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The Compute Module 5 is an amazing computer, but it's not amazing at all on its own. What makes it so cool is all the boards out there that take this and turn it into, well, almost anything. Like, have you ever dreamed of a keyboard where you just plug it into a computer and talk to it instead of typing? Well, this Type or Talk keyboard has a built-in Raspberry Pi with local, private AI to translate your speech into text. You just press this white button, say some words, and it will type them for you on any computer. Raspberry Pi markets the CM5 towards business and industrial customers, but I don't see it that way at all. I've upgraded my Sega Game Gear with one. People are building custom PCs with them. There's even these tiny project boards that let you put a full, fast computer in places they couldn't quite fit before, like CubeSats and drones. Today, I have a few new projects I've been waiting to share with you. To be clear, every one of these things was sent in for testing, and some of these things aren't even going to be available for sale. They might just be open-source hardware that you could modify for your own projects. But the reason I love sharing what I find is to inspire you. The Compute Module 5 is just a neat way to channel creativity. And maybe we can convince Raspberry Pi their system-on-a-module isn't just for industry. Like, take this prototype ITX motherboard. The final product is a little nicer, and it's called Sentinel Core. The idea is you can build your own mini PC with a Raspberry Pi. The creator maintains a custom home assistant image with the GPU drivers built right in. That means you can plug in a modern AMD GPU, just like I did, and then you get private, local AI. You can use that for a voice assistant, or whatever automations you want. Or you could take this board and plug in a storage card for, like, a custom mini ITX NAS build. This is the first prototype of this board, and it definitely has a little jank on it. But there's already a refined version in production, and it's on pre-order, complete with a CM5, pre-flashed with home assistant. I'll probably end up using this prototype board for more GPU testing, but if you're interested in it, go find out more on the Sanctuary Systems website. It should be around 200 euros with the CM5 included, but you do have to supply your own case and power supply. Similarly, this is another ITX board from Edatech. Just like the Sentinel Core, you could install it in a PC case or even in a mini rack. This ED-SBC3300 is focused a lot more on industrial use cases, though. Like, you power it by barrel jack, screw terminals, or even PoE like I'm doing here. It has RS-485, RS-232, mini-PCIe for cellular modems like this QuekTel, and there's IO everywhere. Like, there's even a built-in display controller for commercial LCDs. You probably wouldn't buy this for a custom Pi desktop, especially since it starts around 300 bucks, but it might be perfect for industrial control systems or IoT. Something else that might be important in industry is things like dust control, and this big heatsink here means you don't need a fan, and there's fewer parts to break, less chance of dust killing something. That can be huge if you're deploying into a messy environment or somewhere you might only visit once or twice a year. But why does this thing cost so much more than this guy? Well, besides all the IO, you get support from Edatech. This isn't something a hobbyist might care about, but if you're deploying this somewhere important, having all this documentation can be huge. Now, nobody paid me to sponsor this video, but I want to start something new. Andreas Spies is another creator on YouTube who covers electronics, radio, microcontrollers, and I've been subscribed to him for years. You might know him as the guy with the Swiss accent. If you like the things you see here, go check out his channel and learn about the projects he's working on, like this stamp-sized NTP time server with GPS. This isn't a sponsorship, and Andreas doesn't know I'm doing this. I just figured I have the platform to spread some appreciation, so why not do it? Especially for some of the folks on this site who I learn from every day. Like Andreas' time server, these CM5 Minima boards are small, but they're not the smallest boards you're going to see today. These were designed by another guy whose name I'm probably going to butcher, Pierluigi Colangeli, but he sent three editions, with each one tailored towards a specific use case. The one I put my tiny 2230 NVMe drive into is the Rev2, and it has almost every feature you get on a full-size Pi, just a lot smaller. It even adds on a little humidity and temperature sensor in the corner, though my early prototype board had it wired to the wrong bus, so I couldn't connect to it. He also sent the Rev1, with a built-in LoRa wireless module for things like Meshtastic or long-range IoT. And finally, this is the AI edition, which takes tiny 2230-size AI modules, and this one should be on sale through Seed Studio soon. The best thing about these Minimas is they're all open-source hardware, meaning if you want to mod them for your own projects, you can. In fact, the project Build a CubeSat, which I also recommend you subscribe to, did just that. I'll