As it is Raspberry based, we all know, there is a lot of heat to carry out of the case. I’m not a product designer too, but I’m an electrician and a HVAC expert, with a lot of experience in cooling down my Raspberry’s.
You are right, this one will be hot. Physically. I also would like her better cool physically and hot on possibilities…
Good point. A heatsink in a closed enclosure doesn’t make much sense.
As there is no GPIO, adding a PWM fan is not an option, either, unless something was foreseen on the board.
That leaves the option of punching a hole in the cover, with a ever running fan, which is not ideal…
Now, HA is definitely not the most CPU intensive piece of software, so it likely is not an actual issue (and we can assume load tests were performed)
Yeah, I could agree on a Lil bit since most probably we all going to hit it with tons of apps. Anyway, if any of the creators reading this is there a possibility of collaborations on projects (bulk buying) Please let me know
In the stream, they mentioned they tested both with and without external antennas and didn’t notice a difference. The absence of USB3 make it so that there is far less interferences as well.
Personally, the (apparent) lack of BT is the deal-breaker issue. I would happily have replaced my RPI3 with this, but I have a bunch of cheapo Xiaomi BLE sensors…
Now, I could re-use a random BT dongle…
EDIT: It is mentioned in the video that you can get (theoretically) a CM4 with radio (wifi + BT). Pledged
heat, GPIO, antenna and BT was all discussed yesterday.
I suggests you all watch the Q&A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPR-shzT_VQ it will answer your questions/concerns.
I have seen the video, and can confirm: ALL (yes, all) of the points/concerns mentioned so far, here in this thread, were all addressed in the video. They thought about those and have explained.
So, yeah, I suggest everyone go watch the video first, before calling anything a “bad design”.
I’ve seen the video too, and, call me a skeptic, call me a idiot, call me whatever you want, my concern is not taken away.
Future will show, how it turns out. Still, the basic though is, as the OP say’s: Passive heat-sink + absence of ventilation openings = asking for trouble.
Dozens of products in the past showed this rule is legit. I don’t know, why this box will be the first to break that rule…
The thermal throttling issues around Raspberry are widespread item, everyone does know about.
So, as usual on this forum, I need to say again, THIS IS NOT A RANT!!!, we are trying to HELP.
just my 2 cent’s… Thanks for reading this, thanks even more for THINKING about it, thanks even much more for not calling us stupid…
I watched the video and I’m still not satisfied by the answers.
What does the loadAvg in the graph really mean? Is it a good way to measure the throttling that will occur when the CPU is too hot? Why no graph with the CPU clockspeed so you can really see if it’s throttled?
And questioning if a design might be bad is not a personal attack but a warning to prevent failures, so for the greater good of Home Assistant.
Here’s a simple guide that is supposed to calculate the temperature rise of an enclosure based on it’s dimensions (to determine the surface area), material of construction (for its thermal conductivity), power consumption, and the external room temperature.
The thing is that here in NL at least alot of the times we have stone and concrete walls/ floors. So i usually install an external antenna to even get out of the server room/meter cupboard? (dont know how to translate meterkast). I’ll just stick with the nuc and stick
Whilst I agree about the heat issue, it is easily solved with some mods to the case so no big deal for me.
What I do see as a bigger deal is the NVME as it is an interesting design choice, I’m not going to say bad, just that I actively choose to not go in that direction when I was comparing all the common off the shelf ARM devices. NVME means that you have to give up USB3 to have that feature with current ARM processors. By only having USB2 on this device you now can not get decent external SSD speeds and other AI accelerators via USB3. I would personally prefer to have 4x USB3.x ports over a single NVME slot. What do others feel they prefer?
Now I know someone is going to say how much faster NVME is and that they prefer it, OK but if the data still has to pass through the 1gb network port, any gains made from NVME are lost. Interested in hearing from people that feel this is a trade off that they prefer and what they will be using it for.
4 ports of USB3 and no NVME, that is starting to sound like an Odroid N2+ only with a slower CPU
Mmm… Where did you get that from?
NVME is PCIe, and hooked directly to the SoC…
Actually, besides the issue with USB3 interference, they mention in the QA that they could not have USB3 because the sole PCI lane was taken by the M.2 slot (54:10)
It’s a fact that if you have a hard requirement for an external SSD, no use for the builtin zigbee and are oblivious to the modularity of a CM4, there is little value in Amber,.
Yes but let’s talk real world end use cases and not a command line benchmark. You use the drive as a NAS = no advantage. A NVR = no advantage. If the only way to get the data on and off the drive is via a 1gb network card then How do you benefit from the extra speed when you can not connect other usb3 devices? Perhaps the next generation of ARM will allow both USB3 and NVME, we can only wait and see.
As for the CM4, you can buy a whole SBC for a similar price that has similar features. I don’t see the VALUE in it when I can have all new technology, keep the old device as a backup, and the newer SBC does not need to make compromises to try and keep backwards compatability.
Usb3 rf issues stem from bad shielding caused by buying or designing the cheapest option. There is a risk of an unknown future CMx and untested NVME drive causing similar result. If you can use a longer USB cable to move a rf dongle away from the rf noise you have an easy to implement solution.
