M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/m2-on-raspberry-pi-tofu-compute-module-4-carrier-board

by geerlingguy • 5 years ago

294 201 5 years ago

jeffgeerling.com

cbm-vic-20• 5 years ago

That's a nice product shot, Jeff.

leoc• 5 years ago

He actually just released a video about that photo! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pinYVZxBF2Q

jpmontez2• 5 years ago

One extra step that's missing from the blog post's photos is to take the focus stacked result and replace the background with pure white.

You can notice the inconsistent white balance throughout the otherwise nice product shots.

u678u3• 5 years ago

If rpis had m2 built into the card it would be the premier ARM platform right now. Its so fast many people could use as their main desktop.

dokem2• 5 years ago

Raspi really needs to come out with a 'pro' model. I guess they kind of did with the compute module but raspi's are used a lot professionally in industry, probably more than they are used as a tool to get kids and developing nations into computer science.

barkingcat• 5 years ago

Raspi doesn't "need" to do this at all.

The main goal of their foundation is to support education, not to satisfy a "pro" market.

Just because people use them as tools doesn't mean they change the charter of their non-profit foundation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation

I'd say the other way around: the "pro" people should go find another board to use, of which there are many.

mdtusz• 5 years ago

The "pro" models exist - they're just not Pi's.

Industrial IoT does use Pi's a fair bit, but this is IMO a misuse (I'm guilty of it too) and in the long term can be a disservice. The Pi is a great platform for a go-to-market product, but they have many shortcomings that for most use-cases in industry are showstoppers (most notably, Pi's will often fail without warning, or their "disk" will become corrupt). More expensive industrial products are out there and typically are more robust, and designed in a way that they can be more seamlessly integrated to a product - once the upfront costs are paid (both in development and dollars).

What really needs to happen is other manufacturers making the development on their hardware more straightforwards. What the Pi foundation has done is shown that companies and developers want to just be able to run a widely available and minimal linux distribution and not have to muck about with proprietary and poorly documented SDK's behind closed doors.

intrasight• 5 years ago

Really hoping that the RPi 5 has this. Combined with presumably improved overall performance, it would be a game changer. I don't think it makes sense to fork a 'pro model'. Probably cheaper overall to just add it the regular model.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 5 years ago

That and preferably default UEFI; you can already use a third-party version on whatever your boot device is, but sticking in a tiny bit of on-board storage and flashing UEFI firmware at the factory would let us finally not need pi-specific images

inetknght2• 5 years ago

flashing UEFI firmware at the factory

The factory can already flash the pi firmware. What does UEFI solve here?

bullen18• 5 years ago

They are the premier ARM platform anyway, but the real problem is that a 5W CPU is too slow to work with, unless you write everything minimalistic from scratch!

posterboy4• 5 years ago

Millions of smartphones running on ARM would disagree.

ClumsyPilot3• 5 years ago

Whats this obsession with ysing raspberri pi for work? It makes no sense, PI doesnt ecen have proper cooling. Get an Intel Nuc if you want a miniature PC, at least it has all the ports, disks, etc.

jandrese2• 5 years ago

It really depends what you're doing. The 5W CPU in the Pi is more than adequate for a lot of tasks. Heck, I wrote papers using Libreoffice on the original model Pi.

The Pi4 is powerful enough to run web browsers comfortably, which was a problem on the original Pi. Office programs run no sweat. You can even do light development work.

TaylorAlexander3• 5 years ago

It’s got plenty of speed to drive my autonomous GPS guided solar powered open source farm robot!

I guess I did write the code from scratch, but it’s just Python, nothing fancy.

https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...

nimbius2• 5 years ago

it would still depend on the firmware. people forget that Raspberry Pi is controlled entirely by the proprietary ThreadX RTOS which acts as a hypervisor and allows Linux to run as a virtual "guest" on the pi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX

and for the uninitiated, ThreadX RTOS is not the same as Intel's ME. ThreadX is a critical dependency to run any OS on PI. without Intel ME, you can still run an OS.

this virtualization model is still largely why Pi performance is complete garbage compared to pine64, banana pi, beagle, and others.

monocasa4• 5 years ago

I think you're mistaken about several pieces.

First off ThreadX on the video core does not run as a hypervisor.

It also does not impede perf on the ARM core.

Additionally, yes, Intel ME is required to run anything on Intel cores. Without it the main cores don't start.

tyingq3• 5 years ago

I thought ThreadX only ran on the VideoCore, basically to bootstrap Linux on the ARM processer. The only performance that might affect is elapsed time to boot.

