Our Boards Compatibility with the Raspberry Pi 4
Jul
The Raspberry Pi 4 was recently released. This post is about our boards and their compatibility with the Raspberry Pi 4. Are our extension boards like the PowerBlock or the ControlBlock compatible with it? The short answer is “yes” – from now on.
UPDATE 09/05/2019: All ControlBlocks and PowerBlocks that are ordered from today on are fully compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4! See also the blog post about that here.
In the following you find the original post about the Raspberry Pi 4 compatibility for the legacy devices:
We would have loved it if we could tell you that our current revisions of the boards work without any additional tinkering with the Raspberry Pi 4. However, we realised that the early initialisation behaviour of the RPi 4 is slightly different in comparison to the previous Raspberries. As a result of that the power-switch functionality of our PowerBlock and ControlBlock boards runs into an endless loop without ever turning on the Raspberry.
But you can easily correct this: You simply need to put a pull-down resistor between the 11th pin and a ground pin. We suggest to use a 10K through-hole resistor for that. With that the boards are fully working.
The following images illustrate which pins needs you need to connect and how you could use a 10K through-hole resistor for that. The images show the ControlBlock and the PowerBlock:
RPi 4 compatible: ControlBlock with 10K resistor between “GND” pin and GPIO pin 11 
RPi 4 compatible: PowerBlock with 10K resistor between “OUT -” pin and “S2” pin (GPIO pin 11) RPi 4 compatible: PowerBlock with 10K resistor between “OUT -” pin and “S2” pin (GPIO pin 11)
Future revisions of our boards will of course take this into account.
We set up this compatibility page that summarises these information for all products also in the future.
Good luck with your projects!
If there are two boards stacked (for 4 players/controllers) only one of them needs to be mod’d (or be the new rev), right?
That is correct – only one board needs to be modded.
Hello, I was wondering how can I provide a 3.0A input with the micro usb port ? Can I unsoldered it and change it to something else ?
Thanks.
The PowerBlock and the ControlBlock both provide separate pins for attaching another power supply. You could use those pins to attach the supply of your choice.
Our tests with the Raspberry Pi 4 with the ‘stress’ tool, micro USB connection, and the original Raspberry Pi power supply show that there is no under voltage situation, so far.