Milk-V Mars CM (RISC-V, CM4 form factor)
A $34 StarFive JH7110 RISC-V module in the CM4 footprint has been proposed twice for the uConsole; nobody has reported it booting the display.
What it takes
- Purchase required
- Disassembly
Difficulty 2 of 3 — moderate.
Details
alexmakura's 2023 thread pitched the Mars CM (quad-core RISC-V at 1.5 GHz, Imagination BXE-4-32 GPU, 2–8 GB, WiFi 5) as a replacement on the CM4 adapter, and one member ordered a module to try. The concerns raised — device tree and driver work for the panel and keyboard, thermals ('runs quite toasty'), thin documentation — still stand, and alissa-tung's 2024 question drew the same answer: the CM4 needs patches for display, keyboard and modem, so any other module does too, and eMMC variants struggled to find their boot device.
No working build has been posted. If you want RISC-V in a uConsole today, the R-01 is the only option with software.
Links
Open at Forum threadRelated mods
A single-core 1 GHz RISC-V module with 1 GB and no GPU — a terminal machine with long battery life, now sold out, with a small but determined software scene.
A CM5 drops into the CM4 adapter for a faster CPU, up to 16 GB of RAM and USB 3.0 — get a Lite with WiFi, update its EEPROM, and mind the heat.
Every CM4 or CM5 sits on an adapter in the CM3 socket: the $19 open-source original, HackerGadgets' $23 board with NVMe and USB 3.0, or lulu's $20 CM5 kit.
trinity's reference table of every compute core that fits the uConsole — ISA, RAM, eMMC, WiFi, OS support, adapter needed or not — plus the adapter boards.
An RK3588S module with up to 32 GB RAM on HackerGadgets' Radxa adapter: display, keyboard, USB and charging work, no onboard WiFi, mainline kernel since 2026.
ClockworkPi's own RK3399 module — two Cortex-A72 plus four A53, Mali-T864, 4 GB — needs no adapter; $129, with a smaller but real software base.