be covering some CubeSats pretty soon, so subscribe if you want to see more on that. Wrapping up the Minima, though, Pierluigi wrote an article on Hackster with some more background, so check out the links in the description for more. Now, going from small to even smaller, Waveshare sent over a couple of their tiny boards, and their CM5 Nano comes in two flavors, both being the exact same tiny dimension as the CM5 itself. The A is more basic, but still exposes GPIO, camera, and display connectors, and a couple USB ports. But the B, it goes all out. This thing adds gigabit ethernet, USB 3, mini HDMI, a headset jack, camera and display, and they even crammed in a PCIe connector on the bottom under the CM5. This thing is wild. It's almost as full-featured as a regular Pi 5. I'm not even sure how they crammed all this stuff in on a board this small. But, give them a little extra board space, and Waveshare actually solves two of the main gripes I have with the Pi 5, full-size HDMI, and an M.2 slot on the bottom. Honestly, this thing paired with the CM5 might make a better Pi 5 than the Pi 5. They even built in a little battery holder, and you still have access to the other HDMI port and the extra USB with these little flippy connectors. And having the USB-C power connection in the back means rack-mount deployments are even easier, assuming you're not using power over ethernet. The base A is $20, and you can buy a whole project box kit for it for $40. Now, getting back to industry again, Sphera Labs, and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, sent me their Strato Pi Max, straight from Italy. This is a modular DIN rail computer built with the CM5 at its core, and I asked if they'd send a model with UPS support. You might need to interface with industrial robots or environmental monitoring, and if you have this Pi running somewhere remote, you might need remote access to check on things, especially during power outages. Of course, this is going to cost a little more being fully built and deployable, but like with EdaTech, some of that goes into the support you get and the guarantee that this thing is tested and should work in the field. And a pre-built box like this comes with some other conveniences too, like they have not one, but two microSD card slots for redundancy. One of the main complaints I hear from anyone about deploying a Pi in a critical application is the single point of failure from running off of a microSD card. Never mind that tons of industrial equipment already runs on microSD cards outside of the Raspberry Pi, but this thing uses an RP2040 to manage failover, or even use the second slot for extra storage. And, of course, you can still use the Pi's built-in eMMC storage, network boot the Pi, or even throw in an NVMe SSD. But I was more interested in the UPS, and surprise, surprise, it works out of the box. When it's charging the battery, it shows this red LED. If I unplug external power, it switches to a yellow LED. And this board can also supply aux power in case you want to run something else off battery too. And the cool thing is all the behavior for this thing, every module on it is configurable. Honestly, the compute module in here is probably the least interesting part of the whole build. I kind of want them to build a Kubernetes cluster model though, where each of the little riser cards is another CM5, but I digress. They included a little Python demo to test all the interfaces from digital IO to RS485 and the analog inputs, and you can even manage the UPS from Python too. It's definitely a well-thought-out industrial controller. Now, this next board also has a CM5 and a Pi RP2040 microcontroller, but the way it uses them is wildly different. This keyboard looks pretty unassuming on the top side. That is besides this extra white key over here. But underneath, there's a compute module and a microcontroller. The RP2040 is the keyboard controller, something I've been finding more and more on keyboards these days. And if you just plug the keyboard in using this USB port on top, it works like any other keyboard. But plug power into this extra USB-C port, and it boots up the onboard compute module, which adds a feature I've never seen on another keyboard before. It runs private offline AI transcription using Whisper right on the keyboard. What this means is there's no software you have to run on your computer to get AI-powered transcription, and this keyboard works with any computer with a USB port, even my 20-year-old Power Mac. The Pi is running Whisper AI totally offline. That lets it translate speech into text or even translate from other languages on the fly. Just press this button and start talking. My voice is my passport. Verify me. Now, in using it, I've found in the current state, it works for shorter phrases, but the sound processing seems to split things up sometimes and miss some words. That's a software issue. And the fit and finish of this thing is definitely prototype level. Like, how do you even know when it's in listening mode? You have to flip it over, and you can see this tiny LED on the bottom. And this extra cable out here on the side, that's for power to the CM5, which runs on between 2 to 8 watts, depending on if it's actively processing speech. But I already hear some of you typing in the comments, why