HackerGadgets' uConsole Upgrade Kit - adding NVME SSD(PCIe), RJ45 Ethernet and USB 3.0 to your Uconsole

uConsole
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840

Did you check your eeprom? Can you post the configuration?

841

Having a 50ohm load sma cap can be very useful in preventing this.

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842

Yes thatā€™s the exact one I bought. Does the drive get recognized when booting from the SD?

843

No, the PWR light comes on but the ACT light doesnā€™t. lsblk comes up empty and dmesg shows no sign of it.

I was uncertain about buying the drive because itā€™s been implied that Gen 4 drives donā€™t work in this board, but looking around I donā€™t see any proof of that. Iā€™ll slot it back in and poke around some more.

844

Do you have the ribbon cable the right way and fully inserted?

845

Here are pictures of my internal configuration so you can see for yourself. They are a little blurry as itā€™s morning here and the daylight isnā€™t yet coming through the window but I hope there is enough fidelity that you can verify everything is installed correctly.

uConsole rear interior
uConsole rear interior1920Ɨ1440 392 KB

NVMe drive close-up, upside-down to make the label more legible
NVMe drive close-up, upside-down to make the label more legible1920Ɨ1440 307 KB

PCI ribbon close-up, upside-down because my camera decided it must be
PCI ribbon close-up, upside-down because my camera decided it must be1920Ɨ1440 317 KB

846

Hi bored99, thank you for your reply. Yes I checked it. Here is the EEPROM configuration:

[all]

BOOT_UART=1

POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=1

BOOT_ORDER=0xf641

NET_INSTALL_AT_POWER_ON=1

SD_BOOT_MAX_RETRIES=2

SD_QUIRKS=1

847

Got home from a work trip to find my HG package waiting for me today. Ripped my uconsole apart, opened up the AIO package, realized I forgot to order the antenna mounting kitā€¦. The waiting game starts over.

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848

Looks good to me. You havenā€™t had any drive get recognized? Iā€™ve tried 4 drives and only one wouldnā€™t boot but it showed up if I used it booted from SD. The rest all booted. Maybe something defective?

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849

It will be fine if you donā€™t enable the Meshtastic for the LoRa part. For the GPS and SDR, whether to connect the antennas is fine. Because they donā€™t transmit.

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850

If you bought the 9858110 LiPo battery, it will fit with the AC1200 wifi card.

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851

There may be some reasons that the PCIe didnā€™t work.

  1. The ribbon is faulty, the tracks was broken. You can try to flip it. Or pushing it when booting to see if there is any difference.
  2. The NVMe battery board was faulty.
  3. Iā€™ve encountered a similar problem. I have four used CM4s, and one of them canā€™t use PCIe. I suspect it might be due to the CM4ā€™s EEPROM settings or a hardware malfunction. Do you have other I/O boards to test the CM4ā€™s functionality?

For reason 1/2, we can arrange a replacement.

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852

Thanks very much for the advice. Since finances are good and Iā€™ve been daily driving my uConsole for 2 years now according to ls -l /srv/http (which is a directory which came with the OS image I flashed), Iā€™m using your troubleshooting tips as an excuse to order a CM5 16GB RAM module to replace my CM4 4GB. Itā€™ll be here in March and Iā€™ll check back in then to update on whether or not thatā€™s fixed it (or sooner if I drop my console in a certain enough way to where everything works).

853

You sure the sdr has transmit capabilities? The lora radio can transmit.

855

Have you tried running hwclock(8) as root?

$ hwclock
hwclock: Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method.
hwclock: Use the --verbose option to see the details of our search for an access method.
$ su -
# hwclock
2026-02-24 09:32:14.946799-07:00
856

Yes my mistake, just needed sudoā€¦ Yet the message re setting system clock to 1970 was a little concerningā€¦

20260224_162713
20260224_1627131920Ɨ602 501 KB

This is better thoughā€¦

20260224_163934
20260224_1639341920Ɨ1114 863 KB

857

No thatā€™s a typo, it should be Lora

858

At last the aerials and 7 mount board have arrived @vileer. Yet a little confusion. The GPS/GNSS and Lora antennas are obvious, the long antenna is SDRā€¦ But why 2 ā€˜wifiā€™ and 3 ā€˜bluetoothā€™ when theyā€™re usually the same internally ?.

Any advantage to which position theyā€™re fitted ?. Currently I have three spaced apart from each other by 2 blanks yet thinking of moving to help clear the power switch and leave one space at the side socket end so all 1 blank apart.

Wifi still defaulting to the slow 24Mb/s even though connected to one of your antennas so will try the antenna switch command.

20260224_174043
20260224_1740431920Ɨ1012 597 KB

UPDATEā€¦
Edited config.txt. Already had ant2 selected giving -39dbm (same as Raspberry aerial mounted off the case !!). Ant1 gave -46dbm so 5x weaker signal as expected.

859

I did the same, thought Iā€™d baught the whole AIOv2 kit from AliExpress after getting full upgrade kit from Hackergadgetsā€¦ Antennae here but still missing the side socket for SDR whip :roll_eyes:

860

there are:

  • 1 SDR
  • 1 GPS
  • 1 LORA
  • 2 Bluetooth
  • 3 Wifi

If you have the internal usb c wifi card, it has 2 bluetooth and 2 wifi antenna u.fl connections as well as the 1 u.fl connection for your rpi.

I see you got 3 bluetooth antennas instead of 2, i am guessing that is a mistake.

As to why they are different? Just speculation but bluetooth is on 2.4 ghz while wifi can be 2.4 or 5 (or 6 now, but not sure if the wifi cards support 6E) so potentially the insides are different for dual band antennas vs just a 2.4ghz antenna

Oh and for position, GPS needs to be antenna 6 or 7, there is a little extra space between 6 and 7 and the GPS antenna is chonky. I ran in to that trying to wire mine up

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