Can Home Assistant Yellow support non-Pi CM4 modules?

Now that the supply chain seems better-ish it might be less important, but I was curious if anyone has tested Yellow with non-Pi CM4 modules? In theory at least the ARM ones should work without issue at least at the hardware level? Also wondering about stranger options such as RISC-V? I don’t expect full driver support there because that’s a full architectural change but just wanted to check to see if somehow there was Pi-only requirements at the hardware level?

Have you had any luck with this? I am looking for a CM4 now.

Not yet. I would say check out Jeff Geerlings videos on CM4s. These are mostly for (really cool) CM4 blades but he covers which non-Pi CM4’s work and how to go about using them. There are a couple that might not support PCIe so make sure you find one that does if you want to use the NVMe slot. All those are ARM-based. As far as I know, RICSV CM4’s have been announced but none of hit the market yet.

I found a CM4 on Amazon. Paid to much for it but it works. The yellow is a disappointment because I can’t get Frigate to work with my TPU. A huge waste of money and time.

Update! Took a few orders to get it all sorted out but I have a PINE SOQUARTZ running on Yellow and it does work - but with some major caveats it seems. For one, I don’t think it’s detecting the USB hub as I only see a single USB device (seemingly the one on the SOQUARTZ itself). I’ll need to compare that to the SQ Blade which is what I used to bootstrap the thing. Secondarily, I can’t figure out how to enabled GPIO (specifically I2C) for the Zooz GPIO Z-Wave board to work.

After messing with that yesterday, I opted to switch back to my Pi4 for now. Getting GPIO/I2C working is a matter of enabling an overlay I think but that process is very different on Armbian/Non-Pi’s than it is on an actual Pi SBC and the documentation is sparse (that’s putting it mildly).

That said, I had no issues with getting the NVMe drive working, although I can’t boot from it (I’m booting from MMC) so that’s nice. Wired networking also just works without any issues.

Interesting, I received my PoE Yellow yesterday and I’m tempted to give this a go with a Radxa Rock CM3 which is pretty available around here, did you have to do anything special to get it working on the Pine?

Nothing particularly special apart from getting the PINE to boot. I bootstrapped it via the PINE blade thing. I had to end up buying an eMMC module since it’s not well documented on how to get the PINE to boot from NVMe. I got a USB → eMMC module which made it basically the same process as an SD card. In my case I used Armbian.

As noted though I see any external devices apart from ethernet and NVMe so the Yellow’s features aren’t yet being well used at the moment. I suspect that’s indeed solveable I just don’t know what the next steps are.

I got Radxa Rock CM3 working with the help of a Raspberry Pi CM4 IO board to flash the MMC (I wasn’t able to flash it directly via Home Assistant Yellow board). It is running an old Ubuntu 20.04 with a 4.19.193 kernel so I wasn’t able to just use Home Assistant OS image but instead go with the most complicated method and run it in the supervised mode which also required tinkering with the Python version. It kinda works, except I’m still fighting to get the NVMe and USB working… So it is possible but as they say “there be dragons”…

I wonder if the new Orange pi cm4 module will work with yellow without tinkering
http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/Orange-Pi-CM4-1.html
Nice price and availability compared to the rpi cm4

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I’d like to know if Orange Pi CM4 works too.

I’ve ordered an Orange Pi CM4, will update once I’ve received it and had a play. It’s been impossible to get a Pi CM 4 in Australia.

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@tracpants any update on how things went with the OrangePi model? Was about to buy one of these myself but didn’t want to pull the trigger once I saw this. Thanks for your help!

I’m not having much luck and the moment, I will give it another shot this weekend.

It’s a similar situation as @suda has outlined for the Radxa Rock CM3. It definitely doesn’t work out of the box, but you can technically use it on HA yellow with a a lot of tweaking. I’ve not really had the time to dive deeper into this, hope this helps somewhat.