Wrote this article after receiving my Cerbo GX MK2.
I had been running Venus on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B for 3 or 4 months.
Was very happy with it, just rock solid. Never once, did I feel like it was being pushed beyond it's processing power.
Not long after setting up the Pi did I realized it's limitations. And the list was long.
No native CAN-Bus support, no relay's, no digital inputs, tank sensors and finally no VE.Direct ports.
VE.Direct was easily dealt with, using Victron's VE.Direct to USB dongle. The others were a little more challenging.
That's when I joined the community, developing code to help overcome these limitations.
The particular project I was working on was @fguiot (aka Lucifer06) RemoteGPIO. This project adds additional Relay's and Digital inputs to any device running Venus OS. But did take long to figured out there was an issue with the Digital inputs not functioning on the Raspberry Pi.
Spent some time and resolved the problem. Now I needed a real GX to make sure that my code ran on it, without issues. Figuring the Cerbo had to be the most popular GX device out there, I placed my order.
My Cerbo GX MK2 arrived, and I fired it up. Launched the Victron Remote Console and was greeted with a very underwhelming experience. Just going from page to page in the Console was painful, analogy would be like trying to walk in 3ft of snow. I had to see what was under the hood of the MK2, it was obviously struggling.
Off I went to get some specifications of the Cerbo's SoC. I couldn't find anything published on the topic and probably for good reason, I wouldn't publish it either.
Pretty clear from my findings, why it behaves like it does.
Specification Cerbo GX Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
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Architecture: armv7l arm7l
CPU(s) 2 4
Thread(s) per core: 1 1
Core(s) per socket: 2 4
Socket(s): 1 1
Vendor ID: ARM ARM
Model name: Cortex-A7 Cortex-A72
CPU max MHz: 960.0 1500.0
CPU min MHz: 144.0 600.0
MIPS: 50.52 108.00
The Cerbo GX MK1 & 2's SoC is based on the Cortex-A7 that was first released back in 2011. Half the CPU cores, half the clock speed and scoring just under half the number of MIPS as 5 year old Pi.
Now I know why the Cerbo GX experience feels like it does. It just doesn't posses the processing power necessary for a fluid experience.
$45 Pi verses a $350 Cerbo. My baseless expectation was that it would at least keep pace with Raspberry Pi 4 model B. Never even crossed my mind, that a device that was released Q1 2024 maybe late 2023 in some parts of the globe, would be so horribly under-powered. Really a same, would have taken a couple of month to do it right. If was wasn't developing for code for Venus, this thing would be going back to Vicrtron. Still might, it's so bad.
So any of you guys that started out like me on a Pi and think you'll be stepping up getting a Cerbo GX, you're are dead wrong. It's bad, really bad.
Asked my dealer to send me an Ekrano for testing, they didn't know what it had under the hood. But they did tell me it was substantially quicker. I'll update post this with my findings, once it arrives.
