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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).

If you're tired of waiting for Apple to migrate its Mac Pro workstation-class desktop to Apple Silicon, the Ampere Altra Developer Platform might be the next best thing:

I somehow convinced Ampere/ADLINK to send me a workstation after my now years-long frustrated attempts at getting graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi. And they sent me a beast of a machine:

Every few months, I try to test a number of new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4-based projects, and at this point I've looked at over 100 boards that use the CM4 to fill some need—general computing, industrial controls, media playback, or even clustered computing!

This month, among other projects, I spent a bit of time with Zymbit's Secure Edge Node D35:

KSDK-TV broadcasts to well over 1 million households in the St. Louis metro area. And my Dad and I went to their broadcast tower last month to explore how the digital TV signal is delivered through the air to so many people.

On our tour, we explored over 75 years of television broadcast history, seeing how things transitioned from thousands of volts down to hundreds, and from analog audio and video to all-digital.

And we even found strange artifacts of the past, like this random microwave dish that received a signal through the roof of the broadcast building for a time:

Today Raspberry Pi launched their new Global Shutter Camera.

Outwardly it is almost identical to the 12 Megapixel High Quality Camera, and like that camera it accepts C and CS mount lenses, or most anything else with the appropriate adapter.

But flipping it over reveals a black plastic cover over the back of the board that is not present on the HQ or M12 HQ Camera:

It's risky business fighting Intel, AMD, and Arm, and that's exactly what Star Five is trying to do with this:

The chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a computing revolution—at least that's what some people think!

The VisionFive 2 has a JH7110 SoC on it, sporting a new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) called RISC-V.

This week I finally moved my gaming/Linux PC into my little office rack—it's that 2U box above the UPS at the bottom:

I remembered seeing Linus Tech Tips' 4U build in a video a couple years ago—but he has a full 42U rack in his basement. I don't have that much space—just 2U (technically 3U if I wanted) in my little under-desk studio rack.

So after working with them last year on a similar build (but with a prototype case), I got in touch with MyElectronics and they sent over their new production Mini ITX short-depth 2U PC case.

Radxa's Rock 5 model B is an ARM single board computer that's 3x faster than a Raspberry Pi. And that's just the 8-core CPU—with PCI Express Gen 3 x4 (the Pi has Gen 2 x1), storage is 7x faster! I got over 3 GB/sec with a KIOXIA XG6 NVMe SSD.

It's still half as slow as modern ARM desktops like Apple's M1 mini, or Microsoft's Dev Kit 2023 (see my review here). But it's way faster than a Pi, it comes with 2.5 Gig Ethernet, it has two M.2 slots on board... and, well—it also starts at $150!

...that was the question I asked my Dad, a radio engineer for many decades, who worked at the biggest AM station in St. Louis, KMOX. The station is approaching its centennial in 2025, as are—some YouTube commenters argue—its primary audience!

I recorded that video during my convalescence at my parents' house (I am feeling much better now, thank you!), and my Dad discussed a few reasons why AM radio—at least in the US—is not dead. But it is suffering.

In the video, I pointed out the current dichotomy:

This is the Compute Blade, and I'm test driving it in a four-node cluster: