CM5 WORKING! After all this time & effort it turns out to be so easy

uConsole
1

Holy moley , it’s working!

And it was so simple, following the advice here https://youtu.be/CpXH9CWM_Kw?si=22RHynw93JpOXS0O

Basically use the Raspberrt Pi Imager.

  1. Use the “no filter” option
  2. Choose the RP5 boot loader from the options menu
  3. Burn your SD card
  4. Insert SD into uConsole & power up with batteries & USB C power supply
  5. Wait approximately 8 minutes
  6. Back to Imager, burn your chosen Rex OS Image
  7. Turn off uC remove usb c & batteries
  8. Insert your SD card from step 6
  9. Power uC up, wait a few…and it boots!!!

I’ve been fighting with this for months! Woo-Hoo!

4 Likes
My new uconsole can not boot up
2

Congratulations! Glad you didn’t give up! Of course, with the price of a CM5 these days, failure wasn’t really an option, huh?

3

That’s for sure.

I did manage to mangle the Wi-Fi antenna jack on the cm5 during this process.

But things worked well enough to get the os (bookworm) up & updated. It was just show. So I plugged in a usb Wi-Fi adapter and things are much better.

I can’t get the smile off my face - I’m totally a 70 yo geek!

2 Likes
4

70, huh? That’s awesome. You put a smile on this 57-yo nerd’s face. Have fun!

1 Like
5

Step 5: 8 minutes!?! The usual advice for copying the bootloader is about 30 seconds. Did you try that first and have it not work?
Step 7: Is that really necessary? Again, did you try without it and have it not work?

6

No, I went with the 8 minutes recommendation in the YouTube.

At this point I’ve wasted way more that 7 minutes on this puzzle!

7

I’m new here, just got my uConsole a few weeks back. I’m using a CM5 10800, have flashed a cards with the RP5 Bootloader as mentioned above. I click the power button and a sec or so after the green light I get a red HDMI monitor screen. I’ve formatted the card for fat32 prior to flashing it. Still the same outcome. What am I missing?

8

  1. what is a full CM5 model id?

  2. what distro do you flash? made by rex? flash this one: Trixie 6.12.y for the uConsole and DevTerm

  3. have you updated an eeprom? EEPROM config and the CM5 lite

what does it even mean? photo?

9

that’s really impressive :tada:

welp,there are two antennas. one is internal on PCB, another one you broke.
you can try to switch to the internal one, most probably wifi won’t work due to metal case, but it’s free to try.

modify config file, set it to use ant1

$ sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt

[pi5]
# Select antenna 1 (internal). CM4/5 only.
dtparam=ant1

# Select antenna 2. CM4/5 only.
# dtparam=ant2

and reboot

10

My CM5 box says CM5 108000

When I use the small sd card with the boot loader I see a red screen on the hdmi monitor attached to the uConsole.

I did download ClockworkPi-Trixie-6.12.87

Extracted it and flashed it to a Sandusky Extreme 64gb sd card
Nothing at all happens when I boot to it There is nothing displayed or changes on the uConsole screen or the connected hdmi

Here are photos

IMG_8753
IMG_87531920×2560 880 KB

IMG_8754
IMG_87541920×2560 1.2 MB

IMG_8755
IMG_87551920×2560 794 KB

11

have you tried to boot with stock hardware without HG addons?

have you tried to boot without sd card at all?

12

I did not try without the HG add on board. I did try without a sd card, again nothing. I will remove the HG card and see if it boots.

13

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=296300

2 Likes
14

Ok I removed the HG cards and tried to boot with no SD card. Nothing happens on either the HDMI or he device screen. Retried with the EEPROM bootloader update SD, Upon power on I see red screen on the HDMI monitor, nothins on he uConsole monitor. Retried with the ClockworkPi-Trixie-6.12.87 and noting happens on either screen.

15

Even with no SD you should get the bootloader output over HDMI. Take out the adapter board and make sure the CM is fully seated in the adapter board. You should hear each row of connectors snap into place. And make sure the adapter is fully seated in the sodimm slot.

2 Likes
16

I took a week off, had a heart ablation and bought a cm-io base. I flashed the eeprom configuration with the cm5 in the base, got the green screen and I was able to boot, set username and password and shutdown so I can add the HG board, get the back on it and get to playing.
The trackball moved the mouse, but clicking the ball did nothing. I had to hit the enter key.
I have at least two weeks of 10lb weight restrictions so I’m quite happy to get this running (or started)

Mark Hogan a 66 yr old kid in a candy store.

1 Like
17

trackball click is a 3rd mouse button

there are two buttons on the left L/R for mouse

1 Like
18

also you can update stock keyboard firmware and you will be able to scroll vertically by fn + ball

or switch to qmk firmware and scroll x/y by select + ball

19

Thank you for posting these instructions. Worked for me first time on a CM5 4GB lite board and flashing ClockworkPi-Trixie-lite-6.12.87.img.xz to a 128GB Sandisk SD card.
The initial boot of the image in step 9 was very long time ca 10 min. After that reboots are 30 seconds.

The only issue I had was with the wifi In the raspi-config set up. I was getting “There was an error running option S1 Wireless LAN”. The solution was to set the wifi country via the menu in raspi-config then:

nmcli dev wifi connect "YOUR_SSID" password "YOUR_PASSWORD"

I did also do:

rfkill list
sudo rfkill unblock all

As I did see and error at one point saying the wlan was being stopped by rfkill. However, “rfkill list” indicated nothing was being blocked. I am not sure that contributed to the solution.

Again, thanks for posting the instructions!