Running the LAMP Stack in a Lamp Rack I typically don't do anything for April Fool's Day, but this year I thought I'd unite a bit of a meme in the homelab community with something I wanted to make a video on anyway: a lamp rack. What's a lamp rack? Well, you're looking at one! It … | Continue reading
DIY PTP Grandmaster Clock with a Raspberry Pi tl;dr: I set up an open source Time Pi project to build a stratum 1 PTP and NTP timeserver using a Raspberry Pi. Time is important to modern society, and most of us have a clock on our wrist that's more accurate than at any time in hu … | Continue reading
Never in a million years... ...would I have imagined my video on whether a pigeon is faster than the Internet would end up on a popular Italian quiz show, L'Eredita. Specifically, in the March 26th episode (playable in Italy, or with an account). The question, roughly translated: … | Continue reading
I won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died. I bought a Bosch 500 series because that's what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock. After my dad and I got it installe … | Continue reading
Exploring WiFi 7 (at 2 Gbps) on a Raspberry Pi 5 Last time I seriously dug into 6 GHz WiFi was with 6E on a Raspberry Pi CM4 with Intel's AX210 card, in 2023. Back then—and even up until recently—using WiFi 6E or WiFi 7 on a Raspberry Pi meant recompiling Linux, as the iwlwifi Li … | Continue reading
YouTube scares me; I need RAID 1 for my video content Jeff Geerling March 7, 2025 | Continue reading
Is an Intel N100 a better value than a Raspberry Pi? tl;dr: it depends. About one year ago, I bought an Intel N100 mini PC (specifically the GMKtec N100 NucBox G3) and compared it to the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB. A year later, and we have a newer $159 16GB version of that mini PC with … | Continue reading
Windows 11 Arm VMs on a Raspberry Pi, with BVM With the release of a Windows 11 for Arm ISO, it's easier than ever to get an officially-supported install of Windows on many different Arm PCs—now including a Raspberry Pi. The Windows on R seems like it has run out of steam, as man … | Continue reading
Progress on Intel and Nvidia GPUs on Raspberry Pi Nvidia GPUs have been running fine on Arm for a while now—I just upgraded the System76 Thelio Astra to an RTX 4080 Super and am testing it now. But Nvidia seems to have a partnership with Ampere, which probably leads to their driv … | Continue reading
Project MINI RACK - what have we started?? Today I set up a new DeskPi RackMate 12U model, the T2, and compared it to the other existing models (T0 / 4U and T1 / 8U)... and I have to ask: at what point are these racks not 'mini' anymore? I posted a short video about the 12U in ca … | Continue reading
NUT on my Pi, so my servers don't die A few weeks ago, power went out for the first time in my studio space, and that meant all my servers just had power cut with no safe shutdown. Handling power outages is never a top priority... until it's the only priority! And by then it's us … | Continue reading
Benchmarking multiple network interfaces at once in Linux with iperf3 Recently, I've been working on a Pi router build with multiple 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports using Radxa's Dual 2.5G Router HAT. I wanted a simple way to check on total network TCP throughput using both interfaces (o … | Continue reading
SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 is a strange, powerful RISC-V board SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 is a strange board. It's the fastest RISC-V development board I've tested—though I haven't tested a Milk-V Jupiter. It's also Mini DTX, which is an ATX-adjacent standard board size that … | Continue reading
How to Recompile Linux (on a Raspberry Pi) Because I get the same question on every video where I recompile the Linux kernel on a Pi to work on GPU or other hardware driver support, I finally made a video answering it: How do you recompile Linux? In my case, since I mostly rebuil … | Continue reading
Build Box64 with Box32 for X86 emulation on RISC-V Linux Recently I've been testing a SiFive HiFive Premier P550, and as part of that testing, I of course plugged in some AMD GPUs I had laying around. I'll get to that testing at a later date, but one thing I enjoy in my testing i … | Continue reading
How to build Ollama to run LLMs on RISC-V Linux RISC-V is the new entrant into the SBC/low-end desktop space, and as I'm in possession of a HiFive Premier P550 motherboard, I am running it through my usual gauntlet of benchmarks—partly to see how fast it is, and partly to gauge h … | Continue reading
Orion O6 ITX Arm V9 board - temper your expectations When I first heard about Radxa's Orion O6, it was being compared to Apple's M1 silicon, and the product page has extraordinary claims: Jeff Geerling February 3, 2025 | Continue reading
How is Deepseek R1 on a Raspberry Pi? OpenAI, which is only really open about consuming all the world's energy and half a trillion of our taxpayer dollars, just got rattled to its core. Deepseek, a new AI startup run by a Chinese hedge fund, allegedly created a new open weights m … | Continue reading
