Most of the connectors are common-ish parts that are available from multiple brands. Which ones have been challenging to source?
So far, the battery and audio connector are challenging to source.
Any ideas?
For USB-C connectors, I guess we can find suitable alternatives – and the rest can be found at Mouser / DigiKey.
We’re looking around for alternative parts, though our factory’s 2nd source parts are also from obscure brands. Worst case we may need to get a reel of each to our office and then send strips of parts on request.
Thanks! I’d be happy to purchase some strips
It would actually be fantastic if the Framework Marketplace offered a “DIY Creator’s Kit” with strips of all connectors and empty expansion cards
In a future iteration, perhaps there could even be breakout boards for each connector.
We actually do have Expansion Card packs at our TW warehouse that we ship to TW and AU: Framework | Fix Consumer Electronics
Rift from Discord did some research and posted [this].(Discord)
Basically stating that we won’t have enough bandwidth
Oh, and I just returned from my holiday and had the chance to test HDMI to eDP.
This image is being output by a Raspberry PI Compute Module 5 and displayed on the Framework 2.8k display using an HDMI to eDP board
As Devran mentioned:
2256 × 1504 × 60 = 203.6 million pixels per second (not including blanking, which is data that takes up pixel bandwidth but isn’t used for display data)
So MIPI is insufficient to drive Framework’s normal display at full capabilities (not to mention the 2.8k display).
Realistically it may be fine to be limited to reducing the resolution or refresh rate (I doubt that people would use a CM5 mainboard for gaming or other resolution/refresh rate intensive things), but since HDMI is available without these limitations then might as well use that.
Just found this because i was thinking of doing the same. You guys beat me to it.
An idea i Just had: delidding the cm5 might give you another mm or so for the cooling solution. Not much, but maybe enough?
Just wanted to point out that, aside of Raspberry Pi, there are many alternatives that are somewhat compatible, including RK3588 based ones which is, reportedly, twice as performant as CM5.
I saw you comented in the other thread linking to a thread linking to here. The RK3588 will make for a better SoC, but this project with the CM5 should be very helpful for making an RK3588 version.
The rk3588 at least hardware wise is probably going to be easier as it allready has stuff like edp on board that a cm5 platform would have to externally supply
Thanks for the input!
A RK3588 carrier board might be way easier to accomplish than a Raspberry Pi CM5 board.
One of the reasons is the lack of DisplayPort on the CM5.
The LT6711A/B chip helps, but it requires some reverse-engineering of existing adapters, since the documents are only available with an NDA with Lontium. I was able to get some chips, but they are not easy to source and currently I can’t do it open source.
The RK3588 based board on the other hand comes with DisplayPort.
I’ll check what documents they provide, what it’s like to run Ubuntu on those chips and if I want to pivot the project to the RK3588 until we have a better solution for the Raspberry Pi based boards.
Hardware wise the rk3588 is the better platform pretty much across the board, the software support is likely a lot better on the pi though. Then again some of the stuff I had issues getting running with the 3588 don’t even exist on the pi5.
Stuff like having a really sweet video hw encoder/decoder that the pi5 doesn’t have could be a real advantage for laptop use if you can make the driver work, I only got it to run using a custom build of ffmpeg but the thing transcodes (so hw decode h264 and hw encode h265) 1080p h264 to h265 at around 600fps for under 5w (above idle) which is pretty impressive especially given the 7840u used to draw around that much to just decode 1080p60 not that long ago.
Last time I tried it out for “desktop” use was almost a year ago though so it may have gotten better though. I also never touched a pi5 but all my previous pis had amazing software support which made the usually worse than the rest of the market hw not that big an issue.
There was a video on a laptop with an RK3588 compute module.
If you guys indeed go the RK3588 route, this might help.
I think for this application, a module with a full RK3588 would be better than an RK3588s as it has more bandwidth over PCIe. Could be better for storage and USB peripherals.
For sure. However, to this day I only saw 3588 in a Jetson Nano SO-DIMM form factor (from Turing Pi) and other totally incompatible with Raspberry CM modules.
I wrote about them in the coop thread.
Just in case, here’s the IO spec for the RK1 module.
Its what the Person in the Video used. However, i dont think Its compatible with an cm5, as the cm5 only has 2 connector on the bottom (afaik), not 4.
Also,id you want to use the additional IO, you would have to make a fitting Board anyway.
Yes, of course. However, I specifically mentioned compute modules compatible (or mostly compatible) with Raspberry CM format.
tldr: it is complicated.
First of all there are official RK1 distributions available.
Also there is (was) an Ubuntu Rockchip distribution by Joshua Riek. Unfortunately, as it often happens, all his heroic efforts were largely ignored by corps including the Rockchip manufacturer. In the end he apparently abandoned the project for the time being.