azlan.works' Argo CM5, a Tiny Battery-Ready Raspberry PI CM5 Carrier, Readies for Crowdfunding

London-based azlan.works is preparing a crowdfunding campaign for the Argo CM5, a compact carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 with integrated battery charging capabilities.

"Argo CM5 is an open source Raspberry Pi CM5 [Compute Module 5] Carrier PCB designed for embedded and portable applications," azlan.works founder Muhammad "Azlan" Shah explains of the board. "Featuring the same footprint as the CM5, the primarily goal was minimizing volume whilst retaining most of what makes Raspberry Pis great for makers. But don’t mistake its miniature size for a lack of features—Argo CM5 has a surprising number of ports, connectors, and even a LiPo charger built-in."

Shah first showcased the Argo CM5 back in August last year, at the time in prototype form — and cited Pierluigi's CM5 Minima and the Waveshare Nano family as inspiration. Designed to occupy roughly the same footprint as the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 itself, the compact carrier brings one key feature Shah found lacking in its stablemates: integrated battery management.

"Because it has LiPo [Lithium-Polymer] charging built in, Argo CM5 can use as big a battery as you need, whether that’s a 2,000mAh pouch or a 10,000mAh one, with charging made easy over USB Type-C," Shah explains. "For something like an IoT [Internet of Things] device, Argo either frees you from the wall entirely for hours at a time, or gives the user battery backup in case of a power outage."

In addition to battery charging, the board breaks out a range of features of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 itself: there are two MIPI DPHY connectors for Camera Serial Interface/Display Serial Interface (CSI/DSI) use, a micro-HDMI connector, a 16-pin flat flexible circuit (FFC) connector for a single PCI Express Gen. 2 lane, a USB 3.0 Type-C port for data and a USB 2.0 port for charging and flashing, a fan connector for optional active cooling, and a microSD card slot for the Compute Module 5 Lite range that lacks on-board eMMC. There's even a Qwiic/STEMMA I2c connector for further expansion.

The board's design files are available on OSHWLab under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 license, with additional files and what Shah calls "basic firmware files for battery and sensor control" on GitHub. Those looking to pick up an assembled board can register to be notified when the project's crowdfunding campaign goes live on Crowd Supply.