AMD Radeon PRO W7700 running on Raspberry Pi After years of work among a bunch of people in the Pi community (special callout to Coreforge!), we finally have multiple generations of AMD graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi 5. We recently got Polaris-era GPUs working (like the RX460), but in the past month we've gotten 6000 and...
M4 Mac mini's efficiency is incredible I had to pause some of my work getting a current-gen AMD graphics card running on the Pi 5 and testing a 192-core AmpereOne server to quickly post on the M4's efficiency. I expected M4 to be better than M1/M2 (I haven't personally tested M3), and I hoped it would at least match the previous...
Popular Rockchip SBC distro in limbo after maintainer burns out Recently Joshua Riek posted he's dropping off from GitHub. If you haven't heard of him, he's one of the few reasons working with Linux on Rockchip SBCs is so much easier today than it was just a few years ago. His Ubuntu Rockchip distribution is built for Ubuntu 22 and...
Why Raspberry Pi for an SBC guy If anyone asks why I prefer to work with Raspberry Pis when I want to tinker on a random project, consider: I just spent the past hour with a brand new ArmSoM Sige7 board (see my debugging notes in my sbc-reviews repo). This SBC has been on the market for months, with glowing reviews all the way back...
Home Assistant and CarPlay with the Pi Touch Display 2 After a decade, Raspberry Pi finally upgraded their official Touch Display from 480p to 720p, while keeping the price and overall aesthetic the same. I've had early access to the Touch Display 2, and have been testing it in a variety of scenarios. Generally, Linux touchscreen...
LTT's Precision Screwdriver - better than iFixit? Two years ago, Linus Sebastian released a general purpose ratcheting screwdriver tailored towards PC building and IT needs. I reviewed the LTT Screwdriver, and found it to be a good tool that did improve a couple things where it counted: the ratchet mechanism was useful for a broad...
Finding a server's BMC / IPMI IP address with ipmitool I test servers on a temporary basis a lot, and many enterprise servers don't have as user-friendly external port indications, or little OLED displays to provide useful information. They're no-frills because they don't need frills, you just deploy them and they run for years. I...
JetKVM: tiny IP KVM that's not an Apple Watch Despite what it looks like, this isn't a hot-rod Apple Watch. This is an IP KVM. What does that mean? It's basically a remote control rocket pack for any computer, from a giant tower PC, to a little mini PC you might run in your homelab. It's called JetKVM, and the team behind it sent me...
Qualcomm cancels Snapdragon Dev Kit, refunds all orders This afternoon I received the following email from Arrow, regarding the Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows: Dear Valued Customer, Please see this important message from Qualcomm: ”At Qualcomm, we are dedicated to pioneering leading technology and delivering premium...
Realizing Meshtastic's Promise with the T-Deck Meshtastic—a simple off-grid mesh network used to transfer short messages—is a neat bit of tech, but until recently, most development has focused on little nodes with or without tiny OLED displays, and a separate phone app or web UI to actually interact with the mesh. The major use case I...
3rd Party PoE HATs for Pi 5 add NVMe, fit inside case Today I published a video detailing my testing of three new Raspberry Pi HATs—these HATs all add on PoE+ power and an NVMe SSD slot, though the three go about it in different ways. You can watch the video for the full story (embedded below), but in this post I'll go through my...
Use an External GPU on Raspberry Pi 5 for 4K Gaming After I saw Pineboards 4K Pi 5 external GPU gaming demo at Maker Faire Hanover, I decided it was time to set up my GPU test rig and see how the Pi OS amdgpu Linux kernel patch is going. I tested it out on a livestream over the weekend, but I thought I'd document the current state of...
Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows - the fastest X Elite, tested I have mixed feelings publishing this post: many developers who are actively trying to port their Windows software to Arm are still awaiting shipment of their own Snapdragon Dev Kits, and I seem to be one of the first few people to receive one. Everyone I've been in contact...
AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus - Can't record to microSD I recently purchased an AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus to help record screens on devices I test at my desk. It's claim to fame is being able to record to a microSD card standalone (at resolutions up to 1080p60), without having a separate computer attached. For my 4K...
Qualcomm Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows Teardown (2024) In late July, a week after ordering the Snapdragon Dev Kit, I wondered where it was. Arrow's website said 'Ships tomorrow' when I ordered, after all. Many developers eager to test their code on Windows on Arm, on the premiere new 'CoPilot+' PCs that would revolutionize computing...
Elecrow responded, apologized for AI voice cloning AI voice cloning is a tool. It can be used, and it can be abused. Your browser does not support the video tag. Last week I was made aware that Elecrow, an electronics manufacturer and distributor, was using an unauthorized clone of my voice in some of their YouTube tutorials. I...
They stole my voice with AI Listen to this clip: Your browser does not support the video tag. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty familiar. I mean I would like you to subscribe to my channel. But that's the Jeff Geerling channel, not Elecrow, where the clip above is from. I never said the words that are in that video....
Sipeed NanoKVM: A RISC-V stick-on This is the Sipeed NanoKVM. You stick it on your computer, plug in HDMI, USB, and the power button, and you get full remote control over the network—even if your computer locks up. How did Sipeed make it so small, and so cheap? The 'full' kit above is about $50, while the cheapest competitors running...
What happens when you touch a Pickle to an AM radio tower? A few months ago, our AM radio hot dog experiment went mildly viral. That was a result of me asking my Dad 'what would happen if you ground a hot dog to one of your AM radio towers?' He didn't know, so one night on the way to my son's volleyball practice, we tested it. And it...
RF safety experiments - Meat & Pickles demonstrate foldback A few months ago, our AM radio hot dog experiment went mildly viral. That was a result of me asking my Dad 'what would happen if you ground a hot dog to one of your AM radio towers?' He didn't know, so one night on the way to my son's volleyball practice, we tested it. And it...
New 2GB Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings Raspberry Pi launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip. This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5's shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said: The new D0 stepping strips away all that...
Positron - an upside-down and portable 3D printer I've been getting into 3D printing lately. I have an older Ender 3 V2 at home I bought during COVID. And in the past year I've acquired an Ender 3 S1, Bambu Labs P1S, and Prusa MK4. I also dove head-first into 3D CAD, and designed a number of small SBC cases or parts to help with...
Radxa X4 SBC Unites Intel N100 and Raspberry Pi RP2040 At first glance, especially from the top, the Radxa X4 is your typical Arm SBC: But you'll quickly notice the lack of an SoC—that's on the bottom. Looking more closely, what's a Raspberry Pi chip doing on top?! First, let's flip over the board to investigate. There's the SoC:...
Raspberry Pi Pico 2 - RP2350 adds more PIO, RISC-V cores The $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was announced today, with a new chip, the RP2350. This silicon improves on almost every aspect of the RP2040: 3 PIOs instead of 2 150 MHz instead of 133 MHz base clock Faster Arm Cortex M33 cores and RISC-V Hazard3 cores I've had access to pre-release...
Milk-V Jupiter is the first ITX RISC-V board I've tested The latest RISC-V computer I've tested is the Milk-V Jupiter. It's pokey at Intel Core 2 Duo levels of performance—at least according to Geekbench. But performance is only one aspect that interests me. This is the first RISC-V Mini ITX motherboard I've tested, which means it...
Fixing curl install failures with Ansible on Red Hat-derivative OSes Over the past few months, I've noticed some of my automation failing on Red Hat-derivative OSes like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. The reason for this has to do with the inclusion of a curl-minimal package in some distros, which conflicts with curl if you try installing...
Hacking Pi firmware to get the fastest overclock Since boosting my Pi 5 from the default 2.4 GHz clock to 3.14 GHz on Pi Day, I've wanted to go faster. Especially since many other users have topped my Geekbench scores since then :) In March, Raspberry Pi introduced new firmware that unlocked frequencies above 3,000 MHz for...
