Green light on but no signs of life

uConsole
1

Hello, I’m another one of those people who have got a uconsole, built it, plugged it in and pressed the power button but nothing happens except the green led light gets a bit brighter.

I have a CM5 4GB, lite with WiFi module. I only have a scandisk 32gb SD card and tried the Bookworm and Ubuntu images (no custom settings applied.) I’ve check the cm5 is plugin in properly a few times and tried different usb-c cables for powering it. I’ve not tried hdmi to external display yet as need a micro hdmi to hdmi cable, which is arriving tomorrow.

Please see picture, just in case I’ve build it incorrectly

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Any advice please?

2

Have you hooked an external monitor to hdmi to check if it’s the screen?

3

what os image? if not Rex’s os image, then there is no CM5 support right now

and also try HDMI for sure

1 Like
4

Thank you. I’m just waiting for the correct cable to arrive to link to external display and so will check this tomorrow. At present nothing at all happens with the screen.

5

Both were Rex’s images.

6

I have a 5 inch external monitor that sits in my uConsole case because the screen will fail to initialize once in a blue moon with a CM5. It’s a known issue. Not sure if it’s been fully fixed yet.

7

Don’t forget to update the Compute module firmware and to set the required parameters otherwise no joy (See below).

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1 Like
8

Thank you. I’ve seen that in the long thread for Bookworm. This might be a stupid question, but how do I do this if the uconsole won’t boot? I’ve got the hdmi cable and a new SD card arriving today. Is there anything else I might need to help get this working?

9

The fastest way to solve this, it to use a carrier board for the compute module, it will provide you standard hdmi output and usb connectivity for an external keyboard. Then, you’ll be able to boot a regular raspberry pi 5 distro and update the firmware of the CM5 from the command line.

10

Thank you. I’ll get myself a carrier board.

11

I got the HDMI cable and a new SD card. Please see screenshot below. I guess this is the known problem and needs the compute module firmware update?

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12

Try using a smaller SD card for the first boot then apply the eeprom changes in the first post of the bookworm post.

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13

Thank you for the suggestion Rex. Both cards I have tried have been 32gb. I don’t have any others, but have now ordered a carrier board. Hopefully it a day or two it should be working.

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14

A 32 GiB SD (properly SDHC) card is basically bog-standard as SD cards go. If a 32 GiB SD card doesn’t work something else has to be wrong.

15

It’s alive! Thank you all for your help!

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3 Likes
16

So, tell us a bit more. :slight_smile: What did you do?

17

The carrier board was the solution. I used one of my sd cards with normal raspberry pi os. Updated the firmware as advised. As soon as I put the CM5 back in the Uconsole it booted first time and no issues since. Now I just need to work out why I bought it apart from wanting it? I guess I’m not the only to buy first work out why later. Thanks again for the help.

2 Likes
18

Glad for you. In fact, I was in the same situation and I ended up with the same solution :slight_smile:

1 Like
19

pico-8/tic-80 game coding on real device is quite fun

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20

Over the last few months I have been trying out some tic-80 games online, there are some really good ones, but it does take a bit of searching to find them. I think my uconsole will be part learning (Linux, etc) and part just playing games. Maybe try and learn some radio things.

1 Like