CrowPi 3 is a Raspberry Pi 5-powered education kit coming soon to Kickstarter

The Elecrow CrowPi 3 is a kit that provides a bunch of tools and resources to help young people develop computer science skills. The kit is about the size of a small, but chunky laptop, measuring 285 x 185 x 38mm (11.2″ x 7.3″ x 1.5″). But instead of a large display and keyboard, it has a small screen, a bunch of sensors, and support for a wide range of electronic components.

Powered by a Raspberry Pi 5, the CrowPi 3 can also be used to program with Arduino Nano, micro:bit and Raspberry Pi Pico hardware. Elecrow hasn't announced how much the new kit will cost yet, but the company plans to launch a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for the CrowPi 3 soon.

As the name suggests, this isn't the first CrowPi device from the company. Elecrow been making Raspberry Pi-based computer science education kits since 2018 and last summer the company also expanded into more traditional laptops with the Raspberry Pi 5-powered CrowView Note 14.

But the CrowPi 3 is very much a device designed for tinkering and learning, not for general purpose computing.

While the specs haven't been finalized yet, Elecrow has produced a prototype that features a 4.3 inch 800 x 480 pixel, 300 nit capacitive touchscreen IPS LCD display that can fold down flat or flip forward for easy viewing. Elecrow says it can either be configured for use as the system's primary display or as a second screen that can be used to display system status information.

Ports include:

1 x USB Type-C (for 5V/5A power input, 5V/2A output, and data input or output)

1 x USB Type-C (for data output and 5V/2A power output only)

1 x USB Type-C (debug interface only)

1 x HDMI

1 x Gigabit Ethernet

1 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A (5 Gbps)

1 x USB 2.0 Type-A (480 Mbps)

1 x 3.5mm headphone/speaker output

40-pin Raspberry Pi 5 GPIO header

There's also support for WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 LE, and a bunch of additional I/O features including a 5-way joystick, capacitive touch sensor, 4 buttons, a microphone and 2MP camera, and sensors including:

Gyroscope/accelerometer

RFID sensor

Ultrasonic sensor (to detect presence, position, and speed of objects)

Flame sensor

Voltage detector

Infrared receiver

Temperature and Humidity sensor

Hall sensor

Ambient Light sensor

Vibration motor

Servo interface

Buzzer

6 LED lights

8 x 8 RGB LED light matrix

There are also I2C and UART interfaces and two breadboards for connecting electronic components.

While there's a charging circuit and a battery holder for 18650 batteries, the batteries are not included and need to be purchased separately. And while the kit doesn't come with a keyboard, you can use any wired or wireless keyboard with the CrowPi 3 and the case has been designed so that if you use a CrowPi 2 Bluetooth keyboard, you can place in on top of the kit and it will be magnetically held in place.

Elecrow offers over 100 courses to help students (and parents or educators) learn how to use the various components in a variety of projects.

Note that while the prototype has a blue bumper around the sides of the case, the company says the final version will be grey.

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