Latest Posts (20 found)
Jeff Geerling 2 days ago

Building a mini Homelab that fits in my carry-on

I'm traveling to Chicago for VCF Midwest next month. I'll be demoing NTP time history on vintage Macs, with my own GPS-derived NTP service hosted on an Xserve G5, synced via NTP or a strange AppleTalk timing extension from the 1990s . So I built a little 'portable homelab' (pictured above) that supports 1-10 Gbps networking, can run off a small battery for at least an hour, switches between multiple WANs (so I can get my own 5G Internet connection, in case I need it), and gives me 12 wired Ethernet connections.

hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 5 days ago

Debugging Ubiquiti's 5G Backup on AT&T

For a mobile 'mini homelab' project I'm working on, I wanted to use 5G Internet as a primary 'on-to-go' connection, but still have the ability to plug in another Internet connection when I put the mobile rack I'm building in a fixed location. I'll have more on that project soon, but I figured this project was a good way to check out Ubiquiti's solutions, especially considering many of their smaller gear fits nicely within the dimensions of a mini rack (the 3U DeskPi RackMate TT is pictured above).

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Jeff Geerling 1 weeks ago

Getting the Steam Deck LCD working on a Raspberry Pi

The BOE TV070WXM-TV0 LCD used in the original Steam Deck can be had for around $30. It's a serviceable 7" touchscreen with 400 nits of brightness and a resolution of 1280x800 (for a sharp 216 ppi). The specs are a lot nicer than the Pi 7" Touch Display , which costs twice as much, with giant bezels and half the resolution! Until today, the Steam Deck LCD didn't work with a Raspberry Pi. But the folks at Scandent were trying to standardize on a mass-market touchscreen for one of their own devices, and built a Linux kernel driver for it which they intend to upstream.

programming Programming
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Jeff Geerling 1 weeks ago

Hands-on with Raspberry Pi's CM5 Programming Jig

In the before-times, when Raspberry Pi CM5s were (relatively) affordable, I built a number of Pi clusters ( example ), and one of the most annoying parts of the build was flashing Raspberry Pi OS to all the Pis. One, two, or even three Pis isn't a big deal, but once you hit 4+, the process of plugging the Compute Module into a carrier board, plugging that into a computer, managing Raspberry Pi Imager, and trying to match up details like a hostname, MAC address, and the physical Pi itself, gets annoying.

Electronics hardware Hardware tutorial Tutorial
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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

I'm excited for Intel after testing the XPS 13

Shortly after Apple launched the budget MacBook Neo , Dell announced their response, a new low-end XPS 13 . Matching the Neo's current pricing, it starts at $699, or $599 with an educational discount. That discount is currently set to expire on November 2, and with the current component pricing insanity, I'd be surprised if we don't see a price increase on both laptops by next year. I ran the XPS 13 through my gauntlet of benchmarks , and published a review on my YouTube channel:

testing Testing hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

Proxmox officially supports Arm, with some caveats

Proxmox today announced their Proxmox Virtual Environment is now available for 64-bit ARM . I tested it on my Ampere Altra Dev Platform —the same machine on which I've booted Windows on Arm the first time, messed with multiple GPUs, and most recently tested Houdini's native arm64 support . Install was easy, as the Ampere Altra uses UEFI / ACPI for its hardware, meaning Proxmox didn't have to tailor its ISO to specific platforms, like you have to do with Raspberry Pis and most SBCs using a Device Tree setup.

devops DevOps
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on my Mac Studio

I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more . I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.

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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Open Sauce and GPS time were my summer AI Antiseptics

In the midst of our AI slop revolution, traveling to the West coast for Open Sauce this past weekend was the perfect antiseptic for rising costs, summer heat, and online divisiveness. It's ironic, then, that I used Claude to vibe code my Tufty GPS Time Badge . Partly due to time constraints, and partly because I wanted to see if I could complete a personal project end-to-end, without editing a line of code, I throw my requirements at Claude and ultimately came up with this 2141-line MicroPython app for Pimoroni's Badgeware ecosystem.

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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming. It can see WiFi through walls and track drones in flight. If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of. When you plug a computer into a network, tools like Wireshark can show all the hidden traffic you might not even know is there. WiFi packets are the same, but those travel through the air, allowing snooping without physical access.

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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

The Special Value Pi 4 was extremely short-lived

The 'Special Value' Pi 4 pictured above is probably the rarest Raspberry Pi I own—even rarer than my blue special edition Pi . A Raspberry Pi reseller briefly listed a special 'value edition' Pi 4 . But the product page 404's now. While it was up, my curiosity got the better of me, and now I have two 'value' Pi 4s. What makes them a 'value'? They're only certified to run at 1.25 GHz (retail Pi 4s run at 1.8 GHz, and can usually be overclocked).

