that’s so cool! 
It’s not that I’m reaching the limit of the organelle (yet…) but I tend to like supercharged things and now that I have all this free time, I plan to port all my brutal patches to it and also start testing out pd~ . Greetings from Galicia.
I ended up doing this awesome upgrade… I coudnt get the 4 core to work but i got a dual core with wifi! Its really great. I have the CuBox left over… @technobear do you think we could turn our CuBoxes into another little organelle??
Build an audio interface for it?
Just a musing…
Odd, quad works fine for me ?!
Cubox, I tried with the dac it comes with and it was dreadful sound - so didn’t use it for anything.
As an organelle pretty useless without a hardware interface ( pots,screen) - and then adding a new sound card - at that point you might as well just use a rPI 
Hi Mark !
Big fan. I’ve had my 2nd-hand Organelle 1 for a couple months now ~ I’m inspired to finally begin the journey of learning a programming language ~> PD !
Orac 2.0 is truly wonderful ~ I’m enjoying it immensely as it is … yet the thought of an upgrade to the Organelle’s CPU has crossed my mind more than a couple of times (especially when using some of the newer modules) 
I’m wondering if the parts in this cubox i4pro would be suitable to upgrade my organelle 1 like you’ve done with your spare ?
I can’t spot a microSOM version on this site
Thanks for all your wonderful work in the community
and thanks in advance to anyone else who can reply to this in Mark’s place 
(ps yay first post 
)
Yup that’s exactly what I did.
Of course I cannot guarantee it’ll work for you,
eg there might be different revisions of the SoM.
It’s simple to do.
One thing to be clear, the organelle-1 patches are generally not multi-threaded , so don’t really utilize the multiple cores.
So improvements come from more memory and that some tasks can get moved to other cores ( also some parts of orac are run on threads)
Anyway don’t expect miracles ;).
Also i did mention here (?) , sometimes with this som the organelle would not start first time - almost felt like when it was ‘cold’ , it always booted the second time though.
That said bizarrely it doesn’t seem to do that anymore ?!
Hahaaaa sounds great overall ! I’m still keen.
I have one last question to clarify on this topic before I purchase a Cubox :
I’m using Organelle-1 version of the OS , - I assume I’ll be able to use patches (with multi-threading) designed for the Organelle M, on the Organelle 1 ?
EDIT:
looks like solid-run also sell the boards on their own !
(the cubox is still cheaper though hehe)
EDIT 2: Just bought the cubox i4-pro from the new-it website I linked in my earlier post … will post results once I’ve made the upgrade
Hey! I was wondering if anyone tested this on an ETC. I have both an Organelle-1 and an ETC and while there’s some other features in the newer Organelle-M and EYESY what I am missing the most is just power (CPU/RAM) on both machines. Also: I like the concept of recycling/reusing stuff
If this would work it would be awesome with 2 GB ram on the ETC (which is even more than the EYESY has), which should allow for loading more images… 512 mb fill up very quickly!
I opened both machines to check quickly, and the SOM look identical so in theory it should work?
it should work… though I dont have a ETC to check 
however, I should point out, as I did in original post - single core performance is not much better - and pygame only uses a single core.
you might get some better performance due to other tasks being on other cores, and also ram and gpu gains.
ram should just be availbable without code changes I believe.
this is a good time to make a ‘timely comment’ about upgrading Organelle-1 and ETC to quad core SoM vs Organelle-M/EYESY, and benefits…
of course, its great we can upgrade the SoM to make better use of our existing stuff… hey thats why I did this in the first place
BUT… comparing an upgraded Organelle-1/ETC to M/Eyesy is frankly comparing apples n’ oranges.
the issue is the os/software
the O1/ETC are using arch linux with particular drivers, that are nigh impossible to upgrade 
the OM/Eyesy are using a customised raspbian, which is completly up to date.
you cannot use the OM/Eyesy system image on the O1/ETC due to this.
generally this is not an issue, but it can be since the the OM/Eyesy is much more up to date, and has access to quiet a lot of software that is very difficult to get running on the older arch linux used by O1/ETC
example: Eyesy is able to run OpenFrameworks (see beta), this would be difficult/perhaps impossible to get running on an (upgraded) ETC.
this is not to dissuade people from ‘upgrading’ their ETC/M1… its a fun thing to do (at your own risk ;))
BUT lets not bring in comparisons to Eyesy/OM… its not realistic comparison they are quite different, and I don’t want people seeing this thread… thinking this upgrade, somehow is a way to get an eyesy/orgnanellem
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Thanks for the quick reply (and thanks for Orac and everything else you do!)
