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

Build log: Power Mac G4 MDD This blog post will serve as my long-term build log for the Power Mac G4 MDD I started restoring in the video Retro Computing Enthusiasts are Masochists in early 2024. See also: Build log: Macintosh PowerBook 3400c. The G4's swan song Apple's Blue-and-White G3 brought a bit of fun into the industrial design of Apple's pro desktop line of Macs. The four-handle polycarbonate design language progressed through a few generations of G3 and G4, culminating in the 'Mirrored Drive Door' model. This model is also nicknamed 'Windtunnel' for the amount of noise it generates ..read more

Build log: Macintosh PowerBook 3400c This blog post will serve as my long-term build log for the Macintosh PowerBook 3400c I started restoring in the video Retro Computing Enthusiasts are Masochists in early 2024. See also: Build log: Power Mac G4 MDD. The fastest laptop period It's 1997. Apple just re-acquired Steve Jobs, but he hasn't been around long enough to materially impact the next few months of product launches. Gil Amelio, seeing a gap in Apple's laptop offerings, decides to throw the kitchen sink at the market, in the form of the PowerBook 3400c. It works. This laptop was the plat ..read more