video

3rd Party PoE HATs for Pi 5 add NVMe, fit inside case

Today I published a video detailing my testing of three new Raspberry Pi HATs—these HATs all add on PoE+ power and an NVMe SSD slot, though the three go about it in different ways.

You can watch the video for the full story (embedded below), but in this post I'll go through my brief thoughts on all three, and link to a few other options coming on the market as well.

.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }

GeeekPi P33 M.2 NVMe M-Key PoE+ HAT

52Pi P33 GeeekPi PoE+ NVMe HAT for Pi 5

Use an External GPU on Raspberry Pi 5 for 4K Gaming

After I saw Pineboards 4K Pi 5 external GPU gaming demo at Maker Faire Hanover, I decided it was time to set up my GPU test rig and see how the Pi OS amdgpu Linux kernel patch is going.

GLmark2 running on Pi 5 with AMD RX 460 external GPU

I tested it out on a livestream over the weekend, but I thought I'd document the current state of the patch, how to apply it, and what else is left to do to get full external GPU support on the Raspberry Pi.

Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows - the fastest X Elite, tested

Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows - Snapdragon X Elite

I have mixed feelings publishing this post: many developers who are actively trying to port their Windows software to Arm are still awaiting shipment of their own Snapdragon Dev Kits, and I seem to be one of the first few people to receive one.

Everyone I've been in contact with also ordered the Dev Kit on July 16, but we've all been waiting for it to ship—for months.

They stole my voice with AI

UPDATE 9/23: The CEO of Elecrow responded. I've posted a follow-up blog post with my reaction to the response and some other thoughts on AI voice cloning.

Listen to this clip:

Your browser does not support the video tag.

I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty familiar. I mean I would like you to subscribe to my YouTube channel. But that's the Jeff Geerling channel, not Elecrow, where the clip above is from. I never said the words that are in that video.

Sipeed NanoKVM: A RISC-V stick-on

Sipeed NanoKVM

This is the Sipeed NanoKVM. You stick it on your computer, plug in HDMI, USB, and the power button, and you get full remote control over the network—even if your computer locks up.

How did Sipeed make it so small, and so cheap? The 'full' kit above is about $50, while the cheapest competitors running PiKVM are closer to $200 and up!

This blog post is a lightly-edited transcript of the following video on my YouTube channel:

What happens when you touch a Pickle to an AM radio tower?

A few months ago, our AM radio hot dog experiment went mildly viral. That was a result of me asking my Dad 'what would happen if you ground a hot dog to one of your AM radio towers?' He didn't know, so one night on the way to my son's volleyball practice, we tested it. And it was awesome.

There's a video and some pictures in my hot dog radio blog post from back in March.

New 2GB Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings

Raspberry Pi launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip.

BCM2712 C1 vs D0 Stepping chips

This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5's shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said:

The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need.

Steppings are basically chip revisions where they don't change functionality, and usually just fix bugs, or tweak the layout. But even tiny design changes could have unintended consequences. I wanted to see exactly what happens when I push one of these new chips to the limits.

First, I wanted a performance baseline, so I ran Geekbench with the latest Pi OS and all the defaults.

Positron - an upside-down and portable 3D printer

I've been getting into 3D printing lately. I have an older Ender 3 V2 at home I bought during COVID. And in the past year I've acquired an Ender 3 S1, Bambu Labs P1S, and Prusa MK4.

I also dove head-first into 3D CAD, and designed a number of small SBC cases or parts to help with things around the house.

But I'd never built my own 3D printer from a kit—all the printers I've had were pre-built and at most, required assembling the prebuilt gantry or toolhead. That finally changed with the Positron V3.2:

Radxa X4 SBC Unites Intel N100 and Raspberry Pi RP2040

At first glance, especially from the top, the Radxa X4 is your typical Arm SBC:

Radxa X4 Top

But you'll quickly notice the lack of an SoC—that's on the bottom. Looking more closely, what's a Raspberry Pi chip doing on top?! First, let's flip over the board to investigate. There's the SoC: definitely not Arm inside, this thing's an Intel N100:

Radxa X4 Bottom - Intel N100 SoC

I have all my benchmarks and notes bringing up this board stored in my sbc-reviews GitHub repository: Radxa X4 - geerlingguy's sbc-reviews, and I also summarized everything in a video on YouTube, which you can watch inline (or skip past and read this blog post instead):

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 - RP2350 adds more PIO, RISC-V cores

Pico 2 Logo

The $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was announced today, with a new chip, the RP2350. This silicon improves on almost every aspect of the RP2040:

  • 3 PIOs instead of 2
  • 150 MHz instead of 133 MHz base clock
  • Faster Arm Cortex M33 cores and RISC-V Hazard3 cores

I've had access to pre-release hardware and good news: even though the new chip is faster and has more features, it actually uses less power than RP2040, meaning if you run one of these things off a battery, it'll last longer.

I'll talk more about power later, but first, here's the specs.

Pico 2 and Pico side by side comparison