ClockworkPi uConsole

Disclaimer & Purpose

This document serves as a personal repository for hacking and optimizing the ClockworkPi uConsole. I created this because official guides and community instructions are often fragmented across various forums, making it difficult to track the current status of specific mods or fixes.

While the information here has been personally validated, the uConsole is a DIY-oriented device. Please be aware that any modifications are performed at your own risk.

Operating Systems

The community member Rex maintains a list of Operating Systems distributions for uConsole, the latest images can be found in Shared Google Drive.

The best way to prepare the OS disk/SD card is using Raspberry PI Imager.

Keyboard Firmware

The keyboard contains a Aurdurino microchip, the firmware can be upgraded or custmoized via QMK. There are a number of things to check first.

All firmware and insturctions can be found in qmk-uconsole GitHub Repository.

Keyboard Backlight & Key Response

The original keyboard diffuser design has some minor flaws with key response and backlight consistency. I designed a custom 3D printed diffuser to address these issues, the details can be found in uConsole Keyboard Diffuser.

Trackball Maintenance & Modifications

uConsole uses EVQWJN007 Trackball as its pointing device, follow this link to learn about how to maintain and mod the trackball.

RaspberryPi CM5 Power Switch Mod

The original uConsole power button was designed for CM3, the Raspberry PI CM5 has a different power manamgent design. It results that long pressing the power button under kernal issues or any other power related issues, the only way to power off the device is take out of the battery or wait for the battery to drain. To address this issue, here is an guide for Install HackerGadgets Battery Board Manual Power Switch.

RaspberryPi CM5 NVMe

To boot the uConsole from NVMe drive using RaspberryPi CM5, please follow the instructions in Raspberry Pi CM5 EEPROM.

You may experience power stability issues when using NVMe with CM5, please refer to the uConsole Power Issue guide for potential workarounds.

RaspberryPi CM5 Audio Noise

If you experience audio noise or static from the Raspberry Pi CM5 audio output, the issue is likely caused by the sound card’s power saving mode on Linux. This can be disabled in Ubuntu (similar settings exist for other distributions).

For Ubuntu, edit the following file:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/snd-usb-audio.conf

Add the following content:

options snd_usb_audio power_save=0

Save and reboot.

This may not solve all the audio issues especially when using NVMe, but it can help reduce the noise in some cases! Let’s hope the a new CM5 uConsole revision with improved power management will be released soon!