Running from USB-C with no batteries fitted
The uConsole boots and runs from a USB-C supply alone — hold the power button until the green light shows, and use a charger rated for at least 2.5 A.
What it takes
- Plug & play
Difficulty 1 of 3 — easy.
Details
jimla's thread settles a common question for bench use or a permanently powered build. Caljank explains that USB power goes through the mainboard before it reaches the charge controller on the battery board, and Rex confirms it works without cells; his instructions are to hold the power button until the green light shows, and to reflash the card if it lights but will not boot. jimla's blank screen turned out to be the mainboard not fully seated in the adapter slot, and a later CM5/DragonOS owner had the same cause; the first boot takes a couple of minutes.
For the CM5, jcpunk asked the same question for a KVM crash-cart build and Rex's answer was simply to make sure it is at least a 2.5 A charger. One reply in the first thread notes that an NVMe battery-board upgrade still needs batteries fitted to power up.
Links
Open at Forum threadRelated mods
Any genuine branded 3,000–3,500 mAh 18650 works, flat-top or button-top; listings claiming much more than 3,500 mAh are fakes.
The 21700 version of HG's NVMe battery board fits the stock backplate and roughly doubles runtime: 4 h 31 min of 1080p playback against 2 h 27 min on 18650s.
paragonnov's Debian package remaps the power key to a real screen-off sleep: backlight and LCD off, keyboard unpowered, CPU pinned to its minimum clock.
With no real suspend on the CM4, grandrew's script fakes it: busy processes throttled to 1–2 % CPU, backlight off, powersave governor — about 13 h on a charge.
Michael_Wolf's Lua monitor for clock, power draw, temperature and battery, plus the benchmark showing the backlight is what actually drains a uConsole.
hotellonely's Python script logs the PMIC's voltage and current every 0.1 s until the console dies, giving a real watt-hour figure for any cell or pack.