Waveshare CM4-NANO and Radxa CM5

[O635789]

It took me over a month to get this far. I really hope Radxa get their documentation less puzzling. I bought 4 different carriers, Radax CM5 IO board, Raspberry Pi CM4 IO board, Waveshare Mini Base Board A, and Waveshare Nano Base Board A for validation purpose.

I want something like CM5 size capable of running LLMs. Waveshare CM4-NANO-A isn’t ideal for me, but it’s a good start. Since it doesn’t have video output or network connection, I need another board to set up CM5 module. I chose Waveshare Mini Base Board A, hoping it would make the transition to Nano Base Board easier. But it did not.

I need WiFi and Bluetooth, I bought an outdated Edimax EW-7611ULB V2, compiled the driver and worked fine on Mini Base Board A. After I moved the CM5 to Nano Base Board A, CM5 refused to boot, and turned too hot to touch within a few seconds.

I know the Nano Base Board is OK, it runs nicely with Raspberry Pi CM4, the issue is only between the Base Board and Radxa CM5. However I don’t want to debug the combo at that temperature.

I guess I have to design my own base board. The combination of Waveshare CM4-NANO-A and Radxa CM5 is officially a no-go in my list.

[DarkevilPT]

I already said this… im gonna say it again… Radxa needs to make an nano board dedicated for the cm5. Period!

Update: The Cm4-Nano-B and C have video output.
You can see the images here and how I set it up:

Radxa Compute Module 5 with CM4-Nano

CM5 with CM4-Nano Board and FydeOS Setup Guide [91c110c0eaf4544a3845a9b866f215233316ac6a] Components and Costs ~ £104 - £128. Radxa CM5 CM4-Nano Board WiFi AC600 + BT USB Dongle SanDisk MicroSD Card USB Hub CM5 Cooling Heatsink JST 1.25mm Curved Pin Setup Process Boot Configuration Maskrom Button Handling: The CM4-Nano boot switch must be ON for maskrom mode. If connecting it to a computer it shuts it down connect the type c cable before turning on the laptop. The boot switch must be OFF t…

The new waveshare cm5-nano-b doesnt work on CM5 its only meant for rpi5 anyways.

[O635789]

I started planning my own carrier board, I found it’s hard to design a generic purpose board for the size. I have to drop some common features to fit my own requirements, e.g. I’ll completely depend on a dedicated power supply board to save space. I’ll drop the regular USB connectors, too. There is a chance I have to design multiple boards with CM5 footprint and stack them up. I’ll see how far I can go.

[O635789]

Some thoughts on RPi CM4 base boards and Radxa CM5 combo. Radxa being generous to provide the CM5-CM4 image so we can boot up a powerful module with the board we already have, but that’s about it. It’s not the right setup for any serious application.

I tried to use the Seeed 2 mic array hat v2.0 (with TI chip), but hit the dead-end. If you intended to use pin 3 and 5 of the 40 pin header on CM4 IO board (including all 3rd party board) as I2C, it won’t work. I2C6 of Radxa CM5 are connected to those pins, but SDA and SCL are flipped.

I’ll move to Radxa CM5 IO board to continue my study of my own board design.