The Great Search - PCI express x1 connector

Adafruit Industries

This week on the Great Search, we've had our eyes on the new Pi 5 announcement - they're not shipping yet but we did get some tantalizing new images including a new PCIe connector on board. PCIe is a high speed bus that will make it a lot easier to add hardware to a Pi computer, including storage cards, cell modules, radios, and co-processors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express) that can use 1 lane of data. A PCIe HAT is expected from Raspberry Pi at some point, and there's a few folks trying to make adapters for M.2, which we covered on The Great Search earlier (https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/10/27/the-great-search-m-2-e-key-connectors-thegreatsearch-digikey-digikey-adafruit/) So this time around let's look for PCIe sockets. We'll try to find one that is SMT and vertical, so a wide variety of cards can be inserted.