In my video about the brand new Raspberry Pi 5, I mentioned the new external PCIe port makes it possible to boot the standard Pi 5 model B directly off NVMe storage—an option which is much faster and more reliable than standard microSD storage (even with industrial-rated cards!).
Enabling NVMe boot is pretty easy, you add a line to /boot/firmware/config.txt, modify the BOOT_ORDER in the bootloader configuration, and reboot!
The Raspberry Pi 5 includes 5 active PCI Express lanes—4 go to the new RP1 chip for I/O like USB, Ethernet, MIPI Camera and Display, and GPIO, and 1 goes to a new external PCIe connector:
By default, all PCIe lanes operate at Gen 2.0 speeds, or about 5 GT/sec per lane. Currently there's no way to change that default for the RP1 chip's 'internal' lanes, but on the external connector, you can add the following lines inside /boot/firmware/config.txt (and reboot) to upgrade the connection to Gen 3.0 (8 GT/sec, almost double the speed):
If you haven't already, check out my full video on the Raspberry Pi 5, which inspired this post.
Raspberry Pi OS 12 'Bookworm' is coming alongside the release of the Raspberry Pi 5, and with it comes a fairly drastic change from using wpa_supplicant for WiFi interface management to everything network-related running through nmcli, or NetworkManager.
nmcli is widely adopted in Linux these days, and it makes managing WiFi, LAN, and other network connections much simpler.
It's less than 12 hours since the Pi 5 launch, and already there's a few hundred questions whizzing about—I thought I'd answer some of the things I see people asking most frequently, like:
Yes, indeed it does! You can pop out the fan bracket in the new Case, and fit many normal-size Pi HATs. This is useful also if you want to stack cases—assuming the HAT has mounting points, you could put some spacers in and stack another Pi or Pi + Case on top!
If you haven't heard, the Raspberry Pi 5 was announced today (it'll be available in October).
I have a full video going over the hardware—what's changed, what's new, and what's gone—and I've embedded it below. Scroll beyond to read more about specs, quirks, and some of the things I learned testing a dozen or so PCIe devices with it.
For LTX 2023, I built this:
This build centers around the Time Card mini. Typically you'd install this PCI Express card inside another computer, but in my case, I just wanted to power the board in a semi-portable way, and so I plugged it into a CM4 IO Board.
The Time Card mini is a PCIe-based carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and by itself, it allows you to install a CM4 into a PC, and access the CM4's serial console via PCIe.
But the real power comes in 'sandwich' boards:
Every once in a while, there's a little project that pops up in my feed that is just so neat, it's hard to resist buying it.
I have a couple boxes full of these things.
Meet the Beepberry:
This thing is the brainchild of SQFMI, a group who seems to know exactly how to tickle the interest of a tech enthusiast who loves little gadgets.
This blog post is one of the few instances where, no matter how much you prefer reading to watching a video... you're going to want to watch the video.
The day after I interviewed Eben Upton, co-founder of Raspberry Pi, I went to the Sony UK Technology Centre in Pencoed, Wales to tour the factory where almost every Raspberry Pi has been made—50,000,000 of them (as of this month!).
I got to snap a picture with the milestone Pis:
Earlier this month, I was able to discuss with Eben Upton (co-founder of Raspberry Pi) the role RISC-V could play in Raspberry Pi's future (among other things—watch the full interview here).
I am frequently away from home (whether on family vacation, a business trip, or out around town), but I have a number of important resources on my home network—as any homelabber does.
There are services I like to access remotely like my NAS with my giant media library, my edit server with all my active projects, and especially Home Assistant, which lets me monitor all aspects of my home.
Some people rely on individual cloud services from IoT vendors and have a bunch of apps to connect to each type of device independently. As someone who has dealt with numerous security breaches for numerous services, I know not to trust 50 different cloud-connected devices in my home.
That's why I'm a 'self-hosted' homelabber, and why I try to find devices that don't leave my local network.