The Raspberry Pi 5 is the default small computer most people reach for. The Radxa Dragon Q6A is the one that quietly ended up running Playbill, running Peregrine, and standing in as a candidate second brain for Headwaters that we are still working through. New video on the open-source channel puts the two boards side by side: what is on each, where each one wins, and why the Q6A keeps showing up in our designs.
The short version
The Q6A is an 85 mm by 56 mm single board computer built around the Qualcomm QCS6490. Eight Kryo cores in a one-plus-three-plus-four arrangement, an Adreno 643 GPU, hardware H.264, H.265, and VP9 decode up to 4K at 60 fps, and a Hexagon block rated at up to 12 TOPS of AI work, all on the same die. NVMe sits right on the board through an M.2 slot. So does a 12 V input, on both the USB-C port and an external pin header, which means you do not need a separate buck converter to run it from a vehicle. For $139 that is a lot of silicon to land in one part order, and once you have it on the bench it is hard to go back to a Pi for the jobs we use it for.
None of that makes the Pi 5 obsolete. It is still the better choice if you want the biggest community, the deepest pile of tutorials, and the easiest path to a known-good image. The video walks through where each board pulls ahead instead of pretending one of them wins outright.
Three places the Q6A shows up at TrailCurrent
The reason this board kept earning a spot on the bench is that it solves a different problem in each of three different modules.
- Playbill, the in-cabin computer. The Adreno 643 GPU and the hardware video decoder are what let local 4K movies play smoothly on a TV without spinning a fan to a whine. The chip does the heavy lifting and the CPU stays calm. The story of getting that working is in Playbill, Polished.
- Peregrine, the on-board voice assistant. The Hexagon NPU runs a Llama 3.2 1B model on the board at roughly twelve tokens per second. The microphone, the model, and the answer all stay inside the vehicle. No cell connection required, no audio leaving the rig.
- Headwaters, the edge gateway. The Q6A is the candidate second brain for Headwaters, sitting next to the Raspberry Pi CM5 on a Waveshare base. NVMe and 12 V are already on the board, which trims the bill of materials and the assembly step. It is not in production for Headwaters yet. The cheaper CAN hat we tried first kept filling its RX queue under real-world vehicle traffic and dropping frames, which is a hard no for the gateway role. We are working a fix and trying a different hat before we promote this variant the rest of the way. Background on adding the board is in Headwaters Gets a Second Platform, with the first power-on in Headwaters on Radxa: Confirmed Working.
What is in the video
A walk around both boards, what is integrated on each, and what you have to add as a hat or a cable. The places the Q6A pulls ahead, including the on-board NVMe, the on-board 12 V input, the GPU and hardware video decoder for entertainment work, and the Hexagon block for on-device AI. The places the Pi 5 still pulls ahead, including the bigger community, the broader catalog of accessories, and the smoother first-day experience for someone who has never set up a Linux board before. And the part most reviews skip: how each one feels to live with after you stop unboxing it and start using it.
Where the open-source channel fits
This video lives on @trailcurrentopensource, the behind-the-scenes channel. The main @trailcurrent channel is for what the system does and the value of running it on your rig. The open-source channel is for the work underneath: hardware reviews, firmware deep dives, design choices, and the kind of detail that does not belong in a product video. If that is the part you came here for, that is the channel to subscribe to.
Where to go next
If you want the Q6A board behind a specific module, the three product pages are Playbill, Peregrine, and Headwaters. For the prior video on why Headwaters moved off the Pi 5 onto the CM5, see Raspberry Pi 5 vs CM5. Everything that runs on top of these boards lives in the trailcurrentoss GitHub organization, free and open source, as it will always be.