Don't pay $800 for Apple's 2TB SSD upgrade Apple charges $800 to upgrade from the base model M4 Mac mini's 256 GB of internal storage to a more capacious 2 TB. Pictured above is a photo of a standard 2230-size M.2 NVMe SSD (one made by Raspberry Pi, in this case), and Apple's pro … | Continue reading
CaribouLite SDR HAT for SDR on a Raspberry Pi A couple years ago, after I heard about the CaribouLite on CrowdSupply, I pre-ordered one. I've dabbled in SDR with an RTL-SDR v3 for a few years, even using one with nrsc5 to listen to baseball games OTA because of silly MLB blackout … | Continue reading
Project Mini Rack - compact and portable homelabs Today I'm announcing Project MINI RACK, an open source project to help those building homelabs, RF/wireless rigs, and other electronics projects into mini 10" racks. Jeff Geerling January 17, 2025 | Continue reading
Top 10 ways to monitor Linux in the console top (pictured below... above is btop) is the first utility everyone recommends to monitor Linux (or any form of UNIX, including macOS) resource usage. It's efficient, available almost everywhere... but it's also a bit basic. It shows es … | Continue reading
Who would buy a Raspberry Pi for $120? Jeff Geerling January 9, 2025 | Continue reading
System76 built the fastest Windows Arm PC System76 built their first workstation-class Arm PC, the Thelio Astra, and it's marketed for streamlined autonomous vehicle development. But I'm not an automotive developer, just someone who enjoys Linux, Arm, and computing. So I was exci … | Continue reading
Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb Some broadcast engineering tasks are a bit too daunting for me to consider. Climbing the massive towers that power radio and TV stations is one of them! Your browser does not support the video tag. Recently, local engineer Aaron Cox had th … | Continue reading
Getting beyond ProcessExecutionErrors when installing Ubuntu on arm64 Currently there are precious few SystemReady Arm computers—computers like the System76 Thelio Astra I was sent recently to test. The level or 'band' of SystemReady SR used by modern Ampere-based arm64 workstati … | Continue reading
Pi modder successfully adds M.2 slot to Pi 500 As I briefly mentioned yesterday, someone mentioned in this blog's comments a successful M.2 socket installation on the empty header on the Pi 500 (something I attempted, rather poorly!). With a few added components, and 3.3V supplie … | Continue reading
Raspberry Pi 500 uses QMK Firmware for built-in keyboard I mentioned in my Pi 500 review Raspberry Pi is dogfooding their own microcontroller in the new Pi 500. An RP2040 sits next to the keyboard ribbon cable connector, and interfaces it through a USB port directly into the RP1 … | Continue reading
The Pi 500 is much faster, but lacks M.2 Raspberry Pi this morning launched the Pi 500 and a new 15.6" Pi Monitor, for $90 and $100, respectively. They're also selling a Pi 500 Kit, complete with a Power Supply, Mouse, and micro HDMI to HDMI cable, for $120. This is the first tim … | Continue reading
AmpereOne: Cores are the new MHz Cores are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket! Amazon built Graviton 4, Google built Axiom, but if you want your own massive Arm server, … | Continue reading
Raspberry Pi boosts Pi 5 performance with SDRAM tuning tl;dr Raspberry Pi engineers tweaked SDRAM timings and other memory settings on the Pi, resulting in a 10-20% speed boost at the default 2.4 GHz clock. I of course had to test overclocking, which got me a 32% speedup at 3.2 G … | Continue reading
Home Assistant Yellow - instant 2x IoT speedup with CM5 In a win for modular, private, local IoT, I just upgraded my Home Assistant Yellow from a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 to a Compute Module 5 this morning, and got an instant 2x speed boost. I first posted about the Yellow i … | Continue reading
Raspberry Pi CM5 is 2-3x faster, drop-in upgrade (mostly) The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 is smaller than a credit card, and I already have it gaming in 4K with an eGPU, running a Kubernetes cluster, and I even upgraded my NEC Commercial display from a CM4 to CM5, just swapping … | Continue reading
LLMs accelerated with eGPU on a Raspberry Pi 5 After a long journey getting AMD graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi 5, we finally have a stable patch for the amdgpu Linux kernel driver, and it works on AMD RX 400, 500, 6000, and (current-generation) 7000-series GPUs. With … | Continue reading
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 t … | Continue reading
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) … | Continue reading
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 Ub … | Continue reading
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 mar … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 c … | Continue reading
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 fr … | Continue reading
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 homel … | Continue reading
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 pioneerin … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 (e … | Continue reading
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 w … | Continue reading
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 f … | Continue reading
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), … | Continue reading