The Raspberry Pi CM4 with a CM4 motherboard as a powerful device with a long battery life for 24 * 7 applications?

Last Updated on September 16, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

  • We where very happy to see that a Pi Pad 5 with a CM4 which as a 5 inch screen runs more than 24 hrs with a 10 000 mAh power bank.
  • This is a similar battery life value to a Pi zero 2 w with a a 5 inch screen.
  • the negative side of the Pi Pad 5 is that the screen cannot be replaced by another one. If we had the choice we would replace the 5 inch screen of the Pi pad 5 with an Android phone as a screen.
  • For instance a Xiami Redmi 9 offers usb-c connectivity and has a 6.5 inch screen. This is near to the standard 7 inch screens often used with Pi 4.
  • There is another CM4 motherboard from SeeedStudio which does not have a display, which would be better in that respect than the Pi Pad 5.
  • A second advantage of the Seeedstudio CM4 motherboard is that it has usb-3 connectors, which would allow to to boot it from a usb-3 drive which is fast solution.
  • Unfortunately we where not able to install Raspberry PI OS on our Pi Pad 5 with CM4 according to the instruction from Jeff Geerling:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/how-flash-raspberry-pi-os-compute-module-4-emmc-usbboot

The installation is tricky and requires advanced coding skills which we don’t have.