Getting Started with Meshtastic After seeing the Meshtastic booth at Open Sauce, my Dad and I thought it would be fun to learn more about the low power radio tech by getting our own radios and experimenting. Then, we were contacted by Simon from Muzi Works, and he offered to send a few units of R1 and H1, his company's pre-built...
The state of Docker on popular RISC-V platforms I've been testing a Milk-V Jupiter this week, and have tested a number of other RISC-V development boards over the past two years. As with any new CPU architecture, software support and ease of adoption are extremely important if you want to reach a wider audience. I wouldn't expect...
Where is Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit? I signed up to buy a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Dev Kit the second I found out about it. It's supposed to be the Mac mini killer for Windows. They even promoted it with this amazing-looking transparent shell, and I and hundreds of other devs were ready to pony up the $899 Qualcomm was asking....
NUMA Emulation speeds up Pi 5 (and other improvements) Recently an Igalia engineer posted a NUMA Emulation patch for the Pi 5 to the Linux Kernel mailing list. He said it could improve performance of Geekbench 6 scores up to 6% for single-core, and 18% for multicore. My testing didn't quite match those numbers, but I did see a...
If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine. But as you...
Installing Ansible on a RISC-V computer Ansible runs on Python, and Python runs on... well pretty much everything. Including newer RISC-V machines. But Ansible has a lot of dependencies, and some of these dependencies have caused frustration from time to time on x86 and Arm (so having issues with a dependency is just a way of life...
Testing new Raspberry Pi 5 Cases - $7 to $79 Since the Pi 5's launch, a number of Pi case redesigns have launched, and there are a few new entrants with something to offer. Like Fractal's 'Baby North'... which, unfortunately, is only a prototype designed for their displays at Computex, and is not being planned for sale. At least not...
Remote shell to a Raspberry Pi at 39,000 ft For a few weeks I've been beta testing remote shell, the latest addition to Raspberry Pi Connect. Just a couple hours ago I was on a flight home from the new Micro Center in Charlotte. One huge problem with VNC or remote desktop is how flaky it is if you have limited bandwidth or an unstable...
Giving away 480 Raspberry Pis was harder than I expected I gave away 480 Raspberry Pi Picos at Open Sauce last weekend, and ran into a number of challenges doing so. All of them self-inflicted, of course. I didn't want to just hand them out like candy—or, well... that's exactly what I did: My initial plan was to build a backpack mount...
Newer versions of Ansible don't work with RHEL 8 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is supported until 2029, and that distribution includes Python 3.6 for system python. Ansible's long been stuck between a rock and a hard place supporting certain modules (especially packaging modules like dnf/yum on RHEL and its derivatives, because the...
55 TOPS Raspberry Pi AI PC - 4 TPUs, 2 NPUs I'm in full-on procrastination mode with Open Sauce coming up in 10 days and a project I haven't started on for it, so I decided to try building the stable AI PC with all the AI accelerator chips I own: Hailo-8 (26 TOPS) Hailo-8L (13 TOPS) 2x Coral Dual Edge TPU (8+8 = 16 TOPS) 2x Coral Edge...
Testing Raspberry Pi's AI Kit - 13 TOPS for $70 Raspberry Pi today launched the AI Kit, a $70 addon which straps a Hailo-8L on top of a Raspberry Pi 5, using the recently-launched M.2 HAT (the Hailo-8L is of the M.2 M-key variety, and comes preinstalled). The Hailo-8L's claim to fame is 8 TOPS/W efficiency, which, along with the Pi's...
Saying a lot while saying nothing at all about Ansible AWX A few days ago, the post Upcoming Changes to the AWX Project came across my feed. An innocuous title, but sometimes community-impacting changes are buried in posts like this. So, as an interested Ansible user, I read through the post. In 1,610 words, almost nothing of...
Can the Raspberry Pi 5 handle 4K? In the past, I've booted LibreELEC on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 in my "This is not a TV" Sharp NEC display. According to LibreELEC's Pi 5 blog post, the new BCM2712 SoC decodes 4K and 1080p content just fine in H.264, and supports HEVC 4K60 hardware decoding. And they've tested AV1, VC1, and...
Testing object detection (yolo, mobilenet, etc.) with picamera2 on Pi 5 Besides the Pi 5 being approximately 2.5x faster for general compute, the addition of other blocks of the Arm architecture in the Pi 5's upgrade to A76 cores promises to speed up other tasks, too. On the Pi 4, popular image processing models for object detection,...
LattePanda Mu crams x86 PC into SoM form factor LattePanda's been building Intel-based SBCs for almost a decade, but until now, they've never attempted to unite an Intel x86 chip with the popular SoM-style form factor Raspberry Pi's dominated with their Compute Module boards. This year they've introduced the LattePanda Mu, a SoM that...
The Cicadas are Here There are annual cicadas. Then there are 13-year cicadas. And 17-year cicadas. Then there are days like today when 13 and 17 year cicadas emerge from the ground around the same time, creating a fairly odd event in our backyard. My daughters are helpfully pointing out a few of the thousands of holes in the ground...
microSD cards' SBC days are numbered For years, SBCs that aren't Raspberry Pis experimented with eMMC and M.2 storage interfaces. While the Raspberry Pi went from full-size SD card in the first generation to microSD in every generation following (Compute Modules excluded), other vendors like Radxa, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, etc. have...
Quick NVMe performance testing with fio I've recently been debugging some NVMe / PCIe bus errors on a Raspberry Pi, and I wanted a quick way to test NVMe devices without needing to create a filesystem and use a tool like iozone. I don't care about benchmarks, I just want to quickly push the drive and read and write some data to it....
Import unsupported camera RAW files into Apple Photos Many years ago, I decided to migrate my photo library from Apple's now-defunct Aperture to Photos, so I could take advantage of Apple's iCloud Photo Library (don't worry, I still have three full complete local backups, plus a separate cloud backup besides Apple's iCloud originals)....
Achieving Pro Zoom meeting quality on my Mac For the past decade, I've worked remote. I slowly moved from full-time software and infrastructure dev to YouTuber, and throughout that time, I kept tweaking my desk video recording/conferencing setup. I wanted to document my setup today, as I've tweaked it a bit in my new studio space....
Raspberry Pi is getting into the services game ...and it's all free—so far. Raspberry Pi today launched Raspberry Pi Connect, a free remote VPN service for all Pi OS users. If you create a Raspberry Pi ID, you can sign up for Connect, install rpi-connect on a Pi 4 or 5 running 64-bit Pi OS 12 'Bookworm', and register that Pi with the...
4-way NVMe RAID comes to Raspberry Pi 5 With the Raspberry Pi 5's exposed PCI Express connector comes many new possibilities—which I test and document in my Pi PCIe Database. Today's board is the Geekwork X1011, which puts four NVMe SSDs under a Raspberry Pi. Unlike the Penta SATA HAT I tested last month, this carrier uses thinner and...
Turing RK1 is 2x faster, 1.8x pricier than Pi 5 I've long been a fan of Pi clusters. It may be an irrational hobby, building tiny underpowered SBC clusters I can fit in my backpack, but it is a fun hobby. And a couple years ago, the 'cluster on a board' concept reached its pinnacle with the Turing Pi 2, which I tested using four...
Corporate Open Source is Dead IBM is buying HashiCorp for $6.4 billion. That's four months after HashiCorp rugpulled their entire development community and ditched open source for the 'Business Source License.' As someone on Hacker News pointed out so eloquently: IBM is like a juicer that takes all the delicious flavor out of a...
Building a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez's Interceptor 1U Case In today's video, I walked through setting up Axzez's Interceptor 1U case with a Raspberry Pi as a Frigate NVR, or Network Video Recorder. Doing so allows me to plug multiple PoE security cameras straight into the back of the device, and record their IP video streams to disk...
Resetting and upgrading old Hikvision IP Cameras This guide isn't definitive, but it is a good reference point as I am wiping out some Hikvision IP cameras I inherited in my new office space. They were all paired with an annoying proprietary Hikvision NVR, and I wanted to wipe them and use them on a new isolated VLAN with my new...
AM phasor has no setting for 'stun' Today on Geerling Engineering, my Dad and I toured the tower site for WSDZ-AM, located in Belleville, IL. It's a 20kW AM radio station broadcasting with an array of eight individual towers: How does one get a single coherent signal out of an eight-tower array? Enter the phasor: That's phasor with an...
Photographing the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse (results) The path of totality for the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse ran right through my backyard, and it was my first experience photographing totality. Total solar eclipses, when the moon completely covers the sun, are rare. After this year's eclipse, the lower 48 United States will see a brief...
Radxa's SATA HAT makes compact Pi 5 NAS Radxa's latest iteration of its Penta SATA HAT has been retooled to work with the Raspberry Pi 5. The Pi 5 includes a PCIe connector, which allows the SATA hat to interface directly via a JMB585 SATA to PCIe bridge, rather than relying on the older Dual/Quad SATA HAT's SATA-to-USB-to-PCIe setup....
macOS Finder is still bad at network file copies In what is becoming a kind of hobby for me, I've just finished testing another tiny NAS—more on that tomorrow. But as I was testing, I started getting frustrated with the fact I've never been able to get a Raspberry Pi—regardless of internal storage speeds, even with 800+ MB/sec...
Sipeed's new handheld RISC-V Cyberdeck tl;dr: Sipeed sent a Lichee Console 4A to test. It has a T-Head TH1520 4-core RISC-V CPU that's on par with 2-3 generations-old Arm SBC CPUs, and is in a fun but impractical netbook/cyberdeck form factor. Here's my video on the Lichee Console 4A, and here's all my test data on GitHub. Last year I...
Talking Hot Dog gives new meaning to 'Ham radio' ...except it was a beef frank. Make your wurst jokes in the comments. What you see above is the remains of a hot dog after it has been applied to an AM radio tower operating in its daytime pattern, at around 6 kW. A couple months ago, soon after we posted our If I touch this tower, I...
Build log: Power Mac G4 MDD This blog post will serve as my long-term build log for the Power Mac G4 MDD I started restoring in the video Retro Computing Enthusiasts are Masochists in early 2024. See also: Build log: Macintosh PowerBook 3400c. The G4's swan song Apple's Blue-and-White G3 brought a bit of fun into the industrial...
Build log: Macintosh PowerBook 3400c This blog post will serve as my long-term build log for the Macintosh PowerBook 3400c I started restoring in the video Retro Computing Enthusiasts are Masochists in early 2024. See also: Build log: Power Mac G4 MDD. The fastest laptop period It's 1997. Apple just re-acquired Steve Jobs, but he...
Raspberry Pi 5 *can* overclock to 3.14 GHz ...and it's not just for Pi Day. After posting my deep-dive into the Pi 5's new BCM2712 and RP1 silicon this morning, someone linked me to this GitHub issue: Raspberry Pi 5 cannot overclock beyond 3.0GHz due to firmware limit(?). For the past few weeks, a few blog readers (most notably,...
Die shots and transistor-level debugging on Raspberry Pi 5 Ever since I X-rayed the Raspberry Pi 5 to see inside the BCM2712 and RP1 chip packages, I've wanted die shots of both chips. Why? Mostly out of curiosity, since I'm not a silicon expert by any means. I also ran into some weird overclocking issues after writing about my...
An important consideration about Pi 5 overclocking Silicon lottery. Now that the Raspberry Pi 5s been readily available (at least in most regions) for a few months, more people started messing with clocks, trying to get the most speed possible out of their Pi 5s. Unlike the Pi 4, the Pi 5 is typically comfortable at 2.6 or even 2.8...
Fixing nginx Error: Undefined constant PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY I install a lot of Drupal sites day to day, especially when I'm doing dev work. In the course of doing that, sometimes I'll be working on infrastructure—whether that's an Ansible playbook to configure a Docker container, or testing something on a fresh server or...