Author Topic: I hacked external PCIe connectivity on the Atomic Pi!  (Read 1464 times)

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Offline ginbot86Topic starter

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I hacked external PCIe connectivity on the Atomic Pi!
« on: June 25, 2019, 10:46:09 am »
Man, this was one of those projects where one thinks "Oh, this'll be easy, just gotta wire it all up"... but everything goes wrong. It took a lot of work and many different attempts, but I was able to break out the PCIe bus from the Atomic Pi, which was originally used by the onboard RTL8111G Ethernet chip. The issue was a lack of any accessible points to add an external connector, but I eventually found a working method.

My blog post is here: https://ripitapart.wordpress.com/2019/06/25/atomic-pi-adventures-episode-1-adding-external-pci-express-expansion-by-removing-onboard-ethernet/
Code: [Select]
Initialization Failed: Insufficient caffeine in system.
 
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Offline magic

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Re: I hacked external PCIe connectivity on the Atomic Pi!
« Reply #1 on: June 26, 2019, 10:14:40 am »
Sounds fun ;)

It may have been stubs and parasitics of the Realtek chip which frustrated your early attempts. At 5gb/s one bit is 4cm long so 1cm stub to the chip and back adds a signal delayed by half bit :scared:
 


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