Thank you all for the support so far! I’m really excited to finally be underway with the campaign. But how did we get here?

I was just casually watching Jeff Geerling videos about the new CM5 and his adventures in connecting GPUs to a Raspberry Pi via a long chain of hats and docks…

…when the thought occured to me: isn’t there a CM5 board that just lets you plug in a GPU and PSU?

Jeff replied that there is one of each but not one with both, which he’d like to exist ver much, so I figured, how hard can it be? If the patron saint of raspberry pis calls on you to make a board, you make a board. The rest, as they say, is history.

From there on it was a long and wild ride. Making a prototype actually wasn’t that hard: a few days of careful CAD work to get all the details right and then you just place the order. The board arrived a few weeks later and pretty much worked first try! Even running llama.cpp on it following Jeff’s guides was smooth sailing.

Then began the long grind to make it polished and sell it, for which I teamed up with my good friend Pepijn Goorden who has done a lot of design, branding, marketing, communication, and all the other things beyond prototyping a board.

We took a long detour trying to make a super polished AI voice assistant, getting Aisler sponored boards shipped to influencers, setting up a mailing list and website, and it all started out super promising but didn’t fully live up to our lofty goals. At which point we decided that we should really get some help from Crowd Supply with all the practicalities of shipping a product. Rather than chasing polish, we would focus on the maker community that we love.

So I am extremely relieved to finally be underway with Crowd Supply and bringing this project to you!