Raspberry Pi now sells its own 45W UBS Type-C power supply, as the company’s latest push into hardware accessories. It will work perfectly with any Pi board that has a USB-C connector, but it also has enough power to fully charge smartphones, tablets, and many laptops.

There are already 15.3W and 27 USB-C power supplies sold by Raspberry Pi, but the company said there was demand for a higher-power version that could work with more devices. A blog post said, “When you build really high-quality generic products, like USB power supplies and SD cards, interesting things happen. Our colleague Oli tells a story of seeing customers at a Micro Center in North Carolina come up to the Raspberry Pi display and buy just our 27W power supply on its own: in building the best USB-C power supply for our customers, we’d accidentally built the best USB-C power supply for everyone.”

The new wall charger uses similar internal electronics as the lower-power versions, with components from Panasonic and KTEC, but with higher-power operating modes like 20V with 2.25A. It still supports the same lower modes for Raspberry Pi boards, like 5.1V/3A for the Pi 4 and 5.1V/5A for the Pi 5.

The 45W charger should be enough to reach maximum charging speeds on most phones, tablets, smartwatches, and other small electronics. That’s also enough for some laptops and handheld gaming PCs, but some of them may charge more slowly. For example, the 13-inch M4 MacBook Air maxes out at around 30-35W, but the M4 MacBook Pro tops out at 70W or 96W, depending on the processor configuration.

Raspberry Pi also chose a longer cable for the 45W charger, at 1.5 meters (~5 feet) in length. The cable isn’t detachable, though, so you’ll need to replace the whole thing if the cable becomes damaged.

The power supply is available for $15 in the United States, which is competitive with options from other reputable brands. For example, Anker’s Ace 45W charger is $20, and UGREEN has a multi-port 65W charger for $25, but neither one includes a cable. You can already buy it from PiShop.us and VILROS, and it should appear at other official Pi resellers (like MicroCenter and Adafruit) soon.

The Pi Ecosystem

The new USB Type-C wall charger is part of Raspberry Pi’s ongoing push into official accessories. Pi boards require flash storage for the operating system and software—usually an SD card, but sometimes M.2 or USB drives—as well as a USB power supply. Depending on the setup, a keyboard, mouse, and display are also needed. Raspberry Pi said it started developing its own hardware accessories to provide consistent quality control.

A blog post explains, “Buying the cheapest SD card or USB wall wart you can find on Amazon is a guaranteed way to have a bad experience. So over time, we started to regulate the accessories offered by our Approved Resellers. We would test resellers’ SD cards, to ensure that they had sufficient random-access performance and were resilient against thousands of unplanned power loss events.”

Over the past few months, Raspberry Pi has released its own Class A2 SD cards, NVMe SSDs, and Power-over-Ethernet (PoE+) injector. The upgraded Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 arrived in November, and the company has sold official USB keyboards and mice for a while. There are also some official expansion boards, such as the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ board, which uses the PCIe bus in the Pi 5 to provide an M.2 slot for storage and other devices.

You can still use many third-party USB devices and flash storage with Raspberry Pi boards, but it’s great to see Pi provide its own options, especially for people who aren’t familiar with SD card ratings or USB power speeds.

Source: Raspberry Pi