I don’t understand; if we power down (cutting power or GND trace) or remove the WiFi module from the MB, the GPIOs on the 40-pin GPIO header are going to be free to use, no?
You mean balls?
It’s nice / comforting to see though, that the CM4 has a nice antenna connector just like the Clockworkpi MB, so you can still connect antennas (maybe even the included one) and get good reception.
It may be worth breaking that connector out to the shell’s outside to connect a beefier antenna via SMB, though. Applies to the MB WiFi, as well, of course.
Another question, referring back to the original post: can’t you use the “52 Pins extension module interface”? Is there anything preventing you to use that for the RTC?
From what I can tell here, GPIO28 through GPIO44 are free to use on the PCIe slot, right?
And if you do remove the WiFi chip, you get full 19 GPIOs free on the “40-pin GPIO header”:
If you end up needing the MB WiFi module after all, you can get a second MB for just $39. Then you’d have one WiFi MB and one non-WiFi with 19 free GPIOs.
Another idea: if you populate the mini PCIe slot for a 4G module and don’t want to lose MB WiFi, you do get another audio port on that 4G module. So you could remove the MB audio and get 4 GPIOs, in case that’s enough for you:
