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64-bits. More is always better, right?

Well, not exactly. And that's why it's taken years for Raspberry Pi OS to add an officially-supported 64-bit version, in addition to the 32-bit version they've had since the original Pi came out.

Since May 2020, there's been a beta 64-bit version of Pi OS, but it wasn't intended for beginners, and was never linked from the main downloads page.

You had to kinda be 'in the know' to get it. And the reason for that is it's actually branched directly off of Debian Linux and had a few growing pains. But almost all those problems have been ironed out now, and apparently it's time for the Raspberry Pi's 64-bit era.

Today's video is about Starlink—I've had an active subscription since last February, and as it's been a year, I figured I should post an update.

The tl;dr: when I had a new roof put on late last summer, I took down 'Dishy McFlatface', but I haven't put the dish back up. I have been holding out hope I could transfer my hardware to my cousin, who lives on a farm 70 miles away, and only gets 300 Kbps upload on her DSL, but so far that seems to be a pipe dream.

In the video below, I outline four problems that have tempered my optimism when it comes to SpaceX's Starlink Internet service:

The rest of this post is a lightly-edited transcript of the video.

I've dipped my toes in 'smart home' automation in the past.

Typically I approach 'smart' and 'IoT' devices as a solution to one simple problem, instead of trying to do 'all the things'.

For example, I wanted to make it easy for my kids to control a home theater with four different devices and complex audio/visual routing, so I bought a Harmony remote and programmed it to control TV, a game console, an Apple TV, and radio. I don't want Logitech to start controlling other aspects of my house, or to give intruders an avenue by which they could invade my home's network.

However, many smart devices require a persistent Internet connection to use them, and that I cannot abide.

ArduCam recently completed a successful crowdfunding campaign for a 16 megapixel Raspberry Pi camera with built-in autofocus.

The camera is on a board with the same footprint as the Pi Camera V2, but it has a Sony IMX519 image sensor with twice the resolution (16 Mpix vs 8 Mpix) and a larger image sensor (1/2.53" vs 1/4"), a slightly nicer lens, and the headline feature: a built-in autofocus motor.

Autofocus performance

Getting right into the meat of it: autofocus works, with some caveats.

First, the good. Autofocus is quick to acquire focus in many situations, especially in well-lit environments with one main subject. Using ArduCam's fork of libcamera-still or libcamera-vid, you only need to pass in --autofocus and the camera will snap into focus immediately.

In 2020, I got serious about my YouTube channel after seeing explosive growth from a series on the Turing Pi Raspberry Pi cluster. Early in 2021, the success of my books and the YouTube channel resulted in me quitting my last paid consulting gig, and focusing all my time on Hosted Apache Solr, writing, and making videos.

In 2021 the channel went from just under 100,000 subscribers to 253,000 (and counting!):

Video views went from about 6 million to 21 million, as a few of my Raspberry Pi-related videos took off (though I wouldn't consider any of my videos 'viral'—most get a slow 'wave' of growth if they get popular).

Earlier this year, I pitted the $549 ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 NAS against a homebrew $350 Raspberry Pi CM4 NAS, and came to the (rather obvious) conclusion that the Lockerstor was better in almost every regard.

Well, ASUSTOR introduced a new lower-cost NAS, the $329 Drivestor 4 Pro (model AS3304T—pictured above), and sent me one to review against the Raspberry Pi, since it make for a better matchup—both have 4-core ARM CPUs and a more limited PCI Express Gen 2 bus at their heart.

Around the same time, Radxa also sent me their new Taco—a less-than-$100 Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 carrier board with 5x SATA ports, 1 Gbps and 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, an M.2 NVMe slot, and an M.2 A+E key slot. (The Taco will soon be available as part of a kit with a CM4 and case for around $200.)

The specs evenly matched, at least on paper:

Since the Raspberry Pi was introduced, hundreds of clones have adopted the Pi's form factor (from the diminutive Zero to the 'full size' model B). Often they have better hardware specs, and yet they remain a more obscure also-ran in that generation of Single Board Computer (SBC).

So when I saw Radxa's CM3 and Pine64's SOQuartz, I wanted to see if either would be—as they advertised—'drop in, pin-compatible replacements' for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

tl;dr: They're not. At least not yet.

Hardware and Specs

Both boards are technically pin-compatible. And both will boot and run (to some extent) on pre-existing Compute Module 4 carrier boards, including Raspberry Pi's official IO Board:

Last year I spent a bit of time building a Kubernetes cluster with the original Turing Pi. It was fun, and interesting, but ultimately the performance of the Compute Module 3+ it was designed around led me to running my homelab off some newer Pi 4 model B computers, which are at least twice as fast for almost everything I run on them.

So this year, I was excited when the folks at Turing Pi sent me a Turing Pi 2 to test drive. And the board arrived just in time for Patrick Kennedy from ServeTheHome to challenge me to a cluster build-off at Supercomputing '21! Check out his ARM cluster build here.

This year, I wanted to solve two problems:

1. Open source projects and maintainers often get no reward (even a simple word of thanks!) for their efforts maintaining the tools we rely on every day.
2. I have a box full of really awesome Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 boards and products like the CutiePi, a PiBox mini 2, and a MirkoPC!

To solve both problems, I'm doing a giveaway—to enter to win one of any of the pictured items below (and maybe a few others I can find lurking in my office), just donate or say thank you to any open source project or maintainer, then submit your entry.

The drawing will be at random and should be held next Friday, so please make sure to fill out the entry form by then!

Since the Compute Module 4 came along last year, there have been a few projects that use it that make me do a double-take: They did what with a Pi?

Alftel's Seaberry is a carrier board for the CM4 in the Mini ITX form factor that adds on eleven PCI Express slots: