Frankfurt-based Maker and Twitter user timonsku decided to create his own carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. He milled the PCB as a single copper layer with no vias or solder mask. He soldered it up, attached the CM4, provided power over USB-C and lo and behold, the screen sprang to life and displayed the OS he had loaded via a microSD card.

As he says on the Twitter thread, this wouldn’t pass any sort of certification, but the HDMI does work:

Here’s another pic showing just the carrier board:

This was just a proof-of-concept without any bells and whistles such as GPIO breakouts, but he did it just to show how relatively easy it is to do a simple carrier board for the CM4.

You can view the Twitter thread here. The project has been uploaded to Hackaday and you can access the PCB files on GitHub.

Thanks to Albert Hickey for spotting this!