That doesn't sound like virtualization to me. Do have more info?

justin663• 5 years ago

ThreadX does not do what you think it does. On the Pi it acts as the first stage bootloader, it is not used as a hypervisor.

What you've written above is not even remotely true. You've been corrected on this before, you ought to stop spreading kooky misinformation.

mikece• 5 years ago

I reading an article recently that if Microsoft really wanted to make Windows on ARM64 take off they should sell a "developer machine" like a Raspberry Pi 4 with Windows ARM64 preinstalled for $199. If such a machine had an M.2 drive as an option (microSD or eMMC default) I suspect it would be a huge hit.

mike_d• 5 years ago

They don't sell them directly, but Microsoft maintains a list of boards you should buy (probably as close to "Windows Certified" as you'll get for small batch boards).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot-core/tutorials/...

diarrhea• 5 years ago

Wait, a 4 times markup for having Windows installed? That doesn't compute.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 5 years ago

Well, Windows 10 IoT will run on a pi 3, but I don't recommend it. It works well enough, but it seems to have been abandoned by Microsoft, so it's doubtful there will be any updates.

passthejoe• 5 years ago

Agree. The main issue with using rpi as a desktop is the slow disk i/o. M2 on the board is what RPi 5 needs.

jbverschoor• 5 years ago

But for an OS you don't need it as the RPI CM3/CM4 can already be equipped with eMMC. It's only useful if you really need more than 32GB.

https://www.cytron.io/p-raspberry-pi-cm4-with-wireless-pick-...

https://www.cytron.io/p-raspberry-pi-cm4-without-wireless-pi...

jacob019• 5 years ago

Or if you want something more performant and reliable than eMMC.

mbreese• 5 years ago

Exactly. There are so many use cases for the RPi that very often people wonder why you’d ever want it to support X. When the people that want feature X have a completely different use case in mind.

Embedded people don’t need faster IO, so why use it? If you want to use it as a desktop, you might not need eMMC, but an M.2 slot would be critical.

It’s really an interesting ecosystem of uses.

cptskippy2• 5 years ago

Does the eMMC get corrupted as easily as the SD cards do?

bityard• 5 years ago

SD cards don't get corrupted easily, if you buy the right ones. (Unfortunately most people don't, and end up blaming the Pi for being unreliable.)

monocasa4• 5 years ago

Not nearly as much. eMMC is designed for these use cases.

phamilton42• 5 years ago

Do you know if anyone makes a back-plane/carrier board (not sure on what the actual name is) for hosting/holding multiple CM4? I found a few for the CM3 but they seem a bit cost prohibitive.

Ductapemaster• 5 years ago

Not affiliated with the project in any way, but I do know this one is launching soon! https://turingpi.com/

Edit: Spoke too soon, only works with the CM3/3+. Leaving it here in case anyone is interested.

wmf2• 5 years ago

https://turingpi.com/turing-pi-2-announcement/

geerlingguy13• 5 years ago

There is at least one other multiple-CM4 board 'in development', though I can't share any detail, other than keep an eye on this page for when it might appear: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm

dylan604• 5 years ago

This is exciting. Drive performance and the discussed clunkiness of external drive connections have been something of a chore. This makes me excited to pick up some projects again

megous4• 5 years ago

Looks like pci-e is not much better here than USB 3.0 attached SSD. Just tried with 250GB samsung evo + JMS578 and that gives:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null iflag=direct bs=16M count=100 1677721600 bytes (1.7 GB, 1.6 GiB) copied, 4.17517 s, 402 MB/s

And that's also going over a USB3.0 HUB in addition.

vardump• 5 years ago

You seemed to miss random access I/O speed (4K reads/writes), which usually matters quite a bit more than sequential access.

Random reads almost doubled even with a cheap SSD and random reads nearly tripled.

megous4• 5 years ago

There's no test methodology, so it doesn't matter. Is it measuring raw block device I/O or filesystem I/O, which filesystem, is it submitting I/O requests sequentially or in batches so that the OS can queue multiple requests at once, etc. etc. There's nothing to compare against, so I didn't even try running the test.

USB 3.0 has no trouble with high random I/O either, anyway.

Article is comparing different SSDs, not just different interfaces, so random 4k block read speeds differ. But it doesn't show what's possible with good USB 3.0 SATA controller and good SSD.

I just wanted to point out that speed difference doesn't have to have much to do with the interfaces themselves.

kabdib• 5 years ago

I'm curious about CPU usage for the two adapter types. My experience (quite a while back...) was that USB required a bunch more involvement from the CPU than the simpler block-oriented drivers.

