Lenovo ThinkCentre M75n IoT Fanless Edge Device with 6W AMD CPU

[Patrick Kennedy]

We take a look at the Lenovo ThinkCentre M75n IoT fanless edge node with a 6W AMD Athlon Silver 3050e processor to see how it fares

The post Lenovo ThinkCentre M75n IoT Fanless Edge Device with 6W AMD CPU appeared first on ServeTheHome.

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[tinfoil3d]

This is interesting as a very low-powered gateway.
They dont' sell a lot of stuff here in japan that they do sell in the US. That's a big problem actually, considering the fact they don't ship abroad from US or other shops and only accept local cards.
Lack of second NIC is meh, but on the other hand they never put in 10gig cards into these 1lpcs. So you can actually attach something like SFP+ NIC via 10gig usb ports. If you REALLY want that speed on such a low-powered device.

 

[tinfoil3d]

I love the fact that it apparently has a visually working modem slot and even a soldered sim slot? Can you test that?

 

[tinfoil3d]

I've got two used units for 150 each. Let's see if they also have some builtin slots for WWAN cards.

 

[tinfoil3d]

I'll be testing WWAN after I get the card later this month. Sim slot is populated in both of units I got. Theoretically it should work since they went so far to actually install a SIM holder component on the board. Some resistors/caps on its side are missing though but those may be unrelated, SIM doesn't need that many components, it basically just hooks up to the WWAN slot. The point here is how to make it work on linux. That's what I'll be testing.

One note @Patrick , it wasn't clear in video or website review that BOTH M.2 slots take both 2242 and 2280, m2_ssd1 slot's screw hole is on the chassis itself. Not sure if anyone would want to put something like dual 2280 into such system, but you CAN. Just note that second slot is x2. That is fine for SATA type SSD but obviously on nvme it would cap max speeds(if system won't throttle first lol).
Otherwise performance is as you may expect it. Apparently it throttles at 57C and max freq for all cpus is set to 400MHz after that. To put that into perspective, at that point it is around 40MB/s read from NVMe and just transmitting that as TCP from bultin NIC. With no other processes running. It's live devuan linux running from RAM.

 

[tinfoil3d]

Okay, so I confirm that with EM7455 LTE or whatever connectivity works in this m75n computer. You need to remove the NVMe disk, insert your nano-SIM and I actually just reused the antenna cables from wifi card which I didn't use and removed, and pulled those wires behind all the way around to the LTE card slot, threw in wifi antenna and the setup works. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with all this, all you need to know is collected here EM7455, Deactivate Low-Power-Mode , here FCC unlock procedure and the AT keygen for this and many other sierra modules with FCC lock is here edl/sierrakeygen at master · bkerler/edl this is all very recent and works. I've spent two hours figuring this out but then it just works after you get past FCC lock and get rid of RadioPowerOff error. There's also this guide Sierra Wireless Modems - Advanced Configuration
It should be pretty easy to figure out mbimcli -d /dev/cdc-wdm0 -p --query-ip-configuration after you ran mbim-network /dev/cdc-wdm0 start
You just set that with ip or whatever network management you're using.

 

[tinfoil3d]

Because I have a lenovo-branded module i had no troubles at all starting a computer, no POST issues. However a lot of modules out there may be generic or not lenovo-branded, for that there's also a ton of docs out there, i recommend checking out GitHub - danielewood/sierra-wireless-modems: EM7565/EM7455/MC7455 - Modem Configuration

 

[tinfoil3d]

mbim-network is just a wrapper script for the mbimcli (in debian/ubuntu both are coming from libmbim-utils package)
when you run that you can see the commands it's actually executing under the hood. First is you run --query-subscriber-ready-status, if you don't, you're "unitialized" and can't proceed with anything else. then you attach to "packet service" and call the connect, and finally you get the issued ip details to set up your wwanX interface with. after that it just works, i even get a public ipv6 address which is really cool feature to have.

So to conclude, all in all, m75n is a really nice little computer yet keep in mind it's very low power, throttles easily if it gets hot. Far, far worse than m90n nano iot. Choose wisely. Because I got these for $150 each it was in okay range for performance. Expandability/upgradability is good(except for RAM and CPU lol). It was just luck, especially since both units were under 20 hours total run time according to their NVMe SMART data. And overall condition. Barely ever touched.

 

[tinfoil3d]

A kind of success story?
This baby has been running here for 1y+ with just few maintenance and upgrade reboots, no issues whatsoever, but it's really low-performance machine as mentioned above. I use it as standalone LTE router and it never ever had problems with em7455 modem.
I'm not using builtin RJ45 port but rather use USB SFP instead. I do use USB SFP adaptors a lot and they also never failed me. Everything just works.