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A group member has discovered a approach to enhance the efficiency of Clockwork Pi’s vintage-themed DevTerm transportable pc — by populating its system-on-module with an otherwise-missing eMMC flash chip.
Delivered to pre-order clients late final yr after part shortages pushed again its launch date, the Clockwork Pi DevTerm is an all-in-one transportable pc impressed by classic portables just like the TRS-80 Mannequin 100. Its top-end model, the A-0604, packs a Rockchip RK3399 system-on-module with two 1.8GHz Arm Cortex-A72 and 4 1.4GHz Arm Cortex-A53 processor cores — although runs by default with some disabled and others down-clocked to work round issues dissipating warmth rapidly sufficient.
These with BGA soldering abilities can now improve the storage on a DevTerm, by including an eMMC chip. (📷: catethysis)
Even with all of the cores enabled, although, the efficiency of the gadget can go away one thing to be desired — significantly in the case of storage, the place the bundled microSD tops out at round 24MB/s learn and 16.7MB/s write. Enter pseudonymous maker “catethysis” and their boyfriend, who found out a approach to enhance issues significantly — by populating a present-but-empty set of pads on the A-0604 SOM.
“I fairly like my new A0604, however I don’t like microSD playing cards and particularly their velocity and stability,” catethysis explains. “However there are empty eMMC pads on the computing board… so we added an eMMC. I’m not so good at [the] BGA reballing course of, so my BF did it for me.”
“We constructed an Armbian Ubuntu LTS with all of the DevTerm patches, and likewise we modified the .dts [Device Tree Source] to help eMMC as within the Rockchip and Firefly board patch did. A Mate DE [Desktop Environment] was additionally added (will change it to l3wm quickly).”
Switching the microSD for an eMMC module supplies a giant enhance to system responsiveness. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
The ensuing velocity enhance is extraordinarily spectacular: From 24MB/s learn to 300MB/s, utilizing the 64GB eMMC chip chosen for the experiment. “The extra responsive system is value it,” catethysis concludes — and the very presence of the pads means that Clockwork Pi might be contemplating providing a inventory variant with eMMC in some unspecified time in the future sooner or later.
Extra info on the modification is on the market within the undertaking’s Clockwork Pi discussion board thread, whereas the DevTerm itself is on the market to order from the official web site beginning at $259 for the lower-performance DevTerm A04; the most cost effective mannequin, which accepts a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 and prices $219, is out of inventory on the time of writing.
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