(Hubs don't affect things much; on the order of tens of nanoseconds of additional latency when things line up properly).

geerlingguy13• 5 years ago

Overclocking the Pi's CPU _does_ increase the speed of some operations, for sure. For example, in my network tests, I can get 1.9 Gbps on a 2.5G adapter with MTU 1500 at 1.5 GHz (default Pi 4 clock), or 2.2 Gbps at 2.0 GHz.

Using MTU 9000 lets me get over 2.3G on that adapter.

megous4• 5 years ago

For USB 3.0 at 43k IOPS load - https://megous.com/dl/tmp/caf84c98b0a67db8.png

It's probably not yet limited by the CPU, but close. This is much slower (than RPi4) Orange Pi 3.

geerlingguy13• 5 years ago

Another question: is that MB/sec or MiB/sec? Note that the 400 MiB/sec benchmark is 420 MB/sec.

Not a _huge_ difference, but it is a difference ;)

The other major difference is anything non-sequential, especially things like 4K reads. This is where the PCIe->USB->SATA (or PCIe->USB->NVMe) adapter overhead really slows things down.

Try out my benchmark script and see how it fares: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-dramble/blob/mas...

(Thank the marketers for making everything confusing with MiB and MB...)

megous4• 5 years ago

Dunno, looks too complicated, and our results will not be comparable, because my block devices use LUKS encryption, and this doesn't measure raw block device access.

I wrote this quick benchmark tool, maybe try it. It does test raw block device 4k random reads via random batches of 128 reads submitted via io_uring:

  https://megous.com/dl/tmp/t.c
  (reduce ROUNDS to 5 or 10 if you test something non-SSD)

  gcc -o t t.c -luring
  ./t /dev/sda

On my workstation:

- My HDDs show 4k read iops in the range of: 126-139

- My samsung 980 pro nvme hovers around 160-180 kIOPS

- Samsung 840 PRO SATA : 95 kIOPS

- Samsung 860 EVO SATA : 90 kIOPS

On my Orange Pi 3:

- USB 3.0 attached intel SSD : 4k IOPS = 15393

- USB 3.0 attached samsung 850 EVO : 4k IOPS = 43154

- Sandisk ultra A1 uSD card 09/2018 model: 4k IOPS = 2228

- Sandisk ultra A1 uSD card 10/2019 model: 4k IOPS = 2512 (they are improving over time :))

So that's about 60MiB/s and 168MiB/s random 4k reads over USB 3.0. (controller supports UAS)

Is it hitting the SSD or interface limit? Dunno. I don't have the exact same samsung ssd model connected via SATA anywhere. But it's much more than the values in the article, so the values in the article are certainly not the USB 3.0 interface limits for 4k random reads.

dd is outputing non-SI units in this case, so it was around 392MiB/s

justin663• 5 years ago

Looks like pci-e is not much better here than USB 3.0 attached SSD.

We shouldn't expect it to be. A good USB 3.0 hub shouldn't add much in the way of latency.

I probably wouldn't bother, but M.2 is still a very cool thing that some people seem to want...

everyone• 5 years ago

This is the 1st thing I thought when Apple announced M2 apu.. This is gonna be confusing.

techrat3• 5 years ago

Given that "Raspberry Pi" or "RasPi" and its many other permutations are never mentioned alongside "Apple", I think it's going to be safely distinctive with or without "M2" by its side.

Koshkin• 5 years ago

Or, simpler still, M.2 is not the same as M2. (Now I am having an ApplePi nightmare...)

bullen18• 5 years ago

The only problem with PCIe is you cannot (generally) power them independently, that's why SATA is better.

inetknght2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't say that's a problem. I'd say it's a balancing act. For some purposes yes you want a separate power supply. But for others it's handy to not need a separate power supply.

bullen18• 5 years ago

True, I meant for server duty... I need to be clearer when I comment!

geerlingguy13• 5 years ago

One other consideration is I've found (at least on the Pi) CPU load is increased when performing heavy read/write activity. Certainly a little more than when I do the same thing through a SATA controller or testing through a Broadcom hardware RAID adapter.

And that CPU load gets a little into the worrisome territory when I put multiple NVMe in a RAID (which I'll be documenting soon!).

throwaway894345• 5 years ago

Is the CPU load attributable to some NVMe overhead or is it just that NVMe is faster than SATA and thus the CPU is being more efficiently utilized?

bullen18• 5 years ago

I'm glad to have you poking the ARM space because we're not getting the hardware we need for home hosting.

