Turing RK1 is 2x faster, 1.8x pricier than Pi 5 I've long been a fan of Pi clusters. It may be an irrational hobby, building tiny underpowered SBC clusters I can fit in my backpack, but it is a fun hobby. And a couple years ago, the 'cluster on a board' concept reached its pinnacle with the Turing Pi 2, which I tested using four Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4's. Because Pi availability was nonexistent for a few years, many hardware companies started building their own substitutes—and Turing Pi was no exception. They started designing a new SoM (System on Module) compatible with their Turing P ..read more

Corporate Open Source is Dead IBM is buying HashiCorp for $6.4 billion. That's four months after HashiCorp rugpulled their entire development community and ditched open source for the 'Business Source License.' As someone on Hacker News pointed out so eloquently: IBM is like a juicer that takes all the delicious flavor out of a fruit skywhopper replied: HashiCorp has done a good job of pre-draining any flavor it once had. Some people wonder if HashiCorp's decision to drop open source was because they wanted to juice the books for a higher price. I mean, six billion dollars? And they're no ..read more

Building a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez's Interceptor 1U Case In today's video, I walked through setting up Axzez's Interceptor 1U case with a Raspberry Pi as a Frigate NVR, or Network Video Recorder. Doing so allows me to plug multiple PoE security cameras straight into the back of the device, and record their IP video streams to disk (the case has space for up to 3 hard drives or SSDs). And by adding on a USB Coral TPU, I can also run inference on frames where motion is detected, and identify people, cars, bikes, and more using built-in object recognition models. Jeff Geerling April 19, 202 ..read more

Resetting and upgrading old Hikvision IP Cameras This guide isn't definitive, but it is a good reference point as I am wiping out some Hikvision IP cameras I inherited in my new office space. They were all paired with an annoying proprietary Hikvision NVR, and I wanted to wipe them and use them on a new isolated VLAN with my new Raspberry Pi Frigate-based NVR setup. The cameras I have are Hikvision model number DS-2CD2122FWD-IS, but this guide should apply to many of the cameras from that era. Jeff Geerling April 18, 2024 ..read more

AM phasor has no setting for 'stun' Today on Geerling Engineering, my Dad and I toured the tower site for WSDZ-AM, located in Belleville, IL. It's a 20kW AM radio station broadcasting with an array of eight individual towers: How does one get a single coherent signal out of an eight-tower array? Enter the phasor: That's phasor with an o, not phaser with an e, so Trekkies need not fret about a misspelling. Jeff Geerling April 17, 2024 ..read more

Photographing the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse (results) The path of totality for the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse ran right through my backyard, and it was my first experience photographing totality. Total solar eclipses, when the moon completely covers the sun, are rare. After this year's eclipse, the lower 48 United States will see a brief bit of totality up around Montana in 2044, and a major event across the US in 2045—and I'll be near retirement! See the full-size image of the eclipse composite on Flickr. The above photograph is a composite image of all the stages of the 2024 eclipse. I took t ..read more

Radxa's SATA HAT makes compact Pi 5 NAS Radxa's latest iteration of its Penta SATA HAT has been retooled to work with the Raspberry Pi 5. The Pi 5 includes a PCIe connector, which allows the SATA hat to interface directly via a JMB585 SATA to PCIe bridge, rather than relying on the older Dual/Quad SATA HAT's SATA-to-USB-to-PCIe setup. Does the direct PCIe connection help? Yes. Is the Pi 5 noticeably faster than the Pi 4 for NAS applications? Yes. Is the Pi 5 + Penta SATA HAT the ultimate low-power NAS solution? Maybe. Jeff Geerling April 4, 2024 ..read more

macOS Finder is still bad at network file copies In what is becoming a kind of hobby for me, I've just finished testing another tiny NAS—more on that tomorrow. But as I was testing, I started getting frustrated with the fact I've never been able to get a Raspberry Pi—regardless of internal storage speeds, even with 800+ MB/sec PCIe-based storage—to consistently write more than around 100 MB/sec write speeds over the network, with either Samba or NFS. NFS would be more consistent... but it ran around 82 MB/sec: Samba would peak around 115 MB/sec, but it was wildly inconsistent, averaging arou ..read more

Sipeed's new handheld RISC-V Cyberdeck tl;dr: Sipeed sent a Lichee Console 4A to test. It has a T-Head TH1520 4-core RISC-V CPU that's on par with 2-3 generations-old Arm SBC CPUs, and is in a fun but impractical netbook/cyberdeck form factor. Here's my video on the Lichee Console 4A, and here's all my test data on GitHub. Last year I tested the StarFive VisionFive 2 and Milk-V Mars CM—both machines ran the JH7110, a 4-core RISC-V SoC that was slower than a Pi 3. Sipeed introduced the Lichee Pi 4A line of computers, offering a slightly newer T-Head TH1520 SoC, which is also 4-core, but uses ..read more

Talking Hot Dog gives new meaning to 'Ham radio' ...except it was a beef frank. Make your wurst jokes in the comments. What you see above is the remains of a hot dog after it has been applied to an AM radio tower operating in its daytime pattern, at around 6 kW. A couple months ago, soon after we posted our If I touch this tower, I die video, a few commenters mentioned you likely wouldn't die after touching a high-power AM tower—rather, you'd have serious RF burns. I was trying to figure out a way to somewhat safely test the scenario: what would happen if someone walked up and touched the to ..read more