raspberry pi

Almost every time I set up a Raspberry Pi these days, I use the 'Lite' version of Raspberry Pi OS. That version doesn't come with a GUI, it just boots to the console. It's much smaller in size and contains most things you'd need for a 'headless' Pi setup.

And if you know your way around the command line, it's not daunting to plug in a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and explore via the shell if you need to.

But every so often, I've had a Lite install that I wanted to switch to GUI, but I'm too lazy to pull the Pi out of wherever it's installed, pull the microSD card, and re-flash it with the full OS, and then re-run my automation on it to set up whatever I had running before.

And that's why it's nice to be able to just install the GUI on top of an existing Lite install!

To do that (assuming you're running the latest Pi OS version, Bullseye as of this writing), just install Xorg and the Raspberry Pi 'PIXEL' environment:

I've been following the issue CM4 is missing IEEE1588-2008 support through BCM54210PE since I heard about IEEE1588-2008 support on the Compute Module 4 last year.

Apparently the little NIC included on every Compute Module 4—the BCM54210PE, which is different than the NIC on the Pi 4 model B (a BCM54213PE)—includes support for a feature called PTP, or Precision Time Protocol.

Today, Raspberry Pi announced the Pico W, a new $6 version of the Pico that includes WiFi.

No word yet on Bluetooth. The WiFi chip in the Pico W (Infineon CYW43439) supports it, but right now the RP2040 firmware lacks Bluetooth support.

The Pico W being available for just $6 is huge, because one of the chief complaints about the original Pico (powered by Raspberry Pi's own RP2040) was its lack of wireless support—a feature present on similarly-priced boards based on the ESP32 and ESP8266.

A few weeks ago, I posted a video about the Petabyte Pi Project—an experiment to see if a single Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 could directly address sixty 20TB hard drives, totaling 1.2 Petabytes.

And in that video, it did, but with a caveat: RAID was unstable. For some reason, after writing 2 or 3 GB of data at a time, one of the HBAs I was using would flake out and reset itself, due to PCI Express bus errors.

A couple weeks ago, I glanced through my ever-growing collection of Raspberry Pi RP2040-based boards—pictured above are three of the boards I've tested: a Cytron Maker Pi RP2040, a Raspberry Pi Pico, and a Seeed Studio Wio RP2040.

In today's video, I highlighted industrial Raspberry Pi computers. Specifically, the Lincoln-Binns CM4-Box Pro, the Onlogic Factor 201, and fieldcloud's Milü-X Industrial IoT Gateway.

And I asked Lincoln-Binns, Onlogic, and fieldcloud what makes an 'Industrial' Pi any different than a Pi and an enclosure like you could buy from a normal Pi retailer.

Last week this Tweet crossed my timeline:

Just taken delivery of a shiny @wallboxchargers EV charger and spotted the super shiny new @Raspberry_Pi CM3E in there with its super swanky combined CPU/RAM package 😎 pic.twitter.com/oEUqKPMwTK

— Pi 0 in your Pocket (@Pi0CKET) June 9, 2022

If you look closely, that's a "Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3E"—which is so far not listed on Raspberry Pi's website.

The NEC UHD Professional Display M551 pictured here is not a TV—it's a display. And it's powered by a Raspberry Pi.

Specifically, it's powered by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and that is done using Sharp NEC's new MPI4E carrier board:

For a recent project, I needed to install LibreELEC/Kodi on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with built-in eMMC storage.

Because it's inconvenient to be swapping the Pi around from the embedded display I was using it in to my preferred carrier board I use for flashing Pis and interacting with their filesystems, I wanted to manage my LibreELEC install over SSH.

It seems like whatever documentation the LibreELEC Wiki used to have for remote SSH access is missing, and all I could find were vague references to enabling SSH during a GUI setup wizard. I don't remember seeing that.

But after many, many searches, I surmised it was possible to enable SSH by adding ssh to the end of the line in the system's cmdline.txt file, and rebooting. So I pulled the Pi, used usbboot to mount the fat32 volume on my Mac, and opened cmdline.txt and added ssh. Then I popped the Pi back in the embedded display, and started it up.

Sure enough, I could now SSH in:

A few months ago, someone from the Raspberry Shake team got in touch, and asked if I'd like to try out a Shake at my home.

As someone who has spent a bit too much time nerding out over space and atmospheric weather, but never touched seismology, I decided it was time to dig deep and learn a bit more about the Earth.

And learn I did! They sent their simplest model, the Shake 1 RS1D, I placed it on my concrete basement floor, and then waited.