AWS/GCP really need that competition if we want some sort of distribution for the internet at large.

I'm still going with Raspberry 2 with 512GB/1TB SanDisc for my live database cluster (redundant not sharded!) as things are now.

But really the problem is watts per high quality GB of disk, as in rewriteable bits >1000 times:

SLC, MLC, TLC and now QLC (for those uninitiated: single, multi; double really, triple and quad; four layer); it's downhill from here on!

snicker7• 5 years ago

Modern Rasperry Pi's supports PXE booting.

geerlingguy13• 5 years ago

Apparently I was incorrect in stating that NVMe boot is not yet supported—this week the Pi Foundation added a new docs page[1] explaining the (in beta) process for enabling NVMe boot on the Compute Module 4, which currently requires updating the firmware _and_ bootloader.

Not something to rely on in production yet, and right now it doesn't work with NVMe drives behind a PCIe switch, so this limits some of the utility, but it is good to know it's being worked on!

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

teleforce2• 5 years ago

Someone need to kickstart CM4 carrier board with multi-port Ethernet. The CM4 can support 5 Gpbs throughput and having 4-port Ethernet will make a really cheap and nice home router [1].

[1]https://youtu.be/KL0d68j3aJM

geerlingguy13• 5 years ago

Check out https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm — there are a couple multi-port boards already in the works.

Also, if you go to the main page on that site, I have tested multiple multi-port PCIe cards, like a dual 2.5G card and a 4-port Intel i340, and all of them can be made to work without too much effort.

There are a few different things you can do with it, but in total, you'll be limited to about 3.2 (only through PCIe) to 4.2 Gbps (if also using the Pi's internal 1G ethernet) of internal bandwidth.

coder543• 5 years ago

you'll be limited to about 3.2 (only through PCIe) to 4.2 Gbps (if also using the Pi's internal 1G ethernet) of internal bandwidth.

Is that the total full duplex bandwidth available or just the "one way" bandwidth?

zdw• 5 years ago

It would be interesting to see a barebones ethernet switch board with some L2/L3 features (VLAN, LACP, etc.) on the switch chip in the data plane, interfaced to the CM4 as the brain and management plane, as something with more programmability than commercial lower-end switches (same price range as Mikrotik/Ubiquiti gear).

I wonder how programmable/open/capable low-cost ethernet switching chips are these days.

teleforce2• 5 years ago

From the follow on of the provided Twitter link in Jeff's website and based on the latest status updates, it seems that the 4-port Ethernet CM4 carrier or Raspberry Router from Blinkinlabs is taking shape now [1].

It uses KSZ9897 switch and LAN7431 PCIe-to-Ethernet adapter from Microchip, and the former does supports VLAN and LACP [2]. The fact that the switch chip can supports up to 7-port Ethernet thus it is possible to make a version of Raspberry Router that can be used in company setting (Mikrotik's customers) in addition to home networks.

[1]https://mobile.twitter.com/cibomahto/status/1364520950763573...

[2]https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/KSZ9897

randomstring4• 5 years ago

"Outside of commercial use, the $100 dollar price tag is a little high for the 'impulse buy then stick it in a drawer' use case most of us using Pis are familiar with."

I swear, some day, maybe even soon, I will find a use for all the Raspberry Pis, various Pi POE adapters, Pi cameras, and sensors I own.

beachy2• 5 years ago

I suggest you don't develop an interest in esp32, or like me you may add an equivalent pile of those devices to your gaggle of interesting but unused hardware.

At least it's much cheaper that pi!

lostlogin3• 5 years ago

Don’t forget the need compare different esp32s or esp8266s.

michrassena5• 5 years ago

I've really gone down that rabbit hole recently, and I get it, but I don't regret it. There's a whole world of electronics that I've been missing. As wonderful as Linux is, at the end of the day, once you have Linux running on a device, it becomes a bit generic. The Raspberry Pi is useful and fun, but they are sort of interchangeable with any other Linux computer. These gumstick-sized microcontrollers bring back some of the joy I had with computing in years past.

mhh__• 5 years ago

The thing that I want in the future is things at the ESP32 price point that can actually do interesting work - i.e. 1GSPS ADC and an FPGA on a board for 20 bucks let's say.

I suspect moore's law may have died too early for it, but I can dream...

adolph• 5 years ago

From ESP there’s downsizing to 555timer chips

https://howtomechatronics.com/how-it-works/electronics/555-t...

