Latest Posts (20 found)
Jeff Geerling 3 days ago

Nvidia Graphics Cards work on Pi 5 and Rockchip

A few months ago, GitHub user @yanghaku dropped a 15 line patch to fix GPU support for practically all AMD GPUs on the Raspberry Pi (and demoed a 3080 running on the Pi with a separate, unreleased patch). This week, GitHub user @mariobalanica dropped this (larger) patch which does the same for Nvidia GPUs ! I have a Raspberry Pi and an Nvidia graphics card—and I'm easily distracted. So I put down my testing of a GB10 system for a bit, and compiled mariobalanica's branch.

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Jeff Geerling 1 weeks ago

Air Lab is the Flipper Zero of air quality monitors

This air quality monitor costs $250. It's called the Air Lab , and I've been using it to measure the air in my car, home, studio, and a few events over the past few months. And in using it over the course of a road trip I learned to not run recirculate in my car quite as often—more on that later. Networked Artifacts built in some personality:

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Jeff Geerling 1 weeks ago

How to silence the fan on a CM5 after shutdown

Out of the box, if you buy a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, install it on the official CM5 IO Board, and install a fan on it (e.g. my current favorite, the EDAtec CM5 Active Cooler ), you'll notice the fan ramps up to 100% speed after you shut down the Pi. That's not fun, since at least for a couple of my CM5s, they are more often powered down than running, creating a slight cacophany!

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Jeff Geerling 2 weeks ago

Using AMD GPUs on Raspberry Pi without recompiling Linux

I'm working on a more in-depth test of some newer AMD GPUs on the Raspberry Pi, now that the 15 line kernel patch is (IMO) nearly ready for upstreaming. But this blog post shows how to quickly get almost any modern AMD GPU running on a Raspberry Pi 5, CM5, or Pi 500+, thanks to this patch on the Pi Linux fork .

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Jeff Geerling 2 weeks ago

All Intel GPUs run on Raspberry Pi and RISC-V

We finally have Intel Arc GPUs working on the Pi somewhat stably—it required overcoming many small hurdles, but it looks like support could land in Raspberry Pi OS if we can get a simple patch upstreamed 1 . If that happens, all you'd need to do to use an Intel card on a Pi is install a firmware package. The cards I've spent the most time with so far are:

hardware Hardware open-source Open Source
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Jeff Geerling 2 weeks ago

Minisforum stuffs an entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1

The Minisforum MS-R1 uses the same Cix CD8180 Arm SoC as the Orion O6 I reviewed earlier this year . But everything else about this thing is different. What this thing should be, is a box that runs Linux and can compete with at least an Apple M1 Mac mini, or a mid-range Mini PC. But what we got ... is something different. Hate reading? I also published a video on the MS-R1 on my YouTube channel. Watch it here, or scroll on past.

hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

Converting hot dog plasma video to sound with OpenCV

When you ground a hot dog to an AM radio tower, it generates plasma. While the hot dog's flesh is getting vaporized, a tiny plasma arc moves the air around it back and forth. And because this tower is an AM tower, it uses Amplitude Modulation , where a transmitter changes the amplitude of a carrier wave up and down. Just like a speaker cone moving up and down, the plasma arc from the hot dog turns that modulation into audible sound.

Science Electronics
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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

It's not that hard to stop a Trane

Six years ago, I replaced the old HVAC system that came with our house, a central forced air system installed in 1995 1 . The new system is a Trane XR AC paired with an S9V2 96% efficiency forced-air gas furnace . And it ran great! Better efficiency, quieter, multiple fan speeds so I can circulate air and prevent stale air in some parts of the house... what's not to love? Well, apparently the engineering:

hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC

The Arduino Uno Q is... a weird board. It's the first product born out of Qualcomm's buyout of Arduino . It's like if you married an Intel CPU, and a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller—oh wait, Radxa's X4 did that . Arduino even tried it before with their old Yún board, which had Linux running on a MIPS CPU, married to an ATmega microcontroller.

Electronics hardware Hardware open-source Open Source
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Why do some radio towers blink?

One day on my drive home, I saw three towers. One of them had a bunch of blinking white lights, another one had red lights that kind of faded in and out, and the third one, well, it wasn't doing anything. I'm lucky to have a radio engineer for a dad, so Dad: why do some towers blink? Joe: Well, blinking I would call like the way you described it, "flashing", "white light", or "strobe". All these lights are to aid pilots and air traffic. helicopters, fighter planes, regular jets. So that's the purpose of it. Jeff: Well that one tower that I saw had red lights that faded in and out, but I even think there's a freestanding tower just north of here that has red and white on top.

Electronics hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

VCF Midwest was even better than I expected

Earlier this year, I inherited a bunch of old Macs and computer parts, including the PowerBook 520 pictured above. And, for the past three years I've been trying to visit VCF Midwest up in Chicago, where there's this odd blend of old computers, radio, broadcast gear... Honestly, it's hard to pin down exactly what it is. And I also had no idea how overwhelming the two-day event would be. Overwhelmingly awesome , that is.

hardware Hardware Electronics
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Resizeable BAR support on the Raspberry Pi

While not an absolute requirement for modern graphics card support on Linux, Resizeable BAR support makes GPUs go faster, by allowing GPUs to throw data back and forth on the PCIe bus in chunks larger than 256 MB. In January, I opened an issue in the Raspberry Pi Linux repo, Resizable BAR support on Pi 5 .

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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

How much radiation can a Pi handle in space?

Late in the cycle while researching CubeSats using Pis in space , I got in touch with Ian Charnas 1 , the chief engineer for the Mark Rober YouTube channel. Earlier this year, Crunchlabs launched SatGus , which is currently orbiting Earth taking 'space selfies'.

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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Qualcomm's buying Arduino – what it means for makers

Qualcomm just announced they're acquiring Arduino , the company that introduced a whole generation of tinkerers to microcontrollers and embedded electronics. The Uno R3 was the first microcontroller board I owned. Over a decade ago, I blinked my first LED with an Uno; the code for that is actually still up on my GitHub .

Electronics hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

The AI Emperor Has No Clothes

If the size of the current AI bubble can be estimated by how many I receive per day... then I'd say we're nearing the pop. There is no way the trillions of dollars of valuation placed on AI companies can be backed by any amount of future profit.

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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

Not all OCuLink eGPU docks are created equal

I recently tried using the Minisforum DEG1 GPU Dock with a Raspberry Pi 500+, using an M.2 to OCuLink adapter, and this chenyang SFF-8611 Cable . After figuring out there's a power button on the DEG1 (which needs to be turned on), and after fiddling around with the switches on the PCB (hidden under the large metal plate on the bottom; TGX to OFF was the most important setting), I was able to get the Raspberry Pi's PCIe bus to at least tell the graphics card installed in the eGPU dock to spin up its fans and initialize. But I wasn't able to get any output from the card (using this Linux kernel patch ), and did not show it. (Nor were there any logs showing errors in ).

hardware Hardware linux Linux
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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

Full eGPU acceleration on the Pi 500+ with a 15-line patch

Instead of a traditional review of a new Pi product, I thought I'd split things up on my blog, and write two separate posts; this one about hacking in an eGPU on the Pi 500+, for a massive uplift in gaming performance and local LLMs, and a separate post about the Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard . The Raspberry Pi 500+ was announced today, sells for $200, and adds on the following over what was present in the regular Pi 500:

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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

Testing the Raspberry Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard

Instead of a traditional review of a new Pi product, I thought I'd split things up on my blog, and write two separate posts; this one about the Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard, and a separate post about hacking in an eGPU on the Pi 500+ , for a massive uplift in gaming performance and local LLMs. The Raspberry Pi 500+ was announced today, sells for $200, and adds on the following over what was present in the regular Pi 500:

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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

You can finally manage Macs with FileVault remotely in Tahoe

It's nice to have a workstation set up that you can access anywhere via Screen Sharing to check on progress, jot down a note, etc.—and not be tied to a web app or some cloud service. I run a Wireguard VPN at home and at my studio, so I can remotely log into any of my infrastructure through the VPN—Macs included.

devops DevOps security Security
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