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

Quickly apply LUTs (color grading) with ffmpeg

This is a quick post, mostly for my own reference. I've avoided LUTs and 'Log' video footage for years 1 , mostly because of the extra tiny bit of workflow involved. Like RAW photos, 'Log' footage retains the video sensor's full dynamic range, so you can pull more color and luminance information out of the footage later. But unlike photography, where RAW has been a thing for decades, and many workflows 'just work' without me having to 'grade' every individual photo, in video precious few consumer apps handle Log footage gracefully. You generally end up with a muddy grey mess.

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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

Framework's 10G Ethernet module exposes USB-C's complexity

I've been following WisdPi's development of various 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps Ethernet adapters for the past couple years. They use newer Realtek Ethernet chips, which sometimes have performance quirks—most frequently encountered under Linux. In today's video, I tested the new WisdPi 10G Ethernet Expansion Card for Framework computers. It fits in any available Framework Expansion slot—even on the Framework Desktop. But Expansion Cards use USB-C for their connection to the mainboard—and therein lies the rub...

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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

You can finally power on a Mac remotely

Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely , without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction to Mac mini power button complaints . While I agree the M4 mini's power button is in a really dumb spot, that's not why I care about this feature. The two bigger use cases for me have been a pain for years:

hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 2 months ago

I tested every IP KVM in my Homelab

Since the PiKVM came out in 2017, there's been an explosion of IP KVMs. I've tested almost every one . But what are they good for? You can use Remote Desktop, Screen Sharing, or VNC to remote control a computer from anywhere on a LAN. And if you don't have a private VPN, you could use RealVNC , Raspberry Pi Connect , or wire up Tailscale or Pangolin for fully remote access. Those solutions are great, and so is SSH if you don't need a full desktop.

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Jeff Geerling 3 months ago

It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

My nephew just graduated high school, and wants a laptop. When he decides what computer to buy, price (or more precisely, value ) is the most important attribute. Apple's MacBook Neo upended the 'value laptop' equation—Apple's not supposed to be both the cheapest option and the best value... but it seems like that's squarely where the Neo landed for the good-but-cheap laptop category. My nephew is also my godson, and to kick off his computing journey, I thought I'd let him choose from a Framework 12 I bought to test, or the MacBook Neo I bought a couple months ago to use around the studio.

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Jeff Geerling 3 months ago

Tuning in FM Radio on a 3D Printer Heatbed

Pooch from Repkord dropped by my studio while he was in St. Louis, and asked a simple question: Can a 3D printer's heatbed act as an antenna? A fair question, as many an antenna is embedded in a PCB these days... and the traces on a PCB heatbed like the one used in Prusa's Core One look kinda like an antenna, if you squint the right way. Really, anything (or anyone) can be an antenna, given enough power.

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Jeff Geerling 3 months ago

I patched iozone for better disk benchmarks on modern macOS

A decade ago, I settled on for disk benchmarking on all my systems. Tools like ('Flexible IO' tester) are a little more capable for raw disk performance testing, and other tools test network-scale filesystems better, but gives me an easy overview of real-world disk performance across hard drives and SSDs, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux (and a smattering of other OSes). It's been around since 1991 , and is still updated today—in fact, the two latest updates (version 509 and 510) contain patches I sent in to get iozone to compile on Apple Silicon Macs running newer releases of macOS.

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Jeff Geerling 3 months ago

News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

On Thursday, three of the lead Raspberry Pi engineers hosted an AMA on the r/engineering subreddit . One of the most interesting tidbits was on the Pi 6. Looking back at previous launches: Following that cycle, one would expect a Pi 6 3-4 years after the Pi 5, which would put it in 2026 or 2027. 2012: Raspberry Pi 2015: Raspberry Pi 2 (+3 years) 2016: Raspberry Pi 3 (+1 year) 2019: Raspberry Pi 4 (+3 years) 2023: Raspberry Pi 5 (+4 years)

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Jeff Geerling 3 months ago

Wi-Wi Is Wireless Time Sync at 1 nanosecond

At NAB, I found a demo of Wi-Wi STAMP , a wireless time synchronization protocol that came out of Japan's NICT . Wi-Wi stands for Wireless 2Way interferometry, and it uses the 900 MHz band for picosecond-level time sync, and mm-level distance accuracy, in a tiny box, currently the size of a smartphone. The system is still in development, but existing prototypes have 20ps of phase synchronization jitter, and time synchronization down to 30ns. The next generation will have time down to 5ns in real-world use.

Electronics Science hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 3 months ago

Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

Last year I said I'd probably never recommend another Bambu Lab printer again . I still use my P1S, but after Bambu Lab started pushing their always-connected cloud solution as the new default: I had to do that to keep it under my control, instead of Bambu's. I blocked the printer from the Internet via my OPNsense Firewall I stopped updating the firmware I locked the printer into Developer mode I deleted Bambu Studio and started using OrcaSlicer

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