The uConsole Is The Coolest All-New DIY Handheld We've Ever Had Our Hands On

foreign hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at a really interesting piece of kit here known as the U console from Clockwork pie now some of you may be familiar with this company from their game shell this was released a few years ago and it's pretty awesome do-it-yourself handheld gaming console then they came to the market with the dev term another awesome little handheld portable device as you can see it's got that built-in keyboard I did a video on that one also but today we've got the brand new U console so like I mentioned this is a do-it-yourself kit and this actually comes with everything you need to get up and running except for the 18650 batteries we'll take a look at those in a little bit but again we've got a Linux powered portable console here with some really awesome features built in and over on their website you can choose from a few different models and basically the differences between I think they offer three right now is going to be your CPU and RAM combo some of them do offer a bit better performance on the GPU and CPU but what we have here is powered by a Raspberry Pi cm4 and I opted to get this one for maximum compatibility as we know there's still a lot of Community Development going on with the Raspberry Pi and I really wanted to get the most out of this unit that I could the shell itself is fully constructed of aluminum it's got that built-in keyboard with Dome switches and it is backlit overall really like what they've done here and this one does come with the Raspberry Pi cm4 and by the way the U console kit is 4G compatible it comes with the module you'll need for your sim card the only thing this kit doesn't come with are batteries and this is powered by 18650 cells you can get away with just using one if that's all you have but I've got two 2 000 milliamp hour cells right here giving me a total of 4 000 milliamp hours for this handheld and another really cool thing about this is it's got a rollerball track pad just like on an old Blackberry now we're going to jump right into the assembly and like I mentioned the shell is constructed of aluminum and taking a quick glance at the instructions it's actually really simple to assemble now the first thing we need to do here is install our screen this is a 5 inch 720p IPS display and we're going to install this in the mid section of the device next up we need to install our keyboard PCB this does use Dome switches but they actually feel really good once everything's installed and I also noticed that the keyboard PCB does have Micro USB now we're not going to be using it for the build but you could plug this into a PC and use it directly on that device oh yeah and the keyboard here is also backlit so you can use this thing very easily in the dark the screen here with the U console does not support touch so we do need an easy way to kind of navigate the operating system and for this they opted to use a trackball anybody who's ever picked up a Blackberry knows exactly what this is going to feel like and I mean it's just like going back there it actually works really well with the firmware they have four raspberry pios now that we have the screen keyboard and trackball in place we're going to put on the front plate here and the screen does have this little protector on it kind of just wanted to peel it back a bit so it'll be easier to get off once everything's put together but this is going to be held in with six screws well they're more like bolts and it is hex Hardware very high quality and really the only tool you'll need to assemble this is included moving around to the back of the console we need to install the Clockwork Pi V3 1.4 revision 5. that's the one that came included with this and this new version supports their cm4 Core board so basically it's just like a little Ram Dem we're going to install the cm4 directly to the Core board we'll go ahead and make sure everything's lined up make sure it snaps down nice and snug and now we can slot this directly into the Clockwork pie 3.14 board as you can see it locks right in just like a so dim Ram stick would in a laptop and now we need to install our Wi-Fi antenna so this does support a 4G module and it comes included but this is simply our Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antenna that's going to go directly to the cm4 the u-console also comes with dual speakers so we'll go ahead and install those and uh basically when we install our 4G module it's going to make contacts with the pins on the back of those speakers connecting it to the whole system so this is going to slot right in it's got a SIM card slot directly on the 4G module so if you did want to add LTE to the U console you can definitely do it right out of the box we're actually almost done with assembly we've just got a few more things to do here like adding the battery module to 18650 cells will fit inside of here but like I mentioned in the beginning you could run this off of a single 18650 if you wanted to and if you don't have those batteries on hand when you assemble this you can plug USB type-c directly into the USB type-c port on the U console and get power to the unit just to make sure you've assembled everything properly the final thing we need to do here is install the back cover and this is also aluminum this is what's going to cool down our cm4 module because they've also included a large thermal pad that'll go directly on that CPU and once we've placed the back cover on put the six screws in it we're gonna be good to go it will make contact with that back cover and turn offering more than enough