Latest Posts (20 found)
Jeff Geerling Yesterday

Formlabs dropped the Raspberry Pi on the way to a $699 SLA printer

Formlabs sent me a Form Studio 1 resin 3D printer to test after years of back-and-forth about their Form 4 printer. Like the Form 4, it's an SLA (stereolithography) printer, but unlike the Form 4 (which starts at $2,600), it's affordable for a hobbyist. It's not cheap , coming in at $699 (or $749 with a flex build platform, which I highly recommend), but it is affordable. I can't say as much about this printer as people who are well-versed in resin printing and use other SLA printers (all my experience until now is with FDM, or Fused Deposition Modeling 1 , printers). But I can convey my first-time experience using this printer and with the entire SLA experience.

hardware Hardware Electronics
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Jeff Geerling 6 days ago

Radxa's Q8B has 2x the performance and expansion of the Pi 5

There was a time I'd look at a board like the Radxa Dragon Q8B (at left, above) and be like, "there's no way I'd spend $209 on an SBC with 8 gigs of RAM". But we're in 2026, and seeing the 8 gig Raspberry Pi 5 going for almost the same amount, I figured I'd give it a shot. On paper , the Q8B beats the Pi 5 in pretty much every way. A lot of that is thanks to this Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip, which is the same chip I tested on Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023 .

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Jeff Geerling 2 weeks ago

I'm starting HomelabFest (in St. Louis, Sep 2027)

I've been working on my homelab for years, and I enjoy sharing what I learn through this blog and my YouTube channel. Over the past few years, I realized the homelab community (which isn't really a defined thing—that's okay) hasn't had its own gathering, the way makers, software engineers, embedded developers, and HPC professionals do. There are many events that have crossover into the homelab realm, but nothing focused on energy-efficient servers, privacy-respecting self-hosted software, keeping old hardware useful, or cable management and rackmounting on a budget.

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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

Raspberry Pi locks down Pi 5 RAM upgrades in firmware

Raspberry Pi added a feature in their firmware that restricts users from swapping RAM chips , sometimes even RAM chips of the same capacity from other Raspberry Pi boards. Apparently there were people buying cheap 1 or 2 gig Pi 5s, soldering in some cheap and sometimes unreliable 8 gig RAM chips, and selling them as new 8 gig Pi 5s . Now I totally understand where Raspberry Pi's coming from. They don't wanna support Pis being sold like this, because flaky RAM and dodgy resellers are a huge problem. Especially with how profitable can be in the current AI bubble.

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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

NTP, an atomic clock, and having a great time at the world's largest VCF

I'm back from VCF Midwest 21 , arguably the largest vintage computer festival on the planet. After being blown away last year, I decided to get a table of my own this year, to demonstrate NTP Time on a bunch of old Macs, representing every era up to the pinnacle of the PowerPC, an Xserve G5 (serving duty as a Stratum 2 server). Attending as an exhibitor is a lot different. In some ways better (I got to interact face-to-face with at least 200 people—after that I ran out of my 'time tokens'), and in some ways worse (I only got to see about 10% of the exhibits—if that).

hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

OpenNMC is an open replacement for expensive APC management cards

UPSes are typically the most boring part of your homelab, but they're important. One of their main jobs is to give servers time to shut down safely if the power goes out. Another job is to condition your power so your servers can run smoothly. To do both of those things well , you need a smart interface. And at least with APC, there are tons of older UPSes that use Network Management Cards. The one pictured below is the NMC 2, and I pulled out of my old APC Smart-UPS 2200 XL (pictured above).

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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Rebuilding a 1995 GPS Time Server so I don't get Telstra'd

In June I purchased this TrueTime XL-AK time server , so I could learn more of the history of GPS-based time. I received it on June 22, and just 16 days later a similar GPS time server took down Australia's cell service for 12 hours ! I made a short video about it but put off digging into the TrueTime... until now. Over the past couple weeks, I've 'restomodded' this device with a Raspberry Pi, to build a stratum 1 NTP Time server, which I'd like to eventually add to the NTP Pool . I found a way to drop in a Pi 5 and GNSS HAT, display the time and GPS status on the built-in 16x2 LCD, show the status on the bicolor LED, and make this box useful again.

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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Before NTP there were Time and Daytime

In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest , I came across RFC 867 and RFC 868 , for the 'Daytime' and 'Time' Protocols, respectively. My first exposure to any form of network time was when I upgraded from a used PowerBook 180c to my first 'new' computer, a Power Mac G3, in 2000. With the introduction of Mac OS 8.5, Apple added a 'Network Time Server' option in the Date & Time Control Panel.

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Jeff Geerling 1 months 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 1 months 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 months 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 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 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 2 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 3 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.

security Security hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 3 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 3 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 3 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...

linux Linux hardware Hardware performance Performance
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