Hi @zynthianers, this is a report on my impressions with running Oram on the latest Raspberry keyboard computer, that is the Pi 500+, equipped with 16 Gb Ram, 256 Gb M.2 internal SSD and a Cherry MX-type LED-backlighted configurable mechanical keyboard.
For anyone interested in trying the same setup, I thought it would have been useful to share some tips and tricks, acquired through a couple of days of troubleshooting and battling, against some initial issues and current limitations, and with some help from AI. This is the current state-of-the-art for this specific Pi-based Zynthian music system.
- The Raspberry Pi 500+ is clearly still in an early hardware and software development phase, as it’s a young product released three months ago. The SSH connection service is not enabled by default, even if the relevant switch is turned on in the Raspberry OS desktop system settings. You need to start the service manually from the terminal, with the following commands:
sudo systemctl enable ssh
sudo systemctl start ssh
-
The Raspberry Pi 500+ is not officially supported yet by the Zynthian project, as clearly stated in a notice on the Webconf main screen. This might be due to the issues I encountered, while configuring USB devices and the LAN connection.
-
The present behaviour of the Pi 500+'s RJ45 LAN port is inconsistent and unreliable, which perhaps will be solved with future kernel updates. Since neither Raspberry OS nor ZynthianOS happen to see the ethernet port as available, the current safe workaround is to plug a LAN-to-USB adapter into one of the USB ports, when connecting from an external computer (for SSH, FTP or Webconf on browser).
-
The latest stable ZynthianOS (Oram 2025-11) fails to negotiate the automatic activation of the Webconf service at startup on the Pi 500+. The service must be started manually from an SSH terminal on an external computer, with the command:
sudo systemctl restart zynthian-webconf
Then the keyboard computer with Oram can be configured normally, through Webconf.
-
After much evaluation, I decided not to take the route of storing on the built-in nvme both Raspberry OS and Zynthian, since the latter is an embedded system that requires exclusive management of the system drive, even more than a normal operating system. I feared that the cohabitation of two completely different OS on the same mass-storage unit would have been prone to break their files access hierarchy with system updates. Therefore, for the time being I left Raspberry OS on SSD and Oram on SD, with overall satisfying speed performance anyway, once set the appropriate boot sequence with sudo raspi-config. In this way, changing system is just a matter of extracting or inserting the SD card at startup. For the future, I am thinking of writing ZynthianOS on an external SSD connected via USB 3.
-
In the current state, of limited and unsupported compatibility between ZyntianOS and Pi500+, the setting of an audio device from Webconf is not retained after system reboot. When a standard USB Audio+Midi interface is connected to the device, Oram goes through a 10-second idle cycle on each bootstrap, signalling the well-known Audio-Midi error, and then starts regularly with full functionality, apparently reinitialising the USB device at each boot to a default fail-safe condition.
With the above premises, and considering the small highlighted inconsistencies, my experience so far is that Oram on the Pi500+ is perfectly usable, with brilliant performance and safe (winter’s) operational temperatures at medium overclock, when connected to an inexpensive class-compliant USB Audio+Midi interface (in my case a crisp-sounding Mackie Onyx 2-2) and a few normal peripherals with low energy draw. In conjunction with one of the Romoral (AliExpress) programmable keypad models, configured through UI key-binding on Webconf, this affordable and sleek setup offers a complete synth/audio workstation, with latencies, thanks to the powerful hardware specs of the Pi500+, in the 10 ms range at 48 kHz resolution and 256-sample buffer, fully sustainable even with the more CPU-hungry processors like the emulators.
I hope that this notes may turn out to be useful to the community somehow.
Cheers 