Yeah of course it is not equivalent by any means!
however, I should point out, as I did in original post - single core performance is not much better - and pygame only uses a single core.
that was going to be my next question! I was hoping that some multithreading would be possible within pygame… oh well
example: Eyesy is able to run OpenFrameworks (see beta), this would be difficult/perhaps impossible to get running on an (upgraded) ETC.
Yes! I was also quite excited about that since in general I feel quite limited with Pygame. Ideally I would like something like the ETC/EYESY that could run Processing (the learning curve seems less steep than OF)
I’m also considering selling the ETC and getting a new Organelle M, since I could use 2 organelles for different projects and I could always install OTC (thanks for that again!) on the O1…
Need to make up my mind!
Hi ya
I got a Cubox with version 1.5 of the SOM ~> from what I’ve read this means the built-in WiFi won’t work out of the box…
Mark - how far did you get compiling a compatible kernel last time you had a crack ?
FYI I have next to no experience coding or compiling ~> so, looking at the arch Linux wiki ‘how-to’ is quite daunting
However, if you feel like sharing: I’d be keen to poke around whatever work you did manage to do on that kernel
[EDIT] : [I am unsure whether it’s as simple as installing drivers for said wifi chip (I wish) or a new kernel is needed (as I suspect)]
I’m pleased to say the upgrade was a great success = the extra 2GB RAM & four core CPU definitely help the Organelle feel snappier !
I loaded up two Orac modules my OG1 couldn’t handle previously: koto (ported by Lcchy - patchstorage)
superposition (ben Blash - also patchstorage)
I had cycles->koto->superposition going on one chain and the CPU usage didn’t even exceed 50% !
Needless to say : dreams of my OG1 using Orac and being a beastly DnB machine for live sets /&/ jamming is now realised
Many thanks
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The WiFi should work ‘out of the box’ - mine does.
( ie organelle os already had compatible drivers)
Building kernel drivers is not really feasible on the organelle image. I did have a go at building an alternative distro which I’ve detailed in another post here - it seemed to work fine - but I never really followed up on it.
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I recall reading earlier in this thread that v.1.5 of the SOM had an incompatible wifi chip … is that now superfluous because of Organelle OS 4.0 ?
Here’s some pics of the SOM anyways and how the antenna is sitting …
AP mode is not working - the ‘Connected AP Mode’ message displays continuously upon selection but, the menu item only briefly switches from ‘Start AP’ to ‘Stop AP’ then returns to ‘Start AP’
I’m getting the ‘problem connecting’ message when trying to connect to my home network
info menu shows wifi as not connected
any help would be greatly appreciated but is not expected
Thank you for all of your work here on these forums
EDIT: chip is wifi / Bluetooth combo :
WL18MODGB
ah, yeah… I see i said mine was 1.3, and 1.5 was incompatible (in the first post )
given i was so specific, i’d say I’d looked up chipsets - and so knew why 1.5 would be incompatible.
but it was a long time ago, so can’t remember specifics, you’d have to go dig into specs.
as for recompiling kernel, as I said its difficult - again, Ive commented on this before above
here are some details from when I tried last time
https://forum.critterandguitari.com/t/kernel-compilation/1609
this is the post where I looked into creating a new ‘distro’ based on armbian
https://forum.critterandguitari.com/t/organelle-linux-upgrade-project/2351
BUT, I didnt really finish this off, so whilst it looked promising, its more of a ‘project’ than something people can just use.
so unfortunately, I think all I can suggest is using an usb wifi stick again…
as I mentioned at the start, Ive only any experience with the 1.3 revision, also the one Andy got working was also 1.3. ( I guess, the 1.3 stock is depleted now, give i was a couple of years ago!)