can't I just use the built-in dictation tools on Windows or my Mac or run Whisper locally? Well, sure, you can. But a lot of the software sends your recordings to the cloud, where privacy is kind of a far-off dream. Sometimes not, but the glory of this solution is it's all right here built into the keyboard. Nothing has to run on your computer at all. And if you press the speech key again, it's off. No microphone, complete privacy. And it works with anything, even if the device you're using can't run local AI models. And as a keyboard, it's nice enough with hot-swappable key-crown switches. And the finish is good enough for everyday typing, but there are still a few bugs to work out. I'd love to know what you think. Is this something that could help someone with difficulty typing? Or could it be useful if you need to switch between typing and dictating And yes, you can still type while it's listening. Sam, who made the Typer Talk, has a YouTube channel that I'll link down below. He's even auctioning off a prototype on eBay. So if you're interested in that, again, go check in the description. Next up, this Mirko PC I'm calling V2 is a continuation of one of the first compute module boards I tested five years ago. It's basically an entire mini PC, but with a Pi at its core. But it adds on some nice features. Like you can use this M.2 slot or you could install a PCI Express hat like on a Pi 5. You can't use both at the same time though, at least not with this version of the board. A future version might let you use both at once. And it has a nice built-in DAC for analog audio output. Next to that, there's a PoE slot so you can add on power over Ethernet without even needing a Pi 5 hat. And you can even install a regular Pi 5 active cooler on here. You just need to swap out the mounting posts for these taller ones. This board does inherit a flaw from the official IO board though. When you shut down the CM5, the fan right now goes full blast, which is a bit annoying. Hopefully that'll get fixed if this design reaches production. And you might be wondering, why do I have this weird thing sticking out of the USB port down here? Right now I'm testing the Mirko PC as a GPS time server with PTP support, which actually works better on the compute module than it does on the regular Pi 5. I'll be covering all that stuff in a future video coming up soon. And the other thing you might notice is I have this PineDrive NVMe SSD on here from Pineboards, or well, if you look closely at that time, they were named Pineberry Pi. And that's been quite a saga. Marek, who makes the Mirko PC, did a ton of PCB design work for Pineboards, but for a few months now, their online accounts have been silent. The last time I heard anything was back in March. And their online store is, well, offline. There's still some stock available on the Pi Hut, but it seems like their products are going out of stock over time. It's a shame because I still use a bunch of their products in my builds. Luckily for a lot of them, there are alternatives, like from Waveshare. But people have asked me about what happened to Pineboards, and honestly, I'm not 100% sure. I'll just refer you to the last known communication from Pineboards in a reply on their X account. They said, it's complicated, can't say that it's gone gone, but there is no denying the fact that we are not accepting new orders at the moment. And that statement was written right before their store went offline. Anyway, that leads me to their Modulo 5 PoE Plus board, which is basically the official CM5IO board, but with built-in PoE and a couple other conveniences. I'm not going to test it right now, though, because it might just be dead in the water. But at least I'll link to a level one text video on it. Instead of showing you that, I'll show you Waveshare's version, because it's similar in that it adds on PoE, but it's different in that it's actually available for you to buy. They have this kit version available that I have with a case and power supply, or you can just get the board that's inside of it. And if you buy the kit, it comes with this GPIO adapter, so you can use GPIO pins outside the metal case. A nice touch, and that's definitely an improvement over Raspberry Pi's own setup. Otherwise, besides the PoE support, this thing is almost functionally identical to the official IO board. Now, there are so many other boards out there, I can't even begin to cover them all. Like, last month at the NAB show, I spotted a whole cluster of compute modules powering a commercial audio processor made by Orban. They were showing it off at their booth. And if you've been following my timing saga, you might have already seen me hinting at this, a fully managed PTP-aware network switch powered by a compute module. And yes, that's SFP Plus on a Raspberry Pi. I'll be testing this, and I still have tons of other testing to do. So be patient, subscribe, and at least some of these things will show up in future videos. But is there anything you saw here that you want me to cover more in depth? Let me know in the comments. I might do some deep dives on level 2 Jeff. Until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling. Something else important in those areas is dust control. And using a beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, bup, bop.