StreamBright• 5 years ago

I usually use them as local dev env. I deploy everything to my local cluster before I try to run it on a real infra. It is pretty good. I can also virtualize some of the workload using Firecracker.

https://dev.l1x.be/posts/2020/11/22/getting-started-with-fir...

swalsh2• 5 years ago

This seems like a great use case. I have a refurbished 1U server I use, but the fans on that thing are sooo loud.

maxerickson• 5 years ago

Develop a remote temperature monitor (freeze alarm).

willis9366• 5 years ago

I have redundant pi holes and NTP servers running. One of them is GPS/PPS trained with chrony for some truly accurate network time.

I have another pi with a SCART hat and 180 GB of ROMs driving my BVM.

I have a 0w modulating its clock with Daftendirekt at 7am every morning for a pirate FM radio alarm clock.

If I had more impulse purchasing power I’m sure I would like to experiment with octoprint on my CR10S-Pro.

There are lots of things you can do with Pis. My use cases are far from the most fun or clever. You just have match them to your interests :)

randomstring4• 5 years ago

To be fair, I have 7 Pis running on my network. Home Assistant, 2x Pi-Holes (for redundancy), 1 magic mirror, my Weasleyclock, 1x w/ a hi-fi berry acting as a Spotify streaming device, and a garage door sensor. So roughly half the pis are in service. Maybe only 5% of all the sensors and projects are.

turdnagel2• 5 years ago

Daftendirekt - the Daft Punk track? By "modulating its clock" do you mean playing the song as an alarm?

ThatPlayer• 5 years ago

If you have an extra Pi Zero W, Klipper has lower system requirements than Octoprint and runs better if you don't need any of the plugins that Octoprint offers, or a USB webcam hooked up.

Though it will involve flashing Klipper over Marlin on the CR10. That just means more stuff to tinker with!

whalesalad• 5 years ago

Hah! As I look down near my feet there is a clear plastic bin full of pi's, usb cables, micro hdmi, a picam, a go pro, all kinds of crap I swear I will use and never do.

I do have a pihole running on a pi3 that has been serving dns for my home network for about two years now without so much as a hiccup.

m463• 5 years ago

I think the answer for those projects is probably a netboot diskless pi and have a server that handles the PXE boot + disk.

Folks here have done it, then all your pis are online easily, especially with poe.

I think it would be great for camera stuff - it's like VMs turned inside out where your server runs lots of remote physical machines.

swalsh2• 5 years ago

I recently had a need for one (installation of Octoprint), but then realized the one I had in a drawer was too old to work. So I ended up having to purchase a new one anyways.

LeoPanthera3• 5 years ago

The tipping point for me was setting up the infrastructure to network boot my Pis. Now it's trivial for me to plug in a Pi anywhere on the LAN, and even switch what OS it is booting into just by changing a symlink on my fileserver. It's now very easy to experiment with different things, and not worry about the cards dying.

randomstring4• 5 years ago

This has been on my TODO list for a while. But first I need to set up another Pi to be the PXE server... :)

bopbeepboop• 5 years ago

Recommended howto?

michrassena5• 5 years ago

There's a price point here that makes sense, and it isn't $100 + the Pi + the M2 SSD. Anything more than this and you get into the low-end laptop price range with full x64 compatibility and a Windows license.

techrat3• 5 years ago

Except by that point you're dealing with a full laptop with proprietary drivers and, well, Windows itself.

There's a reason a Pi took off as the SBC of choice: How open it is and what it still can do without adding things to it.

If you're only looking at price tag when it comes to adding an SSD and a hat to compute module, the compute module concept was never for you in the first place.

_0ffh• 5 years ago

This comment, and the general response to it, made me feel slightly less ashamed. Thanks for that! =)

hosh• 5 years ago

I’m experimenting with self-hosting platforms, like sandstorm.io. (It is not currently available on an rpi, though there is a lot of interest within the community)

Right now though, going to setup pi-hole so my daughter can stay on task during remote learning, and if we ever get a smart TV, pi-hole the adtech dns.

swebs• 5 years ago

Just put LibreElec on the Raspberry Pi 4 and you instantly have a cheap media player capable of running HEVC video.

Railsify• 5 years ago

I use my pis to run an air quality sensor. It runs continuously.

tyingq3• 5 years ago

The case looks great, like an ASUS Chromebox...which I always thought looked nice.

geerlingguy13• 5 years ago

Heh, I guess I did well for the first ever 3D model I made :D

Here it is on Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4786257

Saris2• 5 years ago

That's some extremely slow performance for all the money spent to add NVME to the Pi.

