RasPi CM4 Announced!

[illogicGate]

I'd be much more ecstatic to keep the GBA form factor for its size and retro aesthetic, rather than sacrifice both to make a Switch knockoff. Especially considering Switches can already be used to emulate games and are still currently found on store shelves. That strikes me as redundant, and therefore imo cost inefficient when you might as well just buy the switch if thats what you want.

As would I, I very much prefer the GBA style and size, especially when I splashed out for the BoxyPixel aluminum case


As for the Pi 4 data, I am officially home after a massively "Double U - Tee - Eff" couple months, I managed to drag through and I'm slowly scraping some free time from the bottom of the turd barrel that has been my recent life.

I realized reading my first post on this subject I mispoke; I said "CPU" when I meant "GPU". The CPU's in the Pi CM4 are... well, if you're counting every mA, they're mot trivial, but full whack, they pull about 250mA for a total. That's all 4 at 100%.

Not inconsequential, and dialing them back to 1000Mhz and fiddling with the goofy defaults of the clock governor does yield some good power savings, about 75ma(ish) but compared to the GPU and it's subcores, it's not basically a drop in the bucket. Even a smaller drop so if you're referring to the full RPi 4 and that PIG of a USB 3 controller.

Aside from USB in general being hungry, I was surprised to discover the VideoCore VI is an absolute power pig by default. Clocking that down (especially because in a "mobile" mode since we're running a lower res screen, just make sure the GPU PLL is fast enough to at least handle the pixel clock) and disabling whatever we can internally, like hevc, the yielded average power draw dropping from about 1.5amps to around 700ma; less than half.

I haven't had time yet to do any solid benchmarks, but the new VideoCore VI is... meh, I'd guesstimate 30%ish faster than the IV and even halving the clock it still "feels" pretty cracky even though...

I dunno yet, I have not much conclusive and I'll pull the settings and other notes and pop them up here when I get a bit more time and sort things out around the house, already spent too much time slacking on this post lol!

[smoscar01]

How much voltage is the freeplay board supplying to the cm3's vbat?

If someone was to correctly connect all the pins of a cm4 lite into the freeplay board pins, would that someone need to boost the vbat voltage up to 5v? oO

[Flavor]

How much voltage is the freeplay board supplying to the cm3's vbat?

If someone was to correctly connect all the pins of a cm4 lite into the freeplay board pins, would that someone need to boost the vbat voltage up to 5v? oO

The Freeplay CM3 supplies 5V to the Pi CM3.  IIRC offhand, it also supplies other voltages.

IIRC offhand, the CM4 only needs 5V and it has its own regulators to supply the other voltages.

It's possible to use an adapter board to connect a CM4 to the Freeplay CM3.

[smoscar01]

Thanks, Flavor!

I know that the cm3 can work with lower voltages so I wanted to ask before pulling out the multimeter.

When you say it is possible to use an adapter board, do you mean even the OS image would work?, Still under the assumption that it would be a CM4 lite (no wifi & no eMMC)

[Flavor]

Thanks, Flavor!

I know that the cm3 can work with lower voltages so I wanted to ask before pulling out the multimeter.

When you say it is possible to use an adapter board, do you mean even the OS image would work?, Still under the assumption that it would be a CM4 lite (no wifi & no eMMC)

I think you could use WiFi, but no eMMC. I think that the OS image would work. I don't recall offhand.

[smoscar01]

I must have a bad connection here but, what was the meaning of the status LED going red instead of green when trying to turn on?

[smoscar01]

It seems like whatever makes the Freeplay keep the power on after holding the trigger for 5 seconds isn't working.

I'd assume there's something similar to shutdown-daemon that communicates with the freeplay board to keep sending power to the Pi once it boots up but I can't seem to find anything.

Am I missing something? Perhaps some GPIO pin needs to be flipped?

[Flavor]

smoscar01,

I feel like I'm not following exactly what you're trying to do or what the problem is. Could you maybe make a new thread and put some background info to start?

This thread is titled "RasPi CM4 Announced!" and I don't think that really applies to what you're experiencing, so maybe that's where some of the confusion is.