Pi 5 unfortunately needs a non-standard charger. It requires 5v & 5A charger. Its been difficult to acquire one in India.
Is that not the case?
And yes it’s nearly impossible to find 5v5a power supply in India.
Apple has a 12 W charger....
Makes things so much more convenient when you have to stop everything to hunt for the right dongle or power adapter and can't just use-what-you-have :)
The Raspberry Pi 5 does support USB-PD. There aren't very presently very many USB-PD chargers that support the 5A@5V mode that it prefers, but they do exist.
And like what happened with the Raspberry Pi 3s and 4s (which also had somewhat peculiar power desires and also did not include a power supply), additional third parties will come forward to produce their own versions of Raspberry Pi 5 power supply. (It's only natural, and history supports this happening.)
But even on a desert island: It can be powered through the GPIO header just like all other previous versions, if that's what you want to do. Just put a reasonably-stable 5V supply on there that can output 5A, and power it up. No big deal.
Also like with previous Pis: A person is also free to goof around with using whatever USB bricks they have laying around. Might work, might not -- but it's a device that is intended to be a learning tool.
Or: Buy a kit from a kit-maker like Vilross or something, if you need accessories included all in one box.
(At any rate: Raspberry Pis have always just been bare boards, not complete systems.)
The most difficult soldering I've ever done was swapping an ATMega 2560 chip between two boards with a very basic hot air station, and that one still doesn't work right (but it works well enough to be useful).
Hacks like this are very impressive.
Luckily I have 5 of them (and a k8s cluster is fault tolerant), because the USB disk randomly does not get enough power -- the voltage drops a lot even pulling 2-3A out of most chargers, I can't imagine doing 5 (the USB cable resistances start to become a factor at higher amperages).
I use longhorn though, not CEPH, and it's been relatively painless.
(not afilliated, just use them a lot for 12v systems)
* When the Pi 4B first came out, I connected a cheap Inland (Microcenter house brand) SSD, booting from that, and it ran fine for a while. (Months?) "Better" SSDs like Crucial MX100 had problems under heavy load and I suspected that the instantaneous power demands of the SSD were not met by the USB port on the Pi. (The Pi 4B supports UAS and older Pis did not and the older ones never had problems with USB connected SSDs.)
* At some point it started to run into difficulties with the SSD disconnecting under heavy load, requiring a power cycle to restore operation. At that point I began using a powered USB hub to work around this.
* Recently a user on some forum (which I have forgotten) suggested that one particular SSD model from Kingston worked fine w/out the need for a powered hub. I acquired one and tested [1] and found this to be true. Just for grins, I also tested some other SSDs that had previously only worked with a powered hub and they worked fine when directly connected.
This leads me to believe that the RpiOS folk have been tweaking some settings in the "firmware" [2] that have modified the power delivery from the USB ports.
[1] Testing involved running several disk benchmarks as well as 'stress-ng' to load the storage as much as possible.
[2] I'm unclear what the Rpi folk mean by "firmware". As an embedded systems developer "firmware" is something written to non-volatile solid state storage like flash or eeprom but when I updated firmware on a Pi, it installed a new kernel too.
Or you can google "raspberry Pi 5 power supply".
Whereas lots of USB-PD devices (at each end) will negotiate higher voltages in order to accomplish greater power delivery, the Pi 5 only ever wants 5V -- not 9V, not 12V, 15V, not 20V, and not PPS.
Ideally, it wants up to 5A of 5V.[1]
And many (I dare say "most," or "nearly all") USB-PD power supplies top out at 3A when in 5V mode.
Also: Getting 5A of USB-PD also requires a special e-marked cable because that's getting into the realm of current flow where things can get melty. A dumb cable will never be expected to transmit 5A of current with a USB-PD device at each end.
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The Pi 5 still can still work even if it can't detect that it is running from a 5 Amp-capable supply, though. It may be slower (due to detected voltage sags), and there will be less power available for USB devices attached to the Pi (which can be toggled in config.txt). But it can work.
It can also be powered through the GPIO header, just as other models in the past: Nothing prevents those who think they know what they're doing from using whatever they have laying around that they think is adequate, and just powering the device up in full capacity.[2]
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr...
If you need more you would need to request for example 20V at 5A and then buck convert it down to 5V. Not ideal but you can at least pull the current you need through thinner cables and you also have enough to power external USB devices.
5 A at 5 V seems to be sufficiently unusual for USB-PD that Wikipedia's section on the specification doesn't mention it as being part of the specification at all, giving 3 A as the maximum in the specification for 5 V, and only mentioning 5 A with EPR and marked cables at higher voltages [1]. Discussions about 5 A at 5 V seem to come up essentially only in the context of the rpi5, and there most references seem to be to footnotes in the specification mentioning that more than 3 A can be advertised if a 5 A cable is detected. The rpi5 also apparently doesn't support 5 A at 5 V with PPS; it only supports it as a fixed voltage profile.
The result would seem to be that essentially no USB-PD power supply other than theirs, and one other SBC power supply, actually offers 5 A at 5 V in a way that the rpi5 will accept.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver...
But a casual Google search where I am located at least two alternative suppliers that are already shipping appropriate power supplies that can do 5@5.
And the usual (US) distributors (places like Adafruit and also places like Digikey) are selling the official power supply for $12, which I personally consider to be very cheap.
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And remember, wanting peculiar power supplies is normal in the RPi space. The very popular Pi 3 was weird (5.1V@2.5A over MicroUSB, with many unofficial recommendations suggesting 3A), for instance -- in a world where common "high-power" USB power bricks topped out at 5.0V@2.4A on a good day, with the wind from the South, and under the direction of an unladen sparrow.
Many of us are familiar with the struggles that this entailed as we worked on whatever we were working on. But other suppliers did come to the front and offer alternative products that reliably delivered 5.1V@3A, and there's no indication that this won't be the case for this round as well -- especially if they're able to produce the quantity of RPi5s that they say they will.
At a projected 90k units per month, then: Every 7 seconds, an opportunity to sell another RPi5 power supply opens up.
(The Pi 4 has a different version of the same story.)
Not even "junk drawer gear". USB-PD is recent enough that any gear supporting a good cross-section of that spec will be recent if not brand new.
As 1 data point: I recently bought a USB-C power adapter that supports USB-PD up to 35W at a variety of voltages & negotiation methods.
A RPi5's power needs are well within that 35W. And yet, beside supplying 5V @3A (which comes with its own set of issues / limitations), it'll be largely useless as a RPi5 power supply. Regardless of cable used.
Many USB-PD power bricks will be in same boat. So indeed this is a stupid design decision on RPi's behalf. I've read & understand their rationale for that decision. But it doesn't make it less stupid. Other SBCs use USB-PD as intended (in this case, @ higher voltages like 9, 12 or 15V, or even variable) no problem, and without needing special 5A rated cables. The onboard electronics / ICs to do this are cheap & plentiful.
Okay - RPi's rationale is an excuse. Not a good one. Supplying a 5V/5A brick themselves, doesn't do much to paper over that fact.
I mean, a lot of cables(Certainly all Anker ones) support 100W charging and that's 20V@5amps, so the 5amp part really shouldn't be a big problem.