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MirkoPC – a Raspberry Pi CM4-powered computer made in Poland

199 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

hadlock 6y ago
This looks great, but for a new form-factor, why put the USB-C PD power port on another side than the other USB/Ethernet side? The Raspberry Pi is a great device at any price point, but the biggest fault, in my opinion, is that there are critical ports on all four sides, which means cables snaking out of it on three of the four sides, and SD card access on the fourth. Moving the power to the same side as the USB/Network would improve packaging considerably.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  I broadly agree with moving ports together, but in this case I'm not sure there's room without making the board bigger or stacking ports (which I assume would significantly complicate things).
- walrus01 6y ago
  I have seen a number of different rackmount case designs intended to vertically mount a number of raspberry pi 3b/4 boards in something like a shallow depth, 3U enclosure. One of the design problems has been that the power jack is on the other side from the networking. Some people have solved it by additional DC-DC circuitry as a hat to power them from 802.3af. And the microsd card is accessed from the other side. But some model of rpi with all of its external connections along one side of the PCB would be very helpful for doing this with less third-party hacked up solutions involved.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  I feel like someone should basically build the Pi 400, but use a Compute Module 4 at the heart... like I wish the Pi Foundation would've done, for upgradeability.
  - dijit 6y ago
    the compute modules rarely (if ever) support backwards compatibility. At least not that I've ever seen.
    - geerlingguy 6y ago
      Up until the CM4, every generation of CM (original CM, CM3, CM3+) worked in the exact same slot on the same hardware. I know this because I tested a mixed cluster with all three on a Turing Pi board :) Additionally, upgrading from a 1 GB Lite module to an 8 GB 32 GB eMMC module could also be possible if they were swappable.
- thinkmassive 6y ago
  Having all ports on one side is one of many reasons I like the Argon ONE case. It uses an add-on board to redirect the A/V and power ports, which also converts the HDMI ports to full sized versions. https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-v-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-5.html https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-v-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-...
abraxas 6y ago
This is an amazing board because among other things it lets you add an NVMe drive making the Pi4 a perfectly reasonable computer for day-to-day tasks that don't push the graphics too hard.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  The Pi will still struggle for youtube videos though.
  - kcb 6y ago
    Yes, and heavy sites like facebook. The Pi is just not quite there yet for seamless day to day use.
- techrat 6y ago
  I'm struggling to see the point of getting a CM4 and adding this MirkoPC board to it over just getting a Model B and a case that supports adding an M.2 flash card. As far as Pi as a desktop goes? Sluggish is being generous. Even with 8GB Ram, you're hobbled by the weak GPU. Coudn't even stream Twitch without encountering system wide lag. The Pi needs much more than faster storage if it's going to be replacing desktops at any meaningful rate.
  - GloriousKoji 6y ago
    You do know that the Model B does not have the PCIE lane connected so there's no such thing as case adding M2 flash support, right?
    - techrat 6y ago
      Who said the M2 had to be connected to PCIe lanes? https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MHYWJCP https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MHYWJCP | About this item | M.2 SATA SSD Compatibility | The SSD Case accepts any size of M.2 SATA SSD with B-Key or B+M Key Hence why I said "getting a Model B and a case that supports adding an M.2 flash card."
walrus01 6y ago
It's interesting to see how people have basically reinvented the standard motherboard, as people have been building PCs from in the DIY x86/x86-64 community for 30 years. We've gone from what a raspberry pi was originally intended to be (a $25-35 computer) to something the same size, complexity and price as a standard Taiwanese mini-itx or micro-atx x86-64 motherboard and lower-end Intel or AMD CPU, with the same complement of I/O. I had the feeling this was inevitable when I saw people putting active DC powered fans on heatsinks on the rpi CPU some years ago. Sort of like how a modern Toyota Corolla has incrementally evolved to be a whole lot fatter, heavier, feature laden and costly than the same model name of car 20 years ago.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  The rabbit hole gets deeper still: there are at least three in-progress ITX or ATX motherboard designs based on the Compute Module 4: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm
  - walrus01 6y ago
    sure, why not, I guess? At least if people want a really low cost desktop, or something like a computer powering a kiosk, there's a plethora of low cost but functional mini-itx, microatx or atx sized steel cases. If you go to newegg and sort by price, for instance: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811147295R?quicklink=true https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811147295R?quicklink=true If you look further there's some much smaller slimline desktop mini-itx (170x170mm format) barebones cases that are probably about the same price. vast economies of scale in standardized mounting formats and open standards, like the dimensions/mounting holes for a normal ATX power supply...
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    Many of them probably are unaware of these things: https://www.ebay.com/itm/265106510516 https://www.ebay.com/itm/265106510516 (random result sorted for low price, just search for "picopsu") Once paired with a fanless Mini-ITX board they make for a really compact system that can be supplied by a single 12V line.
sneak 6y ago
How much does it cost?
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  Right now the board designer has only made a small batch of prototype boards. He's thinking about a refreshed design and might take it to some sort of other funding platform, but as with all hardware projects, hard to tell what would happen or final price if it does happen. Look up the TOFU, by Oratek in Switzerland, for something relatively comparable.
zwirbl 6y ago
It took me a while to read CM4 compute module 4 instead of cortex-m4
qwertox 6y ago
Is there some kind of publicly accessible Roadmap for future Broadcom chips which the Raspberry Pi might be using in one or two years? I love these boards so much, but the PCIe-restriction is such a huge bottleneck, that I'd love to know when this will be resolved.
88 6y ago
Does anyone know how hard it’s going to be for the Raspberry Pi Foundation to add some extra PCIe lanes to a future model? These boards are really exciting but at the moment all they’re doing is trading off uses for the single PCIe x1 interface. In this case, losing the USB 3.0 ports in favor of an M.2 interface.
Renaud 6y ago
I'm quite excited by the CM4 RPis. There are quite a few variants but all retain the same form factor and connector pinout. These little boards are fostering a lot of new break-out ideas for all sorts of purposes, from Routers to NAS with a lot of specialised equipment in between (great for industrial and automation). The great thing is that the core component remains the same, with known software that (generally) works well. You could make special boards with a few CM4 on them, all interconnected and ready for parallel computing. you could already do these things with the CM3 but the new versions have better and faster interfaces that make high bandwidth applications possible.
antattack 6y ago
Why are those rPI carrier boards so expensive? PC motherboards are larger, have more layers, controlled impedance, a lot more components, ENIG finish and cost less than half as much.
- nottorp 6y ago
  Because they make thousands in a batch (at best! most probably much less) not hundreds of thousands.
- bradstewart 6y ago
  Low volume.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  PC motherboards are manufactured in the thousands (at minimum) by large companies who benefit from economies of scale. Small boards are more 'boutique', often being produced in the tens or hundreds (though there are exceptions), and components are also way harder to come by. For some of the little chips I've seen people use on these boards, lead times can be months (or even years now), and the pricing is astronomical (e.g. a chip that was $0.80 a couple years ago is a few dollars or more today—if it's available). And some manufacturers won't even pick up the phone unless you're ordering in the thousands.
sloshnmosh 6y ago
What a great selection of boards! I’m very interested in the Pi router shown in the list that has 4 lan ports. But I have heard that the Pi doesn’t have good throughput for routing. Anyone know if that is true? I don’t have any problems with my Pihole but that isn’t really the same as a full network router

