New device to run CMX (and more)

[HansR]

I found a nice device (Inovato Quadra) as an alternative to the Raspberry Pi to run CMX on and this post is supposed to be a kind of review of it.

The device is the Inovato Quadra, originally I guess made for radio enthousiasts (in CMX terms: the wxnow file users) but powerful enough to run additional software like CMX and its utilities. Because CMX uses a lot of space with longer series you may consider using a an additional SSD (I use a 128 Gb SSD). Almost obligatory is the additional Wifi dongle, any will do, but they have a Wifi 5 dongle in their program so order it with the bundle.

Installed is Debian 11 (bullseye) and a lot of software (too much to list here but be assured, it is enough). It also is prepared for VNC which makes it easy to handle. The keyboard as is available beside the bundle, is not required.

I will shortly describe how I set it up. A photo of the whole thing concludes the review.

1. Unpack, construct the standard and set up according to the instructions
2. For CMX use, ignore the advised setup, but please go for the headless setup as I describe below.
   For the headless setup do the following:
   1. Connect to your router via wired ethernet, check the IP it is getting and make your VNC connection
   2. Choose Applications=>Settings=>Armbian Config
   3. Choose Network and setup the Wifi
   4. Choose System and set CPU speed lowest to highest and Governor ondemand
   5. Choose Personal and set Timezone, locale and Hostname
   6. Unplug the ethernet cable and Reboot
3. If all is well you can now login via any terminal app like e.g. mobaXterm or the command screen of the VNC. NOTE: if you do not use the USB Wifi dongle but the internal Wifi you won't be able to have a fixed IP-address and handling the machine via a VNC or whatever will be more a nuisance.
4. At this point your are ready for CMX but take your time to play around, especially with the backup and factory restore as Inovato describes on their site. For here I will continue with the CMX install.
5. Because I chose to use an SSD from where I would run CMX I had to prepare that first. Simply connect your SSD to the free USB and run mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sda (or something alike). Think about where you want to mount the SSD and make the fstab entry. You may reboot to test the fstab entry or mount manually)
6. When done, install mono the regular way (e.g. according to this procedure)
7. When done copy the CMX installation to it's place and set it up with the wizard. Restart en continue via the local website as usual.
8. Install CMX as a daemon (almost obligatory with this machine)

The whole procedure took me half a day investigating, getting used to the machine and getting CMX ready. The big advantage to a RPi - beside its price - is that the Inovato has the OS and a lot of software installed. Software among which specialised software for radio amateurs which may make it first choice for that group of CMX users, but I find it definitely useful for CMX users of all breeds (even addicted Windows users may try a touch of Linux because of size and power usage).

The price is currently $49 for the bundle without keyboard. If you don't have a wifi dongle lying around add $11,- to that.
They ship to US, EU, and CA, UK, AU, NZ. In EU (but most likely elsewhere too) you are for customs 21% + handling. Having payed that I find it still better and cheaper than the RPi for which I have to buy additional housing, cooling etc... The standard eMMC storage I think is also an advantage to the RPi which still has the SD card standard.

My first and second impressions are good.
I am curious to other experiences with the Inovato and CMX combination.

NOTE: The photo is somewhat large so the dimensions of the machine may be overestimated but it measures 12x12x7 cm (Height x Width x Depth)
NOTE2: I think you can run Home Automation / Domoticz in parallel to CMX as well

20240120_140454[1].jpg

[Nossie]

looks like a lovely wee machine 2GB of memory is a bit of a limitation for me but overall nice and tidy and less DIY than a pi setup

[HansR]

looks like a lovely wee machine 2GB of memory is a bit of a limitation for me but overall nice and tidy and less DIY than a pi setup

Definitely more tidy.

And in addition: I use it command line oriented for my Domoticz install and a CMX (test), so I shutdown the daemons for VNC, NoMachine and tailscale (all three not used by me). Then there is hardly anything running and a lot of space and power left. I think you all would be surprised. All the software is there for those who need it, but using it as a bare system shows its power and a lot easier to use than the RPi.

Just have to know how to shutdown those three mentioned daemons and configure with sudo armbian-config.

[packman2008]

Another alternative to the Raspberry Pi which runs CMX and CU very well is the Khadas Edge-V Pro. During the couple of years when Raspberry Pi's were as readily available as hen's teeth I had to feed my SBC habit somehow, so I bought one of these and another Khadas SBC (Edge Pro). The Edge Pro has an extra board that can be fitted giving a range of other I/O that I wanted to try. However, that's not really relevant to CMX so the Edge-V Pro (or equivalent - I think it's an Edge2 now) is what would be best to run CMX.

I'll start by saying that these boards aren't cheaper than the Pi range. They're also not fully pin compatible and cases aren't as easy to find as for the Pi. There is a 3D printed case though and that's what I'm using.

They use the Rockchip RK3399 CPU with 6 ARM8 cores (2*Cortex-A72 at up to 1.8GHz and 4*Cortex-A53 at up to 1.5GHz). There's also a Mali 4K GPU if you want to connect it to HDMI for display purposes. 4GB DDR4 RAM and 32GB EMMC (there's also a much more expensive version with 128GB EMMC if you really want to go big). 2.4 and 5GHz Wifi, Bluetooth 5.x, 1Gbps Ethernet, dual USB-C and dual USB 2.0 ports. It has a 40-pin GPIO header like the Pi. You can also buy a cheap (£15-ish) addon board that allows you to connect a M2 NVME drive (I have a 128GB drive attached).

In terms of operating systems there's mainstream 64-bit Ubuntu and Debian, plus some others that I've not really researched. I'm running Debian 11.7 (Bullseye). Bookworm is available but I've not made that jump yet.

I have CMX and CU installed on it, as well as MariaDB (CMX database), Nginx (HTML+PHP website) and Mosquitto (MQTT broker). That's not really stretching it though and I could easily put quite a lot more on it. What's installed uses about 700MB of the 4GB of RAM. With CMX plus MariaDB/Nginx/Mosquitto running, all six cores are usually less than 10% utilised. When CU kicks in for a full website update one core is often maxed out, but the other 5 still sit around 10% or less. The WiFi works well...each band has it's own antenna on a short cable so probably better than the Pi on-board antennas. Mine is now connected by Ethernet at 1Gbps and that works very well.

Having said all that, there's nothing wrong with Raspberry Pi's. I have 5 or 6 PI4's, plus two Pi Zeros' and two Pi Compute Module 4's all doing different things, and they work well at doing all that I ask of them.