The state of Docker on popular RISC-V platforms I've been testing a Milk-V Jupiter this week, and have tested a number of other RISC-V development boards over the past two years. As with any new CPU architecture, software support and ease of adoption are extremely important if you want to reach a wider audience. I wouldn't expect every developer and SBC hobbyist to be able to compile the Linux kernel, and the need to compile much of anything these days is getting rare. So having any instance where one has to know how to tweak a Makefile or pass in different flags to a compiler is a bit of a t ..read more

Where is Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit? I signed up to buy a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Dev Kit the second I found out about it. It's supposed to be the Mac mini killer for Windows. They even promoted it with this amazing-looking transparent shell, and I and hundreds of other devs were ready to pony up the $899 Qualcomm was asking. Their pre-order form said it would be out June 18. Almost exactly one month later, I got an email saying it was available. Great! So I went to the purchase page on Arrow... and it showed as out of stock. That was about 15 minutes after receiving the email. Ther ..read more

If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine. But as you can see around 7/7 on that graph, the 100 Mbps went down to about eight, and that's the point where my wife starts noticing how slow the Internet is. Action level. So I fired up AT&T's support chat. I'm a programmer, I can usually find ways around the wily ..read more

Testing new Raspberry Pi 5 Cases - $7 to $79 Since the Pi 5's launch, a number of Pi case redesigns have launched, and there are a few new entrants with something to offer. Like Fractal's 'Baby North'... which, unfortunately, is only a prototype designed for their displays at Computex, and is not being planned for sale. At least not for now! I'll write more about this case later in this post. The Pi 5's thermals are close enough to the Pi 4 that old cooling solutions work okay, but the port layout and inclusion of a power button means at least minimal redesigns are necessary. Here are a few ..read more

Remote shell to a Raspberry Pi at 39,000 ft For a few weeks I've been beta testing remote shell, the latest addition to Raspberry Pi Connect. Just a couple hours ago I was on a flight home from the new Micro Center in Charlotte. One huge problem with VNC or remote desktop is how flaky it is if you have limited bandwidth or an unstable connection, like on an airplane. It takes forever to start a screen sharing session, and the airplane's flaky WiFi usually causes the session to lock up, meaning you can't do much at all. Remote terminal access, just relaying text commands, is the best solution ..read more

Giving away 480 Raspberry Pis was harder than I expected I gave away 480 Raspberry Pi Picos at Open Sauce last weekend, and ran into a number of challenges doing so. All of them self-inflicted, of course. I didn't want to just hand them out like candy—or, well... that's exactly what I did: My initial plan was to build a backpack mount for a full 480-Pico reel (they sell them in bulk like that, for pick-n-place machines). However, there was a major flaw with that design. Constraints I needed to get through TSA, so I could fly to San Francisco. Driving was out of the question, as my wife is al ..read more

Newer versions of Ansible don't work with RHEL 8 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is supported until 2029, and that distribution includes Python 3.6 for system python. Ansible's long been stuck between a rock and a hard place supporting certain modules (especially packaging modules like dnf/yum on RHEL and its derivatives, because the Python bindings for the packaging modules are stuck supporting system Python. Users are getting errors like: /bin/sh: /usr/bin/python3: No such file or directory The module failed to execute correctly, you probably need to set the interpreter.\nSee stdout/stderr for ..read more

55 TOPS Raspberry Pi AI PC - 4 TPUs, 2 NPUs I'm in full-on procrastination mode with Open Sauce coming up in 10 days and a project I haven't started on for it, so I decided to try building the stable AI PC with all the AI accelerator chips I own: Hailo-8 (26 TOPS) Hailo-8L (13 TOPS) 2x Coral Dual Edge TPU (8+8 = 16 TOPS) 2x Coral Edge TPU (4+4 = 8 TOPS) After my first faltering attempt in my testing of Raspberry Pi's new AI Kit, I decided to try building it again, but with a more 'proper' PCIe setup, with external 12V power to the PCIe devices, courtesy of an uPCIty Lite PCIe HAT for the Pi ..read more

Testing Raspberry Pi's AI Kit - 13 TOPS for $70 Raspberry Pi today launched the AI Kit, a $70 addon which straps a Hailo-8L on top of a Raspberry Pi 5, using the recently-launched M.2 HAT (the Hailo-8L is of the M.2 M-key variety, and comes preinstalled). The Hailo-8L's claim to fame is 3-4 TOPS/W efficiency, which, along with the Pi's 3-4W idle power consumption, puts it alongside Nvidia's edge devices like the Jetson Orin in terms of TOPS/$ and TOPS/W for price and efficiency. Google's Coral TPU has been a popular choice for a machine learning/AI accelerator for the Pi for years now, but G ..read more

Saying a lot while saying nothing at all about Ansible AWX A few days ago, the post Upcoming Changes to the AWX Project came across my feed. An innocuous title, but sometimes community-impacting changes are buried in posts like this. So, as an interested Ansible user, I read through the post. In 1,610 words, almost nothing of substance was written. A lot about how it's not 2014 anymore, so 2014-era architecture doesn't suit AWX. Then a big bold disclaimer at the bottom: Before we conclude, we should be clear about what will not happen. We are not changing the Ansible project We are not adju ..read more