Compute Module Support?

The Pi CM3 is a Pi 3 in a SODIMM space. It seems, with the right size carrier board, and some software h4x, you can get OTG working with it. This, plus a CSI to HDMI bridge, would seem to allow a TinyPilot to be only slightly larger than a Pi Zero, making an even TinierPilot.

The Pi Zero works, but is very slow. I'm seeing close to 750ms of lag even when overclocking the CPU, GPU and RAM. It is my hope that using a CM3 will have a few advantages.

• Speed. 4 cores, much faster
• RAM. twice a Pi Zero
• Disk. A CM3+ can have much faster eMMC, so there is no SD card is involved
• Size, Size, Size. I dream of this being in a single, tiny, case.

There is a pretty big downside to non-fullsized version of this carrier board and it goes with the problem of the CM3

• No Network.

The Pi CM3 doesn't have wifi and the tiny carrier board doesn't have ethernet. Normally, I'd use g_ether, but since we are using g_hid to connect to the host machine, this won't work. It turns out, you can use GPIOs to connect to an ESP32, but that's a lot of work. I'm just going to solder some motherboard USB headers onto the carrier board's unpopulated USB header and pop on some random USB wifi dongle.

I have ordered a CM3+ 8GB eMMC Pi, the above carrier board, a wifi dongle and a motherboard USB header. I will report back.

Start by reviewing the issue's linked CM3 carrier-board, OTG, CSI-to-HDMI, and USB Wi-Fi resources, then validate the proposed CM3+ setup against the existing Pi Zero behavior described in issue #93. Done would mean confirming whether TinyPilot can support the hardware, including the g_hid connection and networking constraints, and documenting the result.