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I have been looking into multiple ways to power numerous rapsberry pi's from one power source.

I am not an electrical engineer and as such some methods I have researched online are less than ideal, such as modifying my psu to support a usb cable.

Would a product such as this usb front panel allow me to draw power directly from my unused 550w psu (assuming the 24 pin connector is bridged) and the molex cable is connected (without the usb gpio pins being connected to a motherboard)?

more information on my requirements incase there are any valid answers to help me solve this issue that arent directly related to the product in question:

  • I do not want to use a USB hub that is powered directly from a wall socket or from some other usb method.
  • I would ideally want to power 4+ rpi's from my unused 550w psu - ideally without any soldering.
  • I would be open to using the gpio pins if there were a simple method to unify each pi's gpio's to a single power source.
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Yes, that could work, but it'd be overkill for only 4 or so Pi's. A 500W PSU could power ten times that amount easily.

If you still decide to go this route, the adapter you mention will probably work, assuming the 5V of the molex goes straight to the USB pins without any sort of power-saving smarts built in.

If it doesn't, you could always solder the red wire from the molex to the 5V pin on all the Pis and the black wire on the molex to the GND pin on all the Pis - not ideal considering soldering would be required, but it'd be a relatively easy solder job. You might also want to check out this thread on the RPi Forum detailing the soldering procedure.

I'm not sure why you're against USB powering - there are wall-plug outlets with 8 or more ports like this one that would provide more than enough current for a cluster of Pi's.

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  • Any recommendations regarding powering 4 raspberry pi 4 using 1 power source? I understand that each pi 4 needs 3A and the wall-plug suggested above only delivers 2.4 per port..
    – Dr. Mike
    Commented Jan 23, 2020 at 21:30
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    The often-quoted 3A figure is the maximum power consumption for configurations where lots of USB peripherals are in use, a physical display (or two!) is used, and other peripherals are in use which draw additional power. If your configuration doesn't make use of all these peripherals (which I doubt it does if you're using 4 pi's), then you shouldn't need to be able to supply the full 3A. This link suggests that a Pi 4 under full CPU load will only use about 1.3 amps.
    – Brooke Chalmers
    Commented Jan 27, 2020 at 13:59

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