199 points by geerlingguy 6y ago

This looks great, but for a new form-factor, why put the USB-C PD power port on another side than the other USB/Ethernet side? The Raspberry Pi is a great device at any price point, but the biggest fault, in my opinion, is that there are critical ports on all four sides, which means cables snaking out of it on three of the four sides, and SD card access on the fourth. Moving the power to the same side as the USB/Network would improve packaging considerably.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
I broadly agree with moving ports together, but in this case I'm not sure there's room without making the board bigger or stacking ports (which I assume would significantly complicate things).
walrus01 6y ago
I have seen a number of different rackmount case designs intended to vertically mount a number of raspberry pi 3b/4 boards in something like a shallow depth, 3U enclosure. One of the design problems has been that the power jack is on the other side from the networking. Some people have solved it by additional DC-DC circuitry as a hat to power them from 802.3af. And the microsd card is accessed from the other side. But some model of rpi with all of its external connections along one side of the PCB would be very helpful for doing this with less third-party hacked up solutions involved.
geerlingguy 6y ago
I feel like someone should basically build the Pi 400, but use a Compute Module 4 at the heart... like I wish the Pi Foundation would've done, for upgradeability.
- dijit 6y ago
  the compute modules rarely (if ever) support backwards compatibility. At least not that I've ever seen.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    Up until the CM4, every generation of CM (original CM, CM3, CM3+) worked in the exact same slot on the same hardware. I know this because I tested a mixed cluster with all three on a Turing Pi board :) Additionally, upgrading from a 1 GB Lite module to an 8 GB 32 GB eMMC module could also be possible if they were swappable.
thinkmassive 6y ago
Having all ports on one side is one of many reasons I like the Argon ONE case. It uses an add-on board to redirect the A/V and power ports, which also converts the HDMI ports to full sized versions. https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-v-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-5.html https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-v-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-...

abraxas 6y ago

This is an amazing board because among other things it lets you add an NVMe drive making the Pi4 a perfectly reasonable computer for day-to-day tasks that don't push the graphics too hard.

