Has anyone tried the pin compatible OrangePi CM4 modules and figured out how to build an OS for them or what additional tools are required for the uConsole or DevTerm to a standard OS build?
Why? Because they are half the price of the RasPi CM4.
[edit] spoke before looking OP CM4 is a Rockchip board, but still interesting. The Allwinner are in the Zero 2W I was looking at to get more ram than RasPi will give us.
I’m still not certain the AllWinner chip is really to be trusted, I had an AllWinner powered tablet years ago and it was AllLoser, so I’m cautious.
I was just looking on Amazon for some OrangePi stuff and saw the OP CM4 8gb with 64emmc and carrier board for $65, roughly half what I paid for my RasPi CM4 lite board.
Same can be told for cheap-ass Huawei tablets vs beefy smartphones. It’s not ‘ByeSilicon’, it’s just another market for the maker.
Having this sorted out i’d be rather confident about Orange PI’s capabilities. It might be slower than RPI obviously but other than that, as long as it is compatibile with CM4’s connectors, it will work and at least won’t catch fire.
I’ve successfully got UART with pizero (using adapter of course) and ultimately i want to plug Milk-v’s Mars CM4.
You have to keep in mind that anything besides offical cores and community-supported SBCs won’t work out of the box.
First problem is display because it’s actually driven by kernel and not by any other earlier boot stage. Keyboard and trackball on the other hand will work OOTB because they’re USB devices.
Onboard WIFI also needs to be anyhow included into target device’s FDT, same goes for PM chip.
So to summarize: it will work but unless you’re willing to do some hacking or have truckload of money to pay someone to adapt it to the CPi’s mainboard you won’t get experience that you’re looking for.
Don’t know where you are but here in poland i’ve bought 2nd hand 4GB CM4 Lite (41.04000) for circa $40. 4GBs seems to more than enough for basic web needs, some dev stuff in vi or kicad, lack of eMMC means zero chance of bricking device due to worn out storage and with class 10 µSD device is pretty snappy already.
So you do you but IMHO there’s no need to go overboard with god knows what specs. At the end of the day it’s good device for on the go tasks and given that scenario you rather not run kubernetes cluster
I haven’t looked at second hand CM4 yet, kind of concerned about how people treat them because a lot of them get overclocked until they lock up, and that can’t be good for them long term. The 4gb version is around $70 usd new here, when you can find them. The 4gb version also seems to be the most popular and hardest to keep in stock.
I would guess that the OP CM4 would be a combination or A04 and OP CM4 options in the kernel, since I think the a04 uses that same processor. The a06 does use 4 of the cores that the OP CM4 uses, so it might not be a big change, but currently more change than I’m capable of making.
Well, these aren’t 13th gen Intel chips or GPUs to suffer anyhow ;p. Also - concept of overclocking SBC isn’t as straightforward as PC because SBCs are often “optimally tuned” giving best clock per Watt ratio. Gains above this sweet spot are highly non linear giving 10 °C boost for 4% performance gain for example. But don’t trust me, there are way smarter guys than me
IMHO very unlikely and my own experience of buying used IT stuff proves my point - but i am obviously biased ;d
OP CM4 would be a combination or A04 and OP CM4 options in the kernel, since I think the a04 uses that same processor
Don’t want to be the rain on your parade but in world of System on Chip it’s not as simple as “oh, the same cpu, yaay”.
Simple example: Clockwork’s R01 core with Allwinner D1 (Xuantie C906 CPU core) and Lichee RV Dock with the same Allwinner D1 SoC and same C906. µSD card from one won’t boot the other due to different “settings” (oversimplification) of these chips as well as different onboard peripherals plugged into different “ports”. Even if they’d used the same wifi chip for example, on one board it’s plugged into pins 30-34 acting as SDIO, on another it’s plugged into 20-24 acting as SDIO as well. And while you technically can “correct” this via device tree shenanigans there might be little hardware implementation details (like order of signals on these pins) which you have to be aware of and also reflect in config (or in hardware by running some wires here and these).
CPI’s R01 and LP’s RV Dock are actually easier cases to solve due to physically the same SoC is being used. Now consider A04 where Cortex-A53 is baked into different set of internal H6’s SoC peripherals than Cortex-A53 from Rockchip’s whatever number there is.
And while either CM-style connectors and SODIMM-200 connectors stanardize some things like where goes power, ground and HDMI, rest is totally up to solution’s architect.
Not saying it’s impossible to squeeze OPi into CPi, just forget about “easy drop-in replacement”.
Surely having OPi with carrier board would significantly sped up process of “porting”, it’s just work that some pioneer has to do in order for community to benefit in the future.
