I got my laptop last week unboxed it and it’s beautiful. I ordered the CM5 from Mouser and it came today. I installed it and discovered my first mistake: I failed to buy the Wireless CM5 variant! My bad.
Does the laptop fail POST if wireless is not attached? I hoped I could do w/o wireless for a bit, but the following experience argues against this.
I installed the CM5 and a 1Tb NVME drive that I thought had Raspberry Pi OS on it. Applied power and pushed the power button.
Power button lit, the fan briefly ran, then a second later it ran a little longer. Screen remained black, maybe it blinked. (This behavior will be repeated as described below.)
Held down power button. Light went out.
Attached an external monitor via HDMI. Power on. Same behavior, both screens black.
Powered off.
I flashed a SD card with the latest Raspberry Pi OS, fed it into the slot on the right side.
Power on. No difference.
Powered off.
Flashed a thumb drive with Raspberry Pi OS. Stuck it in blue USB slot on the right.
Powered on. No difference.
Tried the other USB A slot. No joy.
Powered off.
Reseated CM5. Reinitialized M.2 NVME drive to latest/greatest Raspberry Pi OS.
Powered on. No difference.
I think that the problem is with me, not the laptop, but I can’t think of anything else to try. Any suggestions?
And there is a slider switch between the CM5 and NVMe: I can’t dismantle my One Up at the moment to be more specific about location/label/appearance, but IIRC it should be slid towards the back of the One Up for normal operation. (It is there to suppress the eMMC booting and put the CM5 into a mode so you can flash the eMMC directly, if you have it.)
The straw I am clutching for is you have eMMC and whatever you do the CM5 is trying to boot from it. So even if you have no NVMe, no SDcard and no USB I guess you get the same symptoms? I will be able to check my switch tomorrow and be more specific about that, if you can check your CM5 model number.
The switch at the point you described on my One Up is labeled “boot_mode.” The switch was set to “Normal“ (and not “OTG“) during the foregoing trials.
I changed it to OTG and tried again. This time even the power light remained unlit despite pushing the power button, and there was no burst of fan noise, either.
I reset it to Normal and got the original non-result described above.
OK - that is good about the switch. In OTG mode the CM5 will connect via the USB-C port, and power up directly from it, when you connect it to another computer to flash the eMMC.
Do you have your CM5 model number (from the back of the box under a small QR code) - presumably CM50xxyyy. If the yyy is not 000 then you have eMMC.
I guess in my mind it is possible your “problem” could be the CM5 itself.
Is it possible to get debug output from the debug probe during boot to see what is happening? I’m not sure if there is serial data piped to the UART on the GPIO adapter?
One distinction that may be significant. I bought the CM5 with 64gb of eMMC that I haven’t touched. Just tossed the unit into the laptop as described above. Reading the Wiki just now I saw that the CM5 with onboard eMMC storage has an additional setup requirement. Namely that the CM5 must be put into boot mode and that software must be installed onto the eMMC using a host computer before first use.
You need to flash a bootable image on the eMMC, or at least clear its bootloader to stop it taking priority to boot.
Start at Setup Boot Mode on ONE UP CM5 Laptop in the wiki. You should either flash RaspberryPi OS to the eMMC as pre the instructions further down that page. Or at the very least “nuke” everything bootable on the CM5 eMMC which should result in the EEPROM actually looking at all the other places you tried to boot from (USB/pendrive in either of the USB-3 sockets or NVMe). Do this (e.g. in Linux) when you have the eMMC mounted (step 4) just
I followed the instructions ( Argon ONE UP Resource Page | Argon 40 Wiki ) running a USB-C to USB-C cable between ONE UP and my Mac. The Mac acted like it didn’t see anything. I pushed the power button on the ONE UP for a few seconds and nothing happened.
I expected the Mac to act as if a mass storage device had become connected; it didn’t. Reading further I installed & ran rpiboot. Only then did Mac see a drive appear–the ONE UP–and I used Raspberry Pi imager to write Raspberry Pi OS to the eMMC.
I switched from OTC back to Normal and got same behavior before I flashed the eMMC.
I think that having a 2nd device to connect to the CM5 is a good idea just to gauge whether the fault is in the CM5 or in the ONE UP. I’ve ordered a 2nd CM5 from Mouser, and will repeat the experiments above when that arrives.
Has anyone gotten the keyboard or trackpad to work in Ubuntu? I’d love to rock 24 LTS or 25 on this puppy but I can’t use it with an external keyboard all the time. Will the Argon driver script also configure those? It worked perfectly out of the box with Trixie so I didn’t think the script mattered.
The official Raspberry Pi OS includes this automatically in a cm5 specific section of the file, but I’m guessing most other debian and ubuntu variants don’t.
Yes, thank you, I found this on the wiki thanks to another post here. It worked on 24.04 and 25 but the latter has some weird issues after setup where apps disappear and update fails on snapd so ima stick to 24 LTS for now
This is all odd - there is some indication that the CM5 is OK and some that the OneUp is OK but combined they are making a dogs breakfast.
Dunnoh how quickly your other CM5 will arrive but in the meantime if you can get the Mac to see the drive, and then “nuke” it as I suggested above (but I do not know Mac commands) to stop the CM5 trying to boot from the eMMC. And then try with an SDcard again.
Second thought - maybe your OneUp screen is duff - can you plug in an external monitor to the HDMI port?
Third thought - if you can get the new CM5 without eMMC makes things simpler.
All my tests were performed with and without an external HDMI monitor. I notice the black screen will flicker a bit grey momentarily when the CM5 would normally be booting. My conjecture at this point is that something in the eMMC is trying to boot (ahead of other things) and getting snagged. (Perhaps due to lack of wireless on the CM5, maybe.)
With the OTC switch and the 1UP connected to my Mac running rpiboot I noticed that Raspberry Pi Imager saw a 1Tb drive that I believe to be my M.2 drive I installed in my 1UP.
I have not touched /boot/firmware/config.txt. That’ll be my next experiment today. Tomorrow, the WIFI enabled CM5 should arrive.
I’ll give that a try. OTOH, if the CM5 weren’t properly seated, wouldn’t it fail to be seen by the Mac when in OTC mode & running rpiboot? Nevertheless, I’ll double-check the CM5 seating first thing tomorrow morning.
I replaced the CM501664 with a CM511664 taking pains to make sure the wireless antenna was plugged in securely and that the CM5 was properly seated. I used the Raspberry Pi Imager to put the latest/greatest Raspberry Pi OS on it. Disconnected from Mac, switched to Normal, and powered on. It booted fine just now and I’m running apt update/upgrade.
Looks like problem(s) encountered before were due to either improperly seated CM5 or the lack of Wifi circuitry on the CM5. In the latter case, perhaps if I had flashed a different OS onto the CM5 it would have worked. Idunno.
I’m tempted to try flashing Alpine Linux or something VERY minimal onto the no-wifi CM5. But I’ll resist that temptation.
Time to check out everything on my new 1Up laptop!