In a win for modular, private, local IoT, I just upgraded my Home Assistant Yellow from a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 to a Compute Module 5 this morning, and got an instant 2x speed boost.
I first posted about the Yellow in 2022, and walked through my smart-but-private HA Yellow setup in my Studio in a video last year.
Because I was running an eMMC CM4 in the Yellow before, I ran a full backup (and downloaded it), yanked the CM4, flashed HAOS to a new NVMe SSD, and plugged that and the CM5 into my Yellow. After running a Restore (it's a handy option right on the first page that appears when you access homeassistant.local), I was up and running like there was no difference at all—just everything was a little more snappy.
The only caveat is the wide screw heads on the CM5 hold-down screws included with the Yellow are a bit close to the PMIC power circuits (especially a tiny capacitor), so I decided to switch screw heads to one that is a hair (like 0.02mm) smaller in diameter, just so it wasn't touching the edge of the cap. The screws aren't even necessary in any normal environment, as the heatsink uses pressure to hold down the CM5 as well.
As noted in Home Assistant's blog post announcing CM5 compatibility, the CM5 is probably overkill for most installations.
But for me, I often try out weird automations, or tinker with new features like locally/private voice automations and text-to-speech, and those benefit dramatically from the speedups. Like in a quick test, inference times on the device with a tiny Pi-optimized model went from 2.8 to 1.3 seconds.
When you're trying to converse with a voice assistant, that kind of latency reduction is huge!
I mentioned in my post early this morning, Raspberry Pi CM5 is 2-3x faster, drop-in upgrade (mostly), and that seems to hold true here.
I will continue testing other devices, and maybe I'll figure out a way to indicate CM4/CM5 compatibility on my Pi PCIe site.
Comments
Just read the latest blog post about this on the official Home Assistant website and read there as well that thw upcoming release of Home Assistant OS 14 will also bring support not only for CM5 but also for the Hailo-8 AI accelerator (AI accelerator found in the Raspberry Pi AI Kit).
Is there a compatible dual M.2 PCIe switch adapter that you can buy for the Home Assistant Yellow (and other CM4/CM5 carrier boards with only a single M.2 slot) that would allow us to use both a a Hailo-8 AI accelerator (Raspberry Pi AI Kit) and a NVMe SSD harddrive in it at the same time?
The point is that it would be awesome for Home Asssistant Yellow users could use a M.2 AI accelerator card like the Hailo-8 AI M.2 module without sacrificing the NVMe SSD storage M.2 slot, thus the need for some kind of PCIe switch adapter in a nice slim format for the Home Assistant Yellow.
Someone on X/Twitter asked about thermals, I just checked and after an hour of uptime in my office rack (ambient temp about 25°C), the CM5 SoC is at 52.6°C. The heatsink seems to be doing a good enough job inside the fanless and slightly-poorly-ventilated Yellow enclosure.
Can you try getting an Hailo-8 AI accelerator card (samw AI accelerator found in the Raspberry Pi AI Kit) working in Home Assistant Yellow together with NVMe storage at the same time via some PCIe switch adapter?