cm5

In a win for modular, private, local IoT, I just upgraded my Home Assistant Yellow from a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 to a Compute Module 5 this morning, and got an instant 2x speed boost.

I first posted about the Yellow in 2022, and walked through my smart-but-private HA Yellow setup in my Studio in a video last year.

Because I was running an eMMC CM4 in the Yellow before, I ran a full backup (and downloaded it), yanked the CM4, flashed HAOS to a new NVMe SSD, and plugged that and the CM5 into my Yellow. After running a Restore (it's a handy option right on the first page that appears when you access homeassistant.local), I was up and running like there was no difference at all—just everything was a little more snappy.

The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 is smaller than a credit card, and I already have it gaming in 4K with an eGPU, running a Kubernetes cluster, and I even upgraded my NEC Commercial display from a CM4 to CM5, just swapping the Compute Modules!

The Compute Module 4 was hard to get for years. It launched right after the COVID supply chain crisis, leading to insane scalper pricing.

It was so useful, though, that Raspberry Pi sold every unit they made, and they're inside everything: from commercial 3D printers, to TVs, to IP KVM cards.