Add Seaberry Mini ITX Motherboard with tons of PCIe connectivity

[geerlingguy]

The Seaberry Pi CM4 Carrier Board is a Mini ITX form factor motherboard for the Pi with tons of PCI Express slots (including M.2 M-key for NVMe, A/E-key for WiFi/Google Coral TPUs, Mini PCIe, x16 PCIe, x1 PCIe... need I go on? It also has a number of other interesting IO and features built-in to make it a very full-featured motherboard for a Pi-based PC!

[sfxworks]

The super micro riser I got from a friend fits so n I c e l y oh man. This is gonna make a great router that could dual as a container registry or more

[geerlingguy]

@sfxworks - looks great! What's that HAT?

[TheGuyDanish]

Seems to be the Adafruit Ultimate GPS HAT.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2324

[sfxworks]

Yep, that's the one @TheGuyDanish. I don't have an atomic pcie clock card like you @geerlingguy but I did have this lying around 😄 I want to see about doing local ntp things using that.

[sfxworks]

Regarding PoE, has anyone figured out how to get it to work? It says it's poe capable, and I have two PoE switches but they don't power on the board. I also have some LoveRPi poe hats but they don't fit on the board, nor do I think they would support 802.3bt. So I am a bit anxious as to whether or not I should take some cables to connect the pins to see what would happen.

Also what size is the barrel? The ones I use for my quartz/rockpro64's don't work.

[geerlingguy]

It should be a typical 12v 2.5mm barrel plug; I powered mine with this adapter: https://amzn.to/3y4wPBm

For the PoE, a standard HAT wouldn't work since the PoE pins are separated from the main GPIO header (unlike the CM4 IO board layout)—you need a separate type of PoE device that you can break out and add jumpers to get to the PoE header on the Seaberry. ALFTEL sent one to me that can do bt, though I haven't had a chance to hook it up and test it yet (and my main switch only does PoE+ and not ++, so I'd have to get out an extra ++ injector too!).

[sfxworks]

Got it, though am I already pushing the board to its limit or is this user error due to power usage?
I have a 6 port lr-link with igp compiled, an adafruit GPS hat, an nvme, and an intel AX210. Last two with antennas. Sometimes all devices show up. At first I thought it was a fluke when my nvme was having trouble mounting on a restart, but then the AX210 started to freak and I just noticed the lr-link didn't show up on this last restart.

Two dmsg on a restart: https://gist.github.com/sfxworks/1c6cacafffddc7da6b49f68b4b00dca5
Last known pcie with lr-link missing:

-[0000:00]---00.0-[01-11]--+-00.0-[02-11]--+-01.0-[03]--
                           |               +-02.0-[04]--
                           |               +-03.0-[05]--
                           |               +-04.0-[06]--
                           |               +-05.0-[07]--
                           |               +-06.0-[08]--
                           |               +-07.0-[09]----00.0  Silicon Motion, Inc. SM2263EN/SM2263XT SSD Controller
                           |               +-08.0-[0a]--
                           |               +-09.0-[0b]--
                           |               +-0a.0-[0c]--
                           |               +-0b.0-[0d]--
                           |               +-0c.0-[0e]--
                           |               +-0d.0-[0f]----00.0  Intel Corporation Device 2725
                           |               +-0e.0-[10]--
                           |               \-0f.0-[11]--
                           \-00.1  PLX Technology, Inc. PEX 8619 16-lane, 16-Port PCI Express Gen 2 (5.0 GT/s) Switch with DMA

I might need to also include the fact that I turned off power saving node following this guide on making a stratum server with the hat there http://www.gregledet.net/computers/building-a-stratum-1-ntp-server-with-a-raspberry-pi-4-and-adafruit-ultimate-gps-hat/

[geerlingguy]

@sfxworks - What kind of power supply are you using? I was using an 8A 12V supply in my testing and didn't seem to have any issues. I should note that maybe once every 10 or 20 boots, I would see the entire PCIe bus get 'link down' on a regular CM4 IO Board in some types of tests, but I didn't see that with the Seaberry in my own testing—only some NVMe issues when I had more than 3-4 drives loaded.

[sfxworks]

Oh whoops, that would be on me then. I only paid attention to the barrel size and threw it a 12v3a one. Should have known better, especially with the previous mentions of the poe++ capabilities
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08C513N9P/

[geerlingguy]

@sfxworks - Yeah, that'll do it! 3A is barely enough for one or two low-power PCIe devices (in addition to the Pi itself). I was using this 8A adapter: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HTFGM6R/