Orange Pi Wants to Put Its CM5 System-on-Module Into Your Next Tablet Build
New, slimmer carrier board drops the Ethernet but adds what you need for a flexible battery-powered touchscreen device.
Embedded computing specialist Orange Pi has announced a new carrier board for its Orange Pi CM5 system-on-module (SOM) family — targeting those looking to build battery-powered devices a fir bit slimmer than its current carriers allow: the Orange Pi CM5 Tablet Base Board.
"The Orange Pi CM5 tablet base board is an official Orange Pi base board that can be used with the Orange Pi CM5 core board, with Wi-Fi 5 + [Bluetooth] 5.0, [Bluetooth Low Energy] support, and standard CM5 connectors," the company explains of its latest launch, "and can be used as a CM5 development system or as an embedded board integrated into end products."
The carrier, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is designed for use with Orange Pi's in-house CM5 system-on-module devices — not to be confused with the recently-launched Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, also abbreviated to "CM5." While Orange Pi's CM5 range has two high-density connectors in the same place as Raspberry Pi's CM5 and earlier CM5, it also has a third connector — and while it's possible to put a Raspberry Pi CM4 or CM5 into an Orange Pi CM5 carrier, you'll miss out on functionality provided over that bonus board-to-board connector.
The Orange Pi CM5 Tablet Base Board is, as the name implies, built to power tablet and tablet-like devices. It includes an integrated battery management system with USB Type-C charging at 5V 5A, full-size USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, and an additional USB 3.0 Type-C port. There's an analog audio connector, but no wired Ethernet — with network connectivity provided through an on-board Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 radio module.
Other features of the board tailored for tablet use include stereo speaker connectors, an integrated microphone, physical power button, a four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) for connection to a flat-panel display with six-pin touch sensor interface, a four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI), and two two-lane MIPI D-PHY RX connectors. Interestingly, 0.1"-spaced general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header pins are included as standard — though on a 26-pin header, rather than the more usual Raspberry Pi-style 40-pin header. There's also an infrared receiver, and a dedicated UART for debugging.
For storage, there's a microSD Card slot plus an M.2 M-key slot which provides access to a single PCI Express Gen. 2 lane and mounting points for 2230-, 2242-, and 2280-footprint M.2 modules — either Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage or high-speed accelerators for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads. Naturally, none of this is functional without installing an Orange Pi CM5 SOM — powered by a Rockchip RK3588S system-on-chip and delivering four Arm Cortex-A76 performance cores at up to 2.4GHz, four Cortex-A55 efficiency cores at up to 1.8GHz, and a neural coprocessor with up to six tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at INT4 precision.
More information is available on the Orange Pi website, while the carrier is up for sale on the company's AliExpress store at $20 plus shipping.