These will be followed by a $120 package due in November and an eventual $150 retail price. Double-board discounts are also available. More information may be found on the CloverPi Kickstarter page and the IPTerra website.
What for? Better buy old laptop, will use similar power giving same amount of RAM and more processing power, display and keyboard, ups included
Picocluster..
Looks like a great little board. The pics in the article are very unclear and somewhat out of focus. It appears that the pics were taken with an old flip-phone. It would have been nice to have a sharper focus to see the detail of the boards. Ill definitely check out the kickstarter.
I don’t see any 3 pin or 4 pin fan connections on the ClusterPI. Why would anyone design a cluster board without a pwm fan controller. That’s a hard pass for me.
$80 and that’s the “early bird price”? All it is is a $5 PCB with hardly any components. And it’s not like they did some groundbreaking R&D to justify the price either. They just connected the headers together by following one of a dozen available schematics. People are getting so lazy with their “startup” ideas it’s ridiculous. If I cared enough to make this board it’d be something I probably wouldn’t even give out for free because it’s just that barebones and embarrassing, bit if someone did want it I’d definitely just pass them the eagle files, not charge $80 for a empty piece of FR4 besides the handful of connectors and traces.
$80 for what amounts to a nearly bare piece of FR4 with $2 worth of connectors? Yeah hardpass. This is definitely the type of thing you post on GitHub and maybe make a shameful Reddit post about your lazy design, not something you try and start a get rich quick scheme off of. Shame.