The Pi 400 design process aka lefty bias
Insights into the design and creation of the latest Raspberry Pi device reveal something surprising…
O ne of the many great things about the Raspberry Pi Foundation is the openness it takes with how its devices are designed and manufactured (see features, LXF182). Now a fresh blog post shines a spotlight on the design process behind the latest Pi 400. One of the odd areas that’s covered is the placement of the USB port, which is over on the left-hand side. As many have pointed out online, this forces the mouse cable to cross over all the other connections – for right-handed users at least. Is this lefty bias? Simon Martin explained: “The PCB shape had to be defined early on so that the industrial designers could get on with the housing design, and I then stared endlessly at the PCB layout, trying to get one of the USB ports to route to the right side without wrecking the signal integrity of the memory or the HDMI; I could not find a way to do this.”