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 OS 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.

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 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.