New Clockwork device: The DevTerm

i bet we could get an expansion board to do (at least) most of that

Well,

  • “USB OUT” as “being host” is already there as far as I can see, there are even 3 USB** port on the device.
  • LAN and Serial as you say you can use USB device for that.
  • VGA-IN. I don’t want to be harsh, but I doubt anyone would work on that, I highly recommend to find an existing solution, or make it yourself. Highly doubtful CPi will make one.

Edit:
** There are more than 3 USB port on the DevTerm, but two are not host.
So on the right side there is 2 USB-A port
On the left side, there is 1 USB-A, one USB-C for charging (and more, depends on the compute module installed)
There is a micro-B socket on the keyboard, but that’s for programming it, and another micro-B on the expansion card to have access to the compute module serial port, but I don’t they are not accessible without having the device open)

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Well, matching the specs, I guess the A04 is H6, while A06 is RK3399. These are widely used in other SBCs as well.
Giving that RK3399 has 4-lane PCI-E… Maybe we can even plug in an NVME SSD here? Just kidding, haha.

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I can’t wait to see some videos about it! :grin:

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Will it be compatible with the cm4?

Check here Will it support Raspberry Pi CM4?

This device seems great, but I hate the fragility of TF/SD cards.

Does the DevTerm have eMMC storage?

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Are you referring to how easily SD cards get corrupted when used as a boot disk? That’s been the bane of my existence since I started using single board computers.
As far as I’m aware TF card is just another name for micro SD card.

Yeah doesn’t the CM3 boot off onboard eMMC?

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That’s right.

And as far as I have briefly googled, unfortunately "Raspberry PI CM3+ LITE " does not seem to have eMMC storage…

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Ah there we go. Well I guess we can backup the card every few days with another device. Every time I lose an SD I’m never sure if it’s safe to reuse. If the flash memory is damaged or if it was just the data that’s damaged.

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I got excited seeing the pci-e looking interface, but it looks like it’s just in form alone.

Whether or not it’s possible to boot off of USB is another thing. It’s what I’ve got my rpi4 set up to do, booting off of a SSD.

On a side note, this statement just got my attention:

Not sure when this was added, or if it was there from the beginning, but it certainly is allowing the devterm live up to the modular expansion ethos.

Hopefully this means that clockwork can make anything happen eventually; possibly even their own SBC with an integrated storage solution. Or alternative expansion cards with NVME headers.

X86. Now that will be interesting!

Notice: We are also evaluating and testing more CPU architectures, such as FPGA+ARM, RISC-V, and even X86 architecture, and look forward to bringing you more exciting Cores shortly.

I also saw this description.

However, it is going to be a long time before additional core modules are released.

It would be nice if they would release information on the storage of the A04 and A06, but they probably don’t have eMMC storage on them either.

After all, if I want a internal boot disk other than a TF card in my DevTerm, I’ll have to get a Pi3 CM variant with eMMC on it?

The lack of eMMC is probably more due to a wrong design choice from the Raspberry Foundation (if that was the only one…) where the external SD slot from the module cannot be used if the module have an eMMC embedded.

I think that CPi decided to honour that, so if their modules were to include an eMMC, the SD slot would not be useable.

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I also like the non eMMC, once they die you can´t replace them without special tools, but SD cards are readily available

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eMMC are not the most difficult BGA chip to replace, but yeah, can’'t do that with a soldering iron for sure

and flashing a Raspberry Pi Compute Module eMMC is not the simplest thing:

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Hmm. eMMC-equipped Pi3 CM+ can not be used at the same time as TF card, which is the first time I knew. That’s certainly a problem.

I’ve never had an internal storage failure in my smartphone or other devices, so I don’t really expect a situation where the eMMC fails and has to be replaced.

The price of a high endurance, high speed TF card is not that different from the Pi3 CM+ itself, so if it were to break, I would replace the core module itself.

I feel that writing an OS image to an eMMC is not as stressful as being scared of when the TF card will fail.

But I understand that it’s difficult for the average user.
So maybe they have no choice but to make the TF card their first choice for a boot disk.

Ah…
Does the fact that DevTerm has a TF card slot mean that I need a Compute Module IO board instead of DevTerm to write an OS image to eMMC?

Ugh.

Hey @yong, do you know by any chance what software was used for that image os the screen:

?

There are some people who are interested in the DevTerm as a “distraction free” writing tool, and this software seems to be one of these

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That might be the main reason or maybe not.

yeah, you definitely got the point of

And I used html css js (a chrome app) to make this software to show this point
The function of this software is not perfect enough, if I can complete it smoothly,
I will put it on github as soon as possible

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