Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) based Gigabit Router

hello there my name is gary sims and this is gary explains now what i have here is a very interesting router dual gigabit ethernet based on the raspberry pi compute module 4 with a custom carrier board so if you want to find out more please let me explain so this very flexible and powerful router based on the raspberry pi compute module 4 comes from seed studios this is not a sponsored video however i would like to thank seed studios for sending me a review unit now inside of this little box is a carrier board specifically designed for router applications and then on top of that board you get a a raspberry pi compute module four now this comes in various different configurations you can get just a carrier board you can add your own compute model to it you can get the carrier board with the compute module or you get the carrier board with the compute model and with this case and a power supply and that's the version that i've got now before we look at this router we need to ask ourselves the question why do you want to use it what what is a router well a router or a router if you're using the american pronunciation i'm going to use the british english pronunciation roots data packets of internet from one network to another so here is something you may have like at your house you know you've kind of got this a modem or modem router that you've got from your internet service provider then you've got some lan cables maybe things checking just via wi-fi a desktop maybe over the curve the the cables and then it roots the traffic and also does modem function depending on the type of um connection you've got to your house and then that goes out onto the internet and here in the house you've probably got 192.168.1.x that's anything from you know one all that up to 255. normally.1 is actually the router itself they're all the addresses that you've got in your network now that means you already have here a router is the one provided along with your internet connection maybe you bought it as a third-party one now you can replace that router with the raspberry pi mini router here and you can run open wrt on it which is an open source alternative firmware that allows you to do lots of kind of interesting things we'll talk about more than a minute on your network via this router so in this case you can see basically the routing is doing the same thing it's taking the traffic from what you have on your home network and putting it out onto the internet and this might be called the land connection local area connection and this one here on the left might be called the wand the wide area connection and it roots between the two of them literally it goes in here round around and inside and out the other one now another scenario where you might want to use a router is that you have a network set up as we described previously but you also have another bunch of computers for example maybe you've segregated some computers specifically for gaming so the traffic is only the gaming traffic that's going on here or maybe you've got you know guest networks or maybe you've got something in a small business you've got a different network whatever reason you've got another network and this is just a normal switch or hub here and these are all connected together now of course at some point you probably want these computers to be connected to the internet now of course there could be a second internet connection into your building into your house or cause it can go via your existing setup and that's where you would use something like the cm4 based mini router it will basically connect from this switch or hub that's connecting to all these pcs and then it will go into there and it will root out back up to your existing router and then onto the internet and this allows you here to provide a kind of a firewall and different functionalities like a bandwidth monitoring quality of service so you make sure that only the stuff that needs to get root down to internet only the internet comes in through here that is needed and everything else stays separate and secure so let's have a quick look at the carrier board here from a networking point of view as i mentioned earlier they call it the one port and the lan port so this port here would have a dhcp server which basically means anything connected to it can ask for a dynamically allocated iap address 192.10.2 would be that one and then i've got a client device here's an example one and two once i said 2.10 and it's got its address from here and then on the other side this acts as a dhcp client which means it asks for address what address do i need on this network and then it is then connected to your isp router or modem for off to the internet and basically what happens the client device will come in through here goes into all the magic that's got the you know the compute module four and all the other stuff we'll talk about in a minute out onto the one and back again and that's the way it works and from the outside looks like this as i said that's the lan port one on the right hand side ether zero in uh linux terms the one port is one here on the left hand side ether one and we'll talk more about here but you can see that the gigabit ethernet physical connection of the cm or the compute module four which is based on the broadcom is the one on the left the one on the right is one using the microchip lan 7800 which is usb 3 2 gigabit ethernet we'll talk more about that now so of the dual gigabit while ethernet port is connected to the gigabit ethernet physical connection of the cm4 module which is based on the broadcom bcm5421010 which is basically a 100 000 base t uh network uh uh chip and that works on standard category five unshielded twisted pair cable so basically an ethernet cable now the other one is a gigabit ethernet port that's going to do microchips lan 7800 which is a chip that basically does usb 3 2 gigabit ethernet and then the usb 3 side is actually taken from the pci interface of the compute module 4. so the normal carrier board has a usb 2. here you've got usb 3 and it's actually connected wide directly into the pci express interface so you're getting the best speed that you can get out of this and therefore you're getting gigabit ethernet out of both ports one connected directly to the processor the other via a usb 3 bridge so what else do you get in this compute module well of course it's based on the raspberry