The Edge AI Expansion Board is an under-board baseboard for Raspberry Pi 5. Confirm the host platform and the M.2 modules you need are on hand before you open the antistatic bag.

What you need

What's in the box

The kit ships ready to assemble. All spacers, screws, the PCIe FFC cable, and the passive cooler ship in the same box.

The Expansion Board sits underneath the Raspberry Pi 5. You install the spacers, connect the 40 mm PCIe FFC cable to the Expansion Board, mount the Raspberry Pi 5 on top so its pogo pins make contact, seat the AI module and its passive heatsink, connect the FFC to the Raspberry Pi 5 and seat the USB Bridge, then finish with the underside modules. Pogo pins on the Expansion Board top side back-power the Raspberry Pi 5 through the GPIO header's 5V and GND pins.

Three M.2 slots, three jobs

Each slot is labelled on the silkscreen. The AI accelerator goes in M.2-PCIE only; the other two slots host storage and cellular over the internal USB hub.

Assembly order

Each step below pairs the instruction with the matching animation, so the orientation and seating cues are visible right where you need them.

1. Install the spacers. Screw the 6× M2.5 female-female 16 mm spacers into the bottom side of the Expansion Board as the base standoffs. On the top side (the side with the M.2 slots), fit the 2× M2.5 × 5 mm plastic screws and the 4× M2.5 × 5 mm male-female spacers, one in each corner mounting hole.

   

2. Connect the PCIe FFC cable to the Expansion Board. Insert the cable into the PCIe FFC connector on the Expansion Board with the EDGE AI label facing up. Align the Pin 1 marking, fully insert, and close the latch. Do this before mounting the Raspberry Pi 5; with the Raspberry Pi 5 in place, the board-side FFC connector is harder to reach.

   

3. Mount the Raspberry Pi 5. Before mounting, make sure you have flashed Raspberry Pi OS to the microSD card and inserted the card into the Raspberry Pi 5. Once the PCIe FFC cable is connected to the Raspberry Pi 5, the microSD card cannot be removed without disconnecting the cable. Then lower the Raspberry Pi 5 onto the 4× 5 mm male-female spacers so the pogo pins on the Expansion Board's top side line up with and contact the underside pads of the Raspberry Pi 5 GPIO header (two 5V pads and two GND pads). Secure the Raspberry Pi 5 with 4× M2.5 × 5 mm plastic screws.

   

4. Install the DEEPX DX-M1 AI module. Insert the AI module into the M.2-PCIE slot at a 30° angle and fully seat the gold contacts. Place the M.2 module spacer at the far mounting hole, press the module flat, then secure it with the module screw.

   

5. Attach the passive heatsink (recommended). The kit includes a passive heatsink for the DEEPX DX-M1 M.2 AI Module. Fitting it keeps the NPU cooler under sustained inference, so it is recommended for most workloads. Place the heatsink on the module as shown below and press down gently and evenly so it makes full contact.

   

6. Connect the FFC to the Raspberry Pi 5 and seat the USB Bridge. Insert the RPi5 end of the PCIe FFC cable into the Raspberry Pi 5's PCIe socket and close the latch. On the other side, seat the USB Bridge daughterboard, which routes the internal USB hub (the data path for the NVMe and cellular slots) to the Raspberry Pi 5. The Sixfab logo on the USB Bridge must face outward and sit flat.

   

7. Install the underside modules. Turn the board over to its underside. Insert the LTE/5G modem into the CELLULAR LTE/5G slot and secure it with the M2 × 4 mm flat-head screw. Insert the NVMe SSD into the M.2-USB slot, place an M.2 module spacer, and secure it with the module screw. Insert a nano SIM into the SIM slot. Each M.2 module goes in at a 30° angle with the gold contacts fully seated.

   

8. Power the system. Connect the USB-C PD adapter to the Type-C socket on the Expansion Board; this powers the whole stack and back-powers the Raspberry Pi 5 through the pogo pins. Fit the included Type-C cap onto the Raspberry Pi 5's own USB-C port so no one accidentally powers the Pi from there. The stack is now ready for first boot and driver install.

   

Up to three lines need to be in /boot/firmware/config.txt before the DEEPX runtime is installed: one to enable the Raspberry Pi 5's PCIe lane, one to set it to Gen 3, and one to lift the USB current limit, which is needed only if you boot the Raspberry Pi 5 from the NVMe SSD. When booting normally from the microSD card, the third line is not needed.

Power on the Raspberry Pi 5 (USB-C PD supply connected to the Expansion Board's USB-C port; the Expansion Board back-powers the Raspberry Pi 5), wait for it to boot to a terminal, then add the lines below to the end of /boot/firmware/config.txt.

# 1. Open config.txt in your editor of choice
sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt

# 2. Append these lines at the end of the file:
dtparam=pciex1
dtparam=pciex1_gen=3

# Only if booting from the NVMe SSD (USB boot); not needed for microSD boot:
usb_max_current_enable=1

# 3. Save (Ctrl+O, Enter) and exit (Ctrl+X), then reboot
sudo reboot

What each line does

• dtparam=pciex1: enables the Raspberry Pi 5's external PCIe x1 lane that the 40 mm FFC cable routes to the DX-M1.
• dtparam=pciex1_gen=3: pushes the PCIe link from Gen 2 (the safe default on Raspberry Pi OS) to Gen 3. The DX-M1 supports Gen 3, and measured bandwidth jumps from 400–450 MB/s at Gen 2 to 800–900 MB/s at Gen 3.
• usb_max_current_enable=1: lifts the Raspberry Pi 5's USB current cap. Only needed when booting from the NVMe SSD (USB boot): without it, the Raspberry Pi 5 pauses at boot and prompts the user to press the on-board button to acknowledge that more than 1.6 A of USB current is being requested. When booting from the microSD card, this line is not required.

The sixfab-dx APT package installs the kernel driver (via DKMS), the DEEPX runtime (dxrt-runtime), and the CLI tools (dxrt-cli, dxtop, run_hello_world). It also pulls in raspberrypi-kernel-headers automatically so the DKMS build succeeds. First add the Sixfab APT repository (apt-repo-sixfab), then install the runtime.

# 1. Add the Sixfab APT repository
sudo apt update
sudo apt install apt-repo-sixfab
# 2. Refresh the index and install the driver + DEEPX runtime
sudo apt update && sudo apt install sixfab-dx

When the installer prompts Do you want to continue? [Y/n], type Y and press Enter. The driver compiles against your running kernel via DKMS, so the first install can take 5–10 minutes depending on connection speed and CPU.

Before running the first inference, confirm the DX-M1 is up with a single command. Detailed status checks and per-subsystem setup live on their dedicated pages, linked below.

The sixfab-dx package ships with a pre-compiled YOLOv8 detection demo wired up to run_hello_world. A single command launches it on the DEEPX NPU and opens a window with bounding boxes drawn in real time.

run_hello_world

A window opens showing the live feed (camera or stored video) with bounding boxes drawn around detected objects in real time.

Watch the NPU work in real time

Open a second terminal while the demo is running and launch dxtop. It prints per-core utilisation, voltage, clock, and temperature, much like htop for the NPU.

dxtop

Press q to quit. The DX-M1 begins thermally throttling at approximately 90 °C; sustained inference well below that is the goal, and dxtop is how you watch for it. The full set of monitoring tools and how to plug them into production fleets is documented separately in System Monitoring.