The Cluster HAT v2.3 does what it says on the tin. It allows you to combine a Raspberry Pi A+/B+/2/3 with up to 4 Raspberry Pi Zeros. The latter connect via a Controller Pi GPIO and are configured to use USB Gadget mode, making it easy to simulate or test small-scale cluster computing. The Cluster HAT v2.3 is designed by Pimoroni and is available to order from SB-Components for US$49.22.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Raspberry-Pi-Combine-a-Raspberry-Pi-with-up-to-4-Raspberry-Pi-Zeros-for-less-than-US-50-with-the-Cluster-HAT.426998.0.html
The ClusterHAT was designed by Chris Burton at 8086 Consultancy.
Note the white 8086.net silkscreen the ClusterHAT board.
Given how difficult it is to buy more than one Raspberry Pi zero, not sure that there's much practical relevance to this article.
Performance numbers?
Hey! Just a quick note since the designer of the ClusterHAT is so awesome: that is not the design of Pimoroni, but Chris Burton's, of clusterhat.com fame. Pimoroni is but one of the many distributors. Cheers to everyone in any case!
Don't know where you live but in the US you can buy as many Pi Zero W's as you want from Micro Center for $5 each. $35 for the base Pi, $20 for 4 Zero W's & $50 for the Cluster Hat. $105 will get you all the boards you need. I would set it up to boot & run from a SSD eliminating the need for the mSD cards altogether.
Here is mine in action: youtube url + watch?v=MgliKfjG2WU . It's a nice little way to learn about cluster computing, Kubernetes and Docker. BTW, the creator of Cluster HAT is not Pimoroni but Chris burton.
Hi all,
Thanks for pointing that out. I will update the article accordingly.
All the best,
I know this has uses, but 5 sd card points of failure? No thanks.
The slightly negative comment above regarding SD cards misses the point. The Pi Cluster is really a teaching aid, it's not meant for mission-critical workloads.
I've just built one, and there are 3 approaches available from the clusterhat.com website. The basic just requires flashing the SD cards with the Control (C-CBridge) image and then the cluster node P1 P2, P3 and P4 images - though you do need to add a file named 'ssh' to the boot folder to then make the SSH set up work correctly. The intermediate method requires you to modify the controller image and change the cmdline.txt file in /boot to define the node type/name. This option does also allow for diskless boot. The manual approach requires a number of steps, though there is a helpful build script.