pi compute module 4. it includes the cm4 the kit that i got as i said you can buy it in different variations the one you get in the kit is with four gigabytes of ram and 32 gigabytes of internal memory using emmc it has dual gigabit ethernet as we've mentioned it supports open wrt that is a open source router firmware of course it also supports raspberry pi os because this is a standard compute module 4 so you can install uh raspberry pi os on it you've got lots of other cad activity because this is an alternative carrier board so you do have cameras and display interfaces including hdmi you've got dual usb 3 and then also on the board itself we've got another nine pin header for even more usb 3 ports got a micro sd card slot if you need to use it with a non emc version of the compute module four there's external fan support and it's powered by usb type c and the adapter you get if you buy it in the full kit is five volts and four amps which is a very healthy power supply which allows you to connect things like external hard drives uh without it being a drain on the overall power so that's really good so a quick look at the actual board itself you can see there the usb three nine pin header you've got these various camera and display connectors here that i'm talking about connector for a fan you've got the micro hdmi you've got the usb sequel you've got the dual gigabit ports you've got those two usb 3 ports you can solder on here serial port if you want to of course it comes this one comes with 32 gigabytes of emc on the compute 4 module you can see that there outlined by these four holes this is the module that goes on the carrier board which is here below you've got wi-fi of course is built into that bluetooth and then you've got the various gigabit stuff that's connect the physical stuff that goes on to the compute module four gigabytes of ram and a nice little reset button here so you can actually use this just as a carrier board with the compute module or of course you can use it you know specifically for open wrt talking of open wrt it's mainly it's what comes pre-flashed on the device it's mainly controlled by the web interface you can log in with secure shell i've done that tested it works absolutely fine but normally you're going through the web menu you type in the username and password and as you can see you have a fairly nice web interface to open wrt so really now we're looking at what you can do with open wrt of course there's firewall functionality there's a kind of all kinds of different servers you know and docker look here network attached storage vpn you can try all these different things you can that are supported by wrt open wrt and as its default configuration it just works as a router using those two ports lan and one as i described earlier and it just works you just plug it in and you've got connectivity between those two networks that you have connected so as i mentioned uh just some of the different functions it's a router by default because there's a whole lot of firewall stuff you can do nas functionality i've tried that you can plug in an external hard drive and then you can start sharing folders that works dynamic dns if you want to have a permanent kind of domain name going through to a dynamically allocated address that's what dynamic dns does for you bandwidth monitoring there's wi-fi support so you can connect to the router also via wi-fi and then that will get even out onto the internet via its routing capabilities very very flexible and comprehensive now of course the big question when it comes to a board like this is not only its flexibility but also its performance so i did some performance testing using iperf 3 and that means i don't need to rely on the speed of my internet connection okay what i'm doing is talking about the connection along this path here so on this pc i have an iperf 3 server running this is all gigabit ethernet on this side of the server then on this side i've got a client this is all again gigabit ethernet cards and cables and basically you go into the mini router out again and onto the server now how quickly can data transfer between these two via this device here and of course this switch here but i know really that this switch is a good uh gigabit ethernet switch and so let's have a look so the first one is you can see here going from the client to the server i managed a speed of 942 megabits per second which is basically the full saturation point 1.1 gigabytes per second or of the network so pretty much there at saturation point you can then run it in reverse and when i did that get slightly slower speed but still very impressive 914 megabits per second 1.06 giga bytes per second so that is again very very close to saturation but not quite as fast so it's clearly a slight difference in the the the speed going one way than the other but not much in it certainly over 900 megabits a second which is pretty impressive okay so there you have it a versatile and flexible solution there you can use it for open wrt if that's what you want to do you could use it as an alternative to the official carrier board from raspberry pi for your compute module you can reflash and do whatever you want depending on what project you've got so flexibility here is the key if you do want to get hold of one i'll leave a link into the description below okay that's it my name is gary sims this is gary explains i really hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up if you like these kind of videos well then do stick around by subscribing to the channel don't forget you can follow me on twitter at gary explains and i also have a newsletter go over to gary explains.com type in your email address you won't get any spam but you will get the newsletter okay that's it i'll see the next one [Music] you

Channel: Gary Explains

Views: 11,431

Keywords: Gary Explains, Tech, Explanation, Tutorial, Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, Compute Module 4, CM4, Gigabit Ethernet, Router, Dual Gigabit Ethernet Router, Dual Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, Broadcom BCM54210PE, Microchip LAN7800, USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet Bridge, Gigabit Ethernet Bridge, OpenWRT, raspberry pi, seeed, router board, internet, wan, lan, network, networking, linux, home network, homelab, wireless, seeed studios, tiny, smallest, gigabit, usb-c, flash, rj45

Id: QQcBghia9Cc

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021