Clockwork Pi's DevTerm Portable Gets a Speedy 300MB/s Storage Upgrade — Courtesy of an eMMC Chip
Catethysis' mod takes advantage of an unpopulated footprint on the A0604 Core module, boosting storage performance from 24MB/s to 300MB/s.
A community member has found a way to boost the performance of Clockwork Pi's vintage-themed DevTerm portable computer — by populating its system-on-module with an otherwise-missing eMMC flash chip.
Delivered to pre-order customers late last year after component shortages pushed back its launch date, the Clockwork Pi DevTerm is an all-in-one portable computer inspired by vintage portables like the TRS-80 Model 100. Its top-end version, the A-0604, packs a Rockchip RK3399 system-on-module with two 1.8GHz Arm Cortex-A72 and four 1.4GHz Arm Cortex-A53 processor cores — though runs by default with some disabled and others down-clocked to work around problems dissipating heat quickly enough.
Even with all the cores enabled, though, the performance of the gadget can leave something to be desired — particularly when it comes to storage, where the bundled microSD tops out at around 24MB/s read and 16.7MB/s write. Enter pseudonymous maker "catethysis" and their boyfriend, who figured out a way to boost things considerably — by populating a present-but-empty set of pads on the A-0604 SOM.
"I quite like my new A0604, but I don’t like microSD cards and especially their speed and stability," catethysis explains. "But there are empty eMMC pads on the computing board… so we added an eMMC. I am not so good at [the] BGA reballing process, so my BF did it for me."
"We built an Armbian Ubuntu LTS with all the DevTerm patches, and also we changed the .dts [Device Tree Source] to support eMMC as in the Rockchip and Firefly board patch did. A Mate DE [Desktop Environment] was also added (will change it to l3wm soon)."
The resulting speed boost is extremely impressive: From 24MB/s read to 300MB/s, using the 64GB eMMC chip chosen for the experiment. "The more responsive system is worth it," catethysis concludes — and the very presence of the pads suggests that Clockwork Pi could be considering offering a stock variant with eMMC at some point in the future.
More information on the modification is available in the project's Clockwork Pi forum thread, while the DevTerm itself is available to order from the official website starting at $259 for the lower-performance DevTerm A04; the cheapest model, which accepts a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 and costs $219, is out of stock at the time of writing.