I get that there's a fun factor involved with raspberry pi stuff, but I wish the performance to price was better. I'm better off buying off-lease USFF pulls or something instead for anything I do, they cost less and generally use about the same power relative to performance.

geerlingguy13• 5 years ago

The interesting thing for me has been the curve of performance/dollar over the past decade since the first Pi came out.

The gap was huge back then, but the Pi 4 is now getting competitive for some use cases (especially if also considering power efficiency for lighter usage patterns), and I can see a time where the value gets even better depending where things end up with a Pi 5 or 6 in the next few years...

Saris2• 5 years ago

It's definitely interesting to see their progress. They are fairly rapidly catching up to the minimum performance needed to run most typical users apps.

nfriedly3• 5 years ago

I hope there's a future Pi with more PCIe lanes. 4 would prevent the PCIe bus from being a bottleneck. Or it could have USB 3 and NVMe, maybe even a 2.5GBPS ethernet.

dasb• 5 years ago

Or you can plug in a USB 3.0 SSD and get decent speed, but you end up with a cabling mess and lose bandwidth and latency to a USB-to-SATA

Is the bandwith loss significant between USB 3.0 and SATA (for an average SSD)?

uuidgen• 5 years ago

For an average SSD - no. It's pretty much multiple times faster than other options.

philihp• 5 years ago

The form factor of the RasPi is a large selling point for me, and to have more than 1tb, it’s nice to see an option that doesn’t involve a cable or dongle plugged out of the side of the case next to the NIC port. I’m excited to try using this with RaspiBlitz, which requires at least 400 gigs for the blockchain alone.

nottorp• 5 years ago

If you like duct taping things to each other, no :)

Personally I'm appalled when people say it's easy to add peripherals to a Pi via USB. Maybe some deep fear of octopuses?

Also note that the resulting system in TFA will lose usb 3 capability, because there's only one pcie lane and you can use it for usb 3, nvme but not both.

neolog• 5 years ago

What do you think about these stackable computers? https://m5stack.com/

They look nice to me but I don't know much about this area.

matheist• 5 years ago

I actually just bought one of these! I'm working on a project where I need a battery, IMU, speaker, and quite a bit of processing power (for real time audio), and their m5 core2 aws IoT product met all those requirements for only 40ish dollars.

I only just got it, but it took me only a couple straightforward hours to set up the dev environment and compile and flash their sample hello world project. (I haven't done anything with esp32 before).

I don't think it's analogous to the rpi, though (which I haven't used) --- you can't put Linux on the m5stack products because they're meant for much simpler tasks.

nfriedly3• 5 years ago

I have one, and I've only been toying around with it, but I've been fairly impressed. The hardware is very nice - polished, while still keeping everything accessible. The software is pretty decent also. The documentation leaves something to be desired.

That said I don't see it as completely overlapping with the Pi. The ESP32 in the M5Stack is a much less powerful system in terms of performance, memory, storage, etc. It's not running Linux, so your code is much closer to the metal. That can be both good and bad depending on what your goal is: you have much more control over the hardware but it limits your choice of programing languages and what existing software you can depend on.

e_proxus• 5 years ago

Not a fan of hijacking scrolling on web pages in general, but they really nailed that stacking animation!

fhunt2• 5 years ago

Few weeks ago I was looking for something like this. If there was anything similar, it was always sold out or did never launch, I don't expect better availability with item. And if they ask for $100 which is way too high and would give me better boards, pls provide two M2 slots.

nfriedly3• 5 years ago

The PI 4 only has a single PCIe lane. Two M.2 Slots would require a PCIe switch which would make things more complex and expensive, as well as limiting the overall performance if you were trying to use both drives simultaneously.

techrat3• 5 years ago

If you're going to split a 1x PCIe lane into two M2 slots, you might as well save the cash and get a Pi4 and use two USB3 thumbdrives instead. The performance would be about equal by that point.

fhunt2• 5 years ago

Ofc I'm aware of this and this is what I did, I just want a nice form factor.

josteink• 5 years ago

Apparently this week NVMe SSD Boot was just added as a beta feature in the Pi firmware, though it requires a bit of a process to use it

Anyone know if you can boot from NVMe on the Pi if you first bootstrap it through an UEFI shim [1]?

[1] https://github.com/pftf/RPi4

xaduha• 5 years ago

I heard you liked boards.

M.2 on a Raspberry Pi – The Tofu CM4 Carrier Board

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