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quick update: I got a second hand cubox on ebay. Turns out it was the old 1.3 version of the som so built in wifi is working which is a nice treat. I’ve tried it on the Organelle1 so far, haven’t checked on the ETC. But it is working great! Thanks again for this amazing hack!
I’m not experiencing the issue @thetechnobear mentioned about needing to boot up twice, but I do feel that the organelle tends to get a little warmer after being turned on for a few hours, something I didn’t notice before. Is there an easy way to check CPU temperature f ex on the terminal?
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Hi there, I have an Organelle v3, with 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 with 512 MB RAM. I’ve bought it in 2019 and running the latest os and I love it. But since Orac and recently S in nowgrains or Orhack, my unit won’t handle these RAM hungry patches… too bad. Is it possible to upgrade the processor of my current unit… I don’t need the microphone, neither the battery of the M… I just need some more power… @chrisk? Is it possible to have some like of DIY upgrade? in order to catch up the current: * 1.2GHz ARM Cortex A53 (Quad-core; 64-bit)
- 1GB RAM?
Many thanks in advance to this marvelous user forum for your help.
Cheers, N
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I reccomend @nicolasbulb and @T8R to read the thread…
Yes, there is that unofficial cpu upgrade
and no.
not all organelles are based on cm3. (it was solid-run imx6 in the past. like 5 moons now.)
When c&g upgraded to cm3 probably they thought that it would be possible for anyone to upgrade easily to cm4 (as easy as replacing ram…). But sadly cm4 has a different form factor and connector than cm3. Pretty stupid move from raspberry…
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@thetechnobear seemed to have good experience with the SOM from the Cubox. We didn’t try this and and I don’t know how easy it is to get the same Cubox today (or the same SOM that is inside that Cubox).
As @Servandob mentions, the original Organelle (aka Organelle 1) uses a SOM from SolidRun. Since upgrading to the Organelle M and S (which use rPi CM3), we haven’t kept up with the developments to the SolidRun SOMs. It is possible that the newer SolidRun SOMs have:
- the same PCB connectors.
- the same placement/location of the connectors.
- identical pin outs as the original SOM.
- same power requirements as original SOM.
- the updated SOM hardware does not require any changes to be made to the OS.
- (there’s probably something else I am forgetting that needs to be identical)
- (there’s probably at least one more thing I am forgetting that needs to be identical)
If the above are true, you could get a new SOM and try swapping them. It may work. (no guarantees here!)
If any item in the above list isn’t true, the possibility to upgrade quickly approaches 0% unfortunately.
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Mmmh… thanks for all the detailed explanitions. Sounds a bit risky… since my Organelle is working perfectly since 2019. Maybe I’ll dive into the M… 3 more question for @chrisk:
- does the wifi is included into the new M architecture or is it still an external dongle that take up an USB port like in OG1?
- I really like the lowfi approach with 4 AA batteries but how long will it last with let’s say 4×AA rechargeable batteries of 1900mAh? roughly?
- how usable is the microphone? I mean how sensible it it?
Many thanks.
N
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The WiFi is not internal and still requires a USB dongle/port.
I usually experienced about 2-3 hours with normal AA batteries and I was finding myself burning through them. I opted for a USB to 9v converter from myVolts and using a more powerful external battery.
The microphone isn’t super great but it’s usable if you are alright with a more lofi sound. It does pick up a lot of noise from the keys, knobs, touching the unit, etc which can be annoying. When recording, it will pick up the initial clicking but I think using that can be a cool sound especially when using delay for effect. Great for capturing some quick sounds if you don’t mind that first click. There are samplers for the Organelle that can adjust your start point to remove it than or in an audio editor.
I find myself using a Tascam DR05x most of the time as my microphone of choice with the Organelle for live looping.
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Mmh, many thanks for the detailed feedback. How about the switch from Inline and microphone, is it either line in or microphone or could it be and/or and use them both at the same time?
Many thanks.
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