Anyone tried the Radxa CM5 on the uconsole?

Has anyone tried the Radxa CM5 - Radxa CM5 on the uconsole?

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Not that I have seen, they only recently have been available. I’d like to pick one up but I’m worried about the thermal management. I have a rock5b and that thing sucks a lot of power and makes a lot of heat, I just don’t think the uconsole is up to task without modifying for an active cooling solution.

If you are thinking of buying one to be the only module I’d recommend against that, and just get a rpi4 for now. You’d be bottlenecked by the SD card anyhow. All my Socs running on fast storage make me realize just how much of a bottleneck microsd is.

Keep in mind cwp designed the uconsole for the cm3 initially. So there’s a lot of features that just aren’t available (nvme).

There’s really no such thing as a drop-in replacement. If it’s pin compatible it might be possible, but someone is going to have to modify the kernel and write drivers to support the screen and ClockworkPi motherboard.

I think it’s telling that the two boards that received aftermarket support are both Raspberry Pi boards, the CM3 and CM4S — they’re in the hands of more developers who are already familiar with them.

If there’s a board that you’d like to see a kernel and drivers for, and you’re not a kernel hacker yourself, my recommendation is to reach out to a developer in the community and offer to send them a board.

Totally. Not a kernel hacker here by any means, getting the bananapi cm4 working with the uconsole has not been as enjoyable as I thought it would be. And it gets too hot.

If someone sends me one with return postage for 2 weeks I’ll see what I can do. I don’t wanna shell out the money myself for one if it won’t work. lol

Not a kernel hacker, but I have seen images for CM5 for the Rpi CM4 IO board from radxa. So I am guessing there is hope that someone can make it work?

Radxa CM5 looks like a great module with an NPU for AI, and much more powerful than a CM4

Much more powerful means it needs better cooling. As @Angrybeez mentioned bananapi cm4 gets too hot inside uConsole, Radxa CM5 should be the same.

Having OS images for it somewhere is cool, but it still needs adoption for uConsole devices and it is not as easy as it seems to be.

So yes, if your interest is not because you just want, but because you really need it, then just send your board to someone who can help with adoption. @Rex seems to be good choice for that purpose :slight_smile:

Much more powerful means it needs better cooling. As @Angrybeez mentioned bananapi cm4 gets too hot inside uConsole, Radxa CM5 should be the same.

Not necessarily true. The Pi 4’s SoC was built on a 28nm process. Chips built on a more modern (and expensive) process can have more transistors, use less energy and produce less heat.

I inspected Radxa CM5 schematic and pinout. My conclusion:

You will need a custom adapter board (and some hacks) to enable Wi-Fi support.

Unfortunately, Radxa CM5 does not route SDIO to its module connector, but it has an extra PCIe lane broken out.

There is two way to support Wi-Fi.

One, less hacky way: Break out an extra PCIe lane and wire it to m.2 2240 slot. Then plug in off the shelf Wi-Fi module.
Two, super hacky way: Desolder the Realtek Ethernet PHY from the module, wire jump wires over it, connect those pins to Wi-Fi module using custom adapter board.

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