BPI-CM4 with MCUZone board, no USB port works

Banana Pi Amlogic design BPI-M2S/CM4(A311D)
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I’m trying to get a BPI CM4 to work with a POE_SSD carrier board from MCUZone / Hangzhou WildChip Tech. The board itself works, so does the ethernet but none of the USB ports works. MCUZone says, their board is 100% RPI-CM4 compatible and BPI says, their CM4 is 100% RPI-CM4 compatible minus the second DSI/HDMI port. I tried Debian, Ubuntu and Armbian as well as various USB devices and nothing works. Any ideas anyone?

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Tried now also the Android image. Same issue. So either my CM4 is broken or it’s not pin to pin compatible with the RPI CM4. I ordered an “official” BPI baseboard now for testing.

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hi， In fact, there is no way to make it 100% the same as the RPI, but most of the functions are fine. We have listed different PINs on the wiki. In addition, our official baseboard is 100% all functions can be used.

Banana Pi BPI-CM4 - Banana Pi Wiki (banana-pi.org)

1 Like
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Yeah, I get that it’s hard to get 100% compatibility but USB is a very basic function and I have to say that if you cannot guarantee compatibility of such basic functions, you shouldn’t advertise it as “pin-to-pin compatible with Raspberry Pi CM4”. I have ordered now a BPi baseboard and will test with that - maybe my module is just broken, who knows…

If you say “our official baseboard is 100% all functions can be used.”, you haven’t understood the idea behind compute modules and making compatible compute modules. Making a compute module that only works 100% with your own baseboards makes that compute module pretty much useless unless you make a lot of different baseboards. Otherwise you can as well just make a monolithic SBC. The whole point of compatible compute modules is that they work with all kinds of different baseboards.

I chose your CM4 not only because RPi CM4s are hard to find at the moment. I chose it because the specs look perfect for a project I’m working on but that project requires a very small footprint baseboard.

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Is this board schematic of usb part different with rpi official cm4io board? maybe you can upload the io board schematic and console debug message from power on.

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I guess your io board is the same hardware design as waveshare-io-base-b How to make CM4 work with Waveshare CM4-IO-BASE-B, the schematic of waveshare-cm4-io-base-b is https://www.waveshare.com/w/upload/8/89/CM4-IO-BASE-B_V4_SchDoc.pdf, it’s different with official rpi cm4io board, it don’t have a hardware detect to switch from device to host mode, because this port is connect to a otg usb port of soc.

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copy this overlay file otg-host.dtbo (354 Bytes) to /boot/overlays and apply it in /boot/env.txt

2 Likes
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August,

that worked! Thank you so much! You rescued my project! That solution should definitely be in the Wiki!

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This should be part of all official images.

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Hi August, could you please tell me how I can activate the overlay file?

I’ve tried “dtoverlay=otg-host”, but it doesn’t work.

I am using Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS

Thank you so much

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edit /boot/env.txt

# Device Tree Overlays
#   uart1           -- Enable UART1 (uart_A, GPIO Header PIN8 & PIN10)
#   pwm_c           -- Enable PWM_C (GPIO Header PIN7)
#   i2c2            -- Enable i2c2 (GPIO Header PIN3 & PIN5)
#   spi0            -- Enable SPI0 (GPIO Header PIN19 & PIN21 & PIN23 & PIN24)
overlays="otg-host"
1 Like
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Now it works. Thank you very much =)

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So I had the same problem and the solution here wouldn’t work for me (using armbian). After trying for a bit and searching around I came up with the following solution (which is dead simple and easy to apply even for an Linux/armbian noob like me)

So In case anyone using armbian (In my case use the BPI-CM4 with the Waveshare CM4-IO-BASE-B for running klipper) Here is the solution:

Get the .dts file from here:

for backup here is the code in plain text - whenever needed make a new textfile “otg-hosts.dts” and save it:

Full credits to ‘C0rnelius’ in the above mentioned thread!

/dts-v1/;
/plugin/;

/ {
	compatible = "bananapi,bpi-cm4io", "bananapi,bpi-cm4", "amlogic,a311d", "amlogic,g12b";

	fragment@0 {
		target = <&usb>;
		__overlay__ {
			dr_mode = "host";
		};
	};
};

copy it somewhere on your machine

run

sudo armbian-add-overlay otg-host.dts

reboot.

It works.

I guess it should work the same way for the MCUZone board, I read somewhere they both suffer the same “problem” (no connection for switching the controller from device mode to host mode)

  • cad435
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OK this is exciting to hear - will a Banana Pi CM4 work with a WaveShare CM4-IO-BASE-B and Debian 12 Bookworm?

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Industrial_i120.6_20240609a
Industrial_i120.6_20240609a1920×2062 252 KB
This is the edge compute node I want to test out - an energy monitoring node that boots a variant of Debian 12 called SolarNodeOS