ekianjo 6y ago
The Pi will still struggle for youtube videos though.
- kcb 6y ago
  Yes, and heavy sites like facebook. The Pi is just not quite there yet for seamless day to day use.
techrat 6y ago
I'm struggling to see the point of getting a CM4 and adding this MirkoPC board to it over just getting a Model B and a case that supports adding an M.2 flash card. As far as Pi as a desktop goes? Sluggish is being generous. Even with 8GB Ram, you're hobbled by the weak GPU. Coudn't even stream Twitch without encountering system wide lag. The Pi needs much more than faster storage if it's going to be replacing desktops at any meaningful rate.
- GloriousKoji 6y ago
  You do know that the Model B does not have the PCIE lane connected so there's no such thing as case adding M2 flash support, right?
  - techrat 6y ago
    Who said the M2 had to be connected to PCIe lanes? https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MHYWJCP https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MHYWJCP | About this item | M.2 SATA SSD Compatibility | The SSD Case accepts any size of M.2 SATA SSD with B-Key or B+M Key Hence why I said "getting a Model B and a case that supports adding an M.2 flash card."

walrus01 6y ago

It's interesting to see how people have basically reinvented the standard motherboard, as people have been building PCs from in the DIY x86/x86-64 community for 30 years. We've gone from what a raspberry pi was originally intended to be (a $25-35 computer) to something the same size, complexity and price as a standard Taiwanese mini-itx or micro-atx x86-64 motherboard and lower-end Intel or AMD CPU, with the same complement of I/O. I had the feeling this was inevitable when I saw people putting active DC powered fans on heatsinks on the rpi CPU some years ago. Sort of like how a modern Toyota Corolla has incrementally evolved to be a whole lot fatter, heavier, feature laden and costly than the same model name of car 20 years ago.

geerlingguy 6y ago
The rabbit hole gets deeper still: there are at least three in-progress ITX or ATX motherboard designs based on the Compute Module 4: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm
- walrus01 6y ago
  sure, why not, I guess? At least if people want a really low cost desktop, or something like a computer powering a kiosk, there's a plethora of low cost but functional mini-itx, microatx or atx sized steel cases. If you go to newegg and sort by price, for instance: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811147295R?quicklink=true https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811147295R?quicklink=true If you look further there's some much smaller slimline desktop mini-itx (170x170mm format) barebones cases that are probably about the same price. vast economies of scale in standardized mounting formats and open standards, like the dimensions/mounting holes for a normal ATX power supply...
- squarefoot 6y ago
  Many of them probably are unaware of these things: https://www.ebay.com/itm/265106510516 https://www.ebay.com/itm/265106510516 (random result sorted for low price, just search for "picopsu") Once paired with a fanless Mini-ITX board they make for a really compact system that can be supplied by a single 12V line.

sneak 6y ago

How much does it cost?

geerlingguy 6y ago
Right now the board designer has only made a small batch of prototype boards. He's thinking about a refreshed design and might take it to some sort of other funding platform, but as with all hardware projects, hard to tell what would happen or final price if it does happen. Look up the TOFU, by Oratek in Switzerland, for something relatively comparable.

zwirbl 6y ago

It took me a while to read CM4 compute module 4 instead of cortex-m4

qwertox 6y ago

Is there some kind of publicly accessible Roadmap for future Broadcom chips which the Raspberry Pi might be using in one or two years? I love these boards so much, but the PCIe-restriction is such a huge bottleneck, that I'd love to know when this will be resolved.

88 6y ago

Does anyone know how hard it’s going to be for the Raspberry Pi Foundation to add some extra PCIe lanes to a future model? These boards are really exciting but at the moment all they’re doing is trading off uses for the single PCIe x1 interface. In this case, losing the USB 3.0 ports in favor of an M.2 interface.

Renaud 6y ago

I'm quite excited by the CM4 RPis. There are quite a few variants but all retain the same form factor and connector pinout. These little boards are fostering a lot of new break-out ideas for all sorts of purposes, from Routers to NAS with a lot of specialised equipment in between (great for industrial and automation). The great thing is that the core component remains the same, with known software that (generally) works well. You could make special boards with a few CM4 on them, all interconnected and ready for parallel computing. you could already do these things with the CM3 but the new versions have better and faster interfaces that make high bandwidth applications possible.

antattack 6y ago

Why are those rPI carrier boards so expensive? PC motherboards are larger, have more layers, controlled impedance, a lot more components, ENIG finish and cost less than half as much.

nottorp 6y ago
Because they make thousands in a batch (at best! most probably much less) not hundreds of thousands.
bradstewart 6y ago
Low volume.
geerlingguy 6y ago
PC motherboards are manufactured in the thousands (at minimum) by large companies who benefit from economies of scale. Small boards are more 'boutique', often being produced in the tens or hundreds (though there are exceptions), and components are also way harder to come by. For some of the little chips I've seen people use on these boards, lead times can be months (or even years now), and the pricing is astronomical (e.g. a chip that was $0.80 a couple years ago is a few dollars or more today—if it's available). And some manufacturers won't even pick up the phone unless you're ordering in the thousands.

sloshnmosh 6y ago

What a great selection of boards! I’m very interested in the Pi router shown in the list that has 4 lan ports. But I have heard that the Pi doesn’t have good throughput for routing. Anyone know if that is true? I don’t have any problems with my Pihole but that isn’t really the same as a full network router