Latest Posts (20 found)
Jeff Geerling 2 days ago

Raspberry Pi Pico Mini Rack GPS Clock

I wanted to have the most accurate timepiece possible mounted in my mini rack. Therefore I built this: This is a GPS-based clock running on a Raspberry Pi Pico in a custom 1U 10" rack faceplate. The clock displays time based on a GPS input, and will not display time until a GPS timing lock has been acquired. For full details on designing and building this clock, see: When you turn on the Pico, the display reads Upon 3D fix, you get a time on the clock, and the colon starts blinking If the 3D fix is lost, the colon goes solid When the 3D fix is regained, the colon starts blinking again

Electronics hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 5 days ago

Local Email Debugging with Mailpit

For the past decade, I've used Mailhog for local email debugging. Besides working on web applications that deal with email, I've long used email as the primary notification system for comments on the blog. I built an Ansible role for Mailhog , and it was one of the main features of Drupal VM , a popular local development environment for Drupal I sunset 3 years ago. Unfortunately, barring any future updates from the maintainers, it seems like Mailhog has not been maintained for four years now. It still works , but something as complex as an email debugging environment needs ongoing maintenance to stay relevant.

web-development Web Development devops DevOps
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Jeff Geerling 1 weeks ago

Raspberry Pi is cheaper than a Mini PC again (that's not good)

Almost a year ago, I found that N100 Mini PCs were cheaper than a decked-out Raspberry Pi 5 . So comparing systems with: Back in March last year, a GMKtec Mini PC was $159, and a similar-spec Pi 5 was $208. Today? The same GMKtec Mini PC is $246.99, and the same Pi 5 is $246.95: Today, because of the wonderful RAM shortages 1 , the Mini PC is the same price as a fully kitted-out Raspberry Pi 5. 16GB of RAM 512GB NVMe SSD Including case, cooler, and power adapter

Finance hardware Hardware business Business
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Jeff Geerling 2 weeks ago

Dell's version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points

Dell sent me two of their GB10 mini workstations to test: In this blog post, I'll cover the base system, just one of the two nodes. Cluster testing is ongoing, and I'll cover things like AI model training and networking more in depth next year, likely with comparisons to the Framework Desktop cluster and Mac Studio cluster I've also been testing. But many of the same caveats of the DGX Spark (namely, price to performance is not great if you just want to run LLMs on a small desktop) apply to Dell's GB10 box as well.

ai AI hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut

If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST. Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated. But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run , they were never off by more than 5 microseconds. 5 μs might seem insignificant. But it is significant for scientists and universities who rely on NIST's more specialized timing signals . But no, you don't need to panic. And yes, they have it under control now. But I thought I'd go over what happened, what it means, and what we can learn from NIST's near-outage. This blog post is a lightly-edited transcript of my most recent YouTube video:

Science hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

Big GPUs don't need big PCs

Ever since I got AMD , Intel , and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What's the point? The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 5 bandwidth. That's 8 GT/s versus 512 GT/s. Not a fair fight.

performance Performance hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 3 weeks ago

1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio - RDMA over Thunderbolt 5

Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2 . The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0 , an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models.

hardware Hardware ai AI performance Performance
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

CM0 - a new Raspberry Pi you can't buy

This little postage stamp is actually a full Raspberry Pi Zero 2, complete with eMMC storage and WiFi. But you can't get one. Well, not unless you buy the CM0NANO development board from EDAtec , or you live in China. This little guy doesn't have an HDMI port, Ethernet, or even USB. It's a special version of the 'Compute Module' line of boards. Little Raspberry Pi 'System on Modules' (SoMs), they're called. Compute Modules are entire Linux computers about the size of a regular desktop CPU that you 'plug in' to another board, to give it life.

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

Benchmarking NVENC video transcoding on the Pi

Now that Nvidia GPUs run on the Raspberry Pi , I've been putting all the ones I own through their paces. Many people have an older Nvidia card (like a 3060) laying around from an upgrade. So could a Pi be suitable for GPU-accelerated video transcoding, either standalone for conversion, or running something like Jellyfin for video library management and streaming? That's what I set out to do, and the first step, besides getting the drivers and CUDA going (see blog post linked above), was to find a way to get a repeatable benchmark going.

hardware Hardware performance Performance
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

The DC-ROMA II is the fastest RISC-V laptop and is odd

Inside this Framework 13 laptop is a special mainboard developed by DeepComputing in collaboration with Framework. It has an 8-core RISC-V processor, the ESWIN 7702X—not your typical AMD, Intel, or even Arm SoC. The full laptop version I tested costs $1119 and gets you about the performance of a Raspberry Pi. A Pi 4—the one that came out in 2019.

Electronics hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All

Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you're not affected yet, just wait. I was building a new PC last month using some parts I had bought earlier this year. The 64 Gigabyte T-Create DDR5 memory kit I used cost $209 then. Today? The same kit costs $650 !

hardware Hardware
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Jeff Geerling 1 months ago

Why doesn't Apple make a standalone Touch ID?

I finally upgraded to a mechanical keyboard. But because Apple's so protective of their Touch ID hardware, there aren't any mechanical keyboards with that feature built in. But there is a way to hack it. It's incredibly wasteful, and takes a bit more patience than I think most people have, but you basically take an Apple Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, rip out the Touch ID, and install it in a 3D printed box, along with the keyboard's logic board.

hardware Hardware Electronics security Security
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Jeff Geerling 1 months 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.

programming Programming
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Jeff Geerling 1 months 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:

hardware Hardware ai AI Electronics
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Jeff Geerling 1 months 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!

tutorial Tutorial hardware Hardware programming Programming
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Jeff Geerling 2 months 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 .

hardware Hardware linux Linux
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Jeff Geerling 2 months 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 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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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