Raspberry Pi CM3, CM3+ and CM4S — no adapter needed
The mainboard's socket is a CM3 socket, so a CM3, CM3+ or CM4S drops straight in; PotatoMania's kernel work made them usable and Rex's images support them.
What it takes
- Purchase required
- Disassembly
Difficulty 2 of 3 — moderate.
Details
PotatoMania's October 2023 thread announced kernel patches on the Pi 6.1.y downstream tree for the CM3 and CM3+, with preliminary CM4 support, tested on Arch: HDMI and the DSI panel (with a workaround), speaker and jack routing, WiFi and Bluetooth, power button, USB, hardware video decode at about 10 % CPU. One hardware note from the thread: a small modification is needed so the 5 V bus shuts down properly. The uconsole-cm3 repository holds the PKGBUILDs and an image builder; the CM4S is electrically a CM3 in the CM4-era package.
Rex's Bookworm and Trixie images list CM3/CM3+/CM4S support too, and the OS directory has a Debian 12 image on 6.1.21 for CM3/CM4/CM4S. The core directory rates CM3/CM3+ software support 'good' and CM4S 'great', with the CM3 end-of-life on 16 October 2025.
Links
Open at Forum threadRelated mods
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.
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.