aluminum to cool that cm4 CPU off go ahead and get this protective cover off of the screen and we'll boot it up for the first time this came with a 32 gigabyte micro SD card with our image already installed so we've got an operating system right now we're running Raspberry Pi OS with all of the drivers and firmware installed for the keyboard the trackball the screen everything should work right out of the box using their included image but yeah I do think this thing looks really awesome very industrial look they also include a kickstand that you can install just two screws on the side that'll hold everything up for you I think they've done a really great job putting this thing together and we've got a built-in controller so we can play some retro games on here we've got that full backlit qwerty keyboard and of course since we're using that compute module 4 we've got Wi-Fi and Bluetooth it's actually AC Wi-Fi plus since it's a pie there's lots of software that we can install and mess around with on this unit so up top we've got our power button with an LED indicator plus a Micro SD card slot over here on the right hand side one full-size USB 2.0 Port we've also got USB type-c for charging up the battery and just powering the unit in general micro HDMI and a 3.5 millimeter audio jack and over here on the left hand side we've got our Clockwork Pi expansion Port it is sold separately but uh you can always pick it up from their store you can adjust the built-in screen brightness directly from the keyboard and we can also enable or disable the backlit on the keyboard itself my image here might not come across as well but we do have a backlit keyboard single color it does look pretty decent and over on the website they do give you a better look at it and I know it might seem strange to some people but my favorite thing about the U console besides the overall look is this built-in trackball it works out really well with Raspberry Pi OS but some people may want to touch screen and it would be nice if they had the option but unfortunately from everything that I've seen over on their website right now they don't offer a touch screen model of the Yukon Soul yet typing on the built-in keyboard is really satisfying we've got a little bit of click here from those Dome switches and you can get to all of these Keys very easily just holding it in your hand like this you don't have to set it down or anything like that just ran a quick update from terminal but so far I've been having a blast with the U console and to tell you the truth it's actually the most fun I've had with the Raspberry Pi in a while now but uh of course we are limited to the performance of the Raspberry Pi or the cm4 which is basically a Raspberry Pi 4 with a little bit of an overclock and of course there are some tweaks we can do here with Raspberry Pi OS to make it run a bit better built-in speakers aren't that loud but we do have that 3.5 millimeter audio jack over on the side and you know if you're familiar with the performance that the cm4 can put out then you know exactly what this thing can do and the Raspberry Pi does retro emulation really well with this image that they provide it does have retro Arch pre-installed I just went with the xmb theme installed a few cores here and we'll go with some uh GBA first then we'll move over to some Sega Genesis here's Sonic Advance 2 for Game Boy Advance the built-in controller was mapped with retroarch right out of the box with this image they provide we've got our d-pad over here a little bit of clickiness to it because it's also using Dome switches a b x y LR there's no rear buttons on the Yukon soul but one thing I have noticed here is a little bit of screen tearing with retroarge I'm sure some configuration would definitely fix that up but let's move over to some Sega Genesis real quick we'll just go with air Buster and overall the d-pad works pretty well for these retro games obviously we don't have any analog sticks or anything built in you could always connect an external controller and use that mini HDMI to get a bigger display but we can use this trackball with certain PC games and emulators that would support it pretty cool I definitely need a little bit of getting used to I probably need to adjust the sensitivity so I can kind of scroll a little further with one scroll here but uh I can definitely play these games with it first impressions here the Yukon Soul I've been having a lot of fun with it like like I mentioned it's the most fun that I've had with the Raspberry Pi in some time now build quality is awesome assembly is super easy here and since this is using a Raspberry Pi there's a lot of different operating systems that we can mess around with on this unit and that's something I'd actually like to take a look at in a future video so if the interest is there definitely let me know down below but that's going to wrap it up for this first look video if you're interested in learning a little more about the U console I will leave some links in the description and again if there's anything else you want to see running on the you console just let me know down below but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching

Channel: ETA PRIME

Views: 871,872

Keywords: etaprime, eta prime, clockworkpi uconsole review, console cm4, clockwork uconsole cm4 linux, uconsole rpi-cm4, clockworkpi, raspberry pi 5, clockworkpi uconsole, linux handheld, raspberry pi, fantasy handheld, open source, interchangeable cores, open source handheld, metal design handheld, uconsole unboxing, raspberry os, hacking tool, raspberry pi projects

Id: ikF0pZqpfYw

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2023