Today I was browsing YouTube and came across this video from Jeff Geerling. The SBC he is showing is the Milk-V Mars CM which is pin compatible with the RPI CM4 module.
Just if we can get the module it looks like a nice alternative for the uConsole and maybe even the DevTerm.
I know a lot of work needs to be done to get this module working in the uConsole but it seems to have some nicer specs than the R1.
What are you thinking, will it be possible the get this module working in the uConsole? Would it be a way to get aroud the long waiting times for a RPI CM4? Yes also this is currently unavailable but still.
I have a Mars CM (8GB, WiFi, SDIO) on order from ARace. Regardless of Jeff G’s experience, I’m not certain whether Milk-V is actually shipping them because ARace has slipped shipping twice and is “sold out”.
Milk-V/ARace shipped some eMMC units. One of which got to Jeff Geerling. I don’t believe any SDIO units shipped. I cancelled my order, but will reorder when/if the correct product becomes available.
RISC-V for general purpose use is still somewhat early days. That situation will change, particularly in the PRC.
I’m not afraid to compile software and alter it to a different cpu. It will take some time but it is not impossible. I hope the uconsole will not take too long to ship.
Hiya, did you get anywhere with this? My uConsole’s finally turned up so was going to start looking at feasability of putting the Mars module into it so thought I should check before starting on the schematics!
I started looking at getting Ubuntu 24.04 to run on the Mars CM a couple of days ago.To familiarize myself with the tool chain, I tried to use Milk-V’s SDK to build the original SD card image. It didn’t work because some source files are no longer available for download.
Frankly, I don’t know how viable this will be. ARace never seems to have much by way of Milk-V Mars products in stock and doesn’t restock. There is negligible activity in Milk-V’s community related to Mars.
Hm, I thought the SDK stuff was on GitHub? From what I could tell, the lack of update isn’t likely that much of a biggie as it’s just a fork of StarFive’s JH repo. I’ll have a look at the weekend and see if I can build if I get time.
For me the main up front job is to check the electrical side of things - whilst compatible pin out I’d like to check what goes where to make sure there’s no likelihood of damaging either the Mars CM or the CPi as both are likely to be a pain to find replacements for!
Yes. I “git cloned” it from the GitHub repo (GitHub - milkv-mars/mars-buildroot-sdk: Milk-V Mars Official buildroot SDK) per the README after unsuccessfully trying to boot the Ubuntu 24.04 image for the VisionFive2 from an SD card. Likely the Mars CM has a somewhat different u-boot and device tree than the VisionFive2.
Update: Decide to simplify by just downloading the appropriate mars-cm-sdcard branch from GitHub as a ZIP file.
make -j$(nproc) finishes (yes, this takes hours).
Attempting to run make buildroot_rootfs -j$(nproc) fails on a missing file. The version specified is no longer available at the author’s web site for download. It is on GitHub, but I couldn’t figure out how to download it with a consistent sha256sum hash. Decided to just bump the version of libkcapi from 1.3.1 to 1.5.0, download the file, compute the hash, and update the appropriate files under buildroot/package/libkcapi.
Now, I have a new and different failure to diagnose …
Thanks. I didn’t spend enough time digging into the chromox.de site.
Either way, I was able to build the SD card image and boot the Mars CM off it on an RPi-compatible carrier. According to someone that corresponded with Alex at ClockworkPi, their engineering team said the Mars CM/JH7110 doesn’t have a DSP to drive the display. Might need to look at the R-01 source to confirm.
This is what I see on their site, perhaps the DSP they have isn’t powerful enough or compatible with the display in the uConsole? Seems strange the manufacturer site itself would advertise the DSP and HDMI as well as codecs directly relevant to that purpose only for Clockwork to say it doesn’t have one.
