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May 5th Update: this feature is now official, and is called "Portability." To enable it, you will need to pay an extra $25/month, though I haven't been charged yet despite using the feature. Starlink says mobility (using Dishy while in motion) is not yet supported and will void your kit's warranty.

I've logged into my Starlink.com account, and I now see a note that reads Click "Manage Service Options" to add Portability. — that screen leads to this Starlink Portability FAQ page with more details. I haven't signed up for it yet, and I'm waiting to see what happens next billing cycle... I still can't update the service address to my cousin's location.

It's been a busy start to the year on my Raspberry Pi PCIe Devices website. Not only have we finally made some significant progress learning about the BCM2711's PCIe bus (both good and bad), I've also added a few dozen new Raspberry Pi CM4-based boards to the site.

In my YouTube video today, I go through four of them in depth, showing how they're built and what they're used for.

The four projects I cover in depth are:

1. Bigtreetech's Raspberry Pad 5
2. Seeed Studio's reTerminal
3. Waveshare's Dual Ethernet 5G/4G base board
4. Ab-log's RPi4-RTC-PoE DIN rail computer

And there are some other projects I'm watching closely as they journey down the road towards production:

For the past year, I've slowly upgraded parts of my network to 10 Gigabit. But 10 Gigabit switches, NICs, and even cabling is a bit more expensive and sometimes annoying to deal with than the very-cheap 1 Gbps equipment most homelabbers are used to.

I dipped my toes into the 2.5 Gbps waters once I got a NAS with 2.5G ports—you can use standard USB NICs that cost less than $50, or PCIe cards for even less. And cabling is easier, since 2.5G works fine over Cat5e (which I already have run to most of my house).

So in order to install a new WiFi 6 Access Point upstairs—and get it's full bandwidth—I upgraded my main 1 Gbps PoE+ switch to a 2.5 Gbps PoE+ switch.

Looking around at options, most switches with more than 4 2.5 Gbps ports with PoE+ seem to cost upwards of $300. And knowing that I'd like to expand my network a bit in the future, I finally splurged a bit and bought this 20-port monstrosity:

Update: The Compute Module 4S is now listed on Raspberry Pi's website. But they state it "is not for general sale."

Strange times beget strange things.

And that's an apt description of the new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4S:

The above chart is from Revolution Pi's page announcing the RevPi S and SE, which are updates to their popular CM3+-based industrial DIN rail computers.

Last month, I built an all-AMD PC to try out Linux Gaming with Steam and Proton, and so I'd have a faster native Linux build machine for my various compilation tasks.

This month, Apple introduced the Mac Studio, and as a now full-time video producer, it was a no-brainer for me to upgrade from an M1 Mac mini.

My Mac Studio arrived Friday, and over the weekend, I spent some time benchmarking it against not only my M1 mini, but also my new AMD Ryzen 5 5600x PC build.

My Mac Studio's specs:

Update: After posting the video yesterday, the site was hit by more low-complexity DDoS attacks, mostly just spamming one URL at a time. After I cleaned those up, the attacker finally switched to a more intelligent offense, posting actual comments to the site overnight. This morning I noticed that, and the fact the attacker found I left my edit domain un-proxied, so I switched to a different IP on DigitalOcean and shored up the Cloudflare configuration a bit more.

It was a good thing I did that, because about the same time, I got an email from DigitalOcean support saying they had to blackhole the other IP for getting 2,279,743 packets/sec of inbound traffic. Sheesh.

After cleaning up a few bits of fallout, the site should be running a bit better at this point, DDoS or no.

Over on the Geerling Engineering YouTube channel, my Dad and I just posted a video where we installed the ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4RS - AS6504RS at his radio station, to increase their raw network storage capacity from 4 to 16 TB:

In the video, we focused on the installation, though I highlighted the unit's top-line features at the beginning.

In this blog post, I'll quickly recap the main features, then give more impressions of the unit from our experience setting it up, and my Dad's use of it at the station since we recorded the video.

Update: I was able to get everything to work—but I couldn't get the RX 6700 XT's drivers installed in Ubuntu. There are probably a few reasons for that... but it definitely wasn't as straightforward as I had hoped. I'll post an update soon.

Last year, in my work towards bringing up a graphics card on the Raspberry Pi, I was fortunate enough to acquire an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT at near-retail price (thanks to a viewer who assisted my luck!).

This year, as part of a slightly-zany video building a Raspberry Pi into a standard desktop PC, I was able to gather enough parts to make up a halfway-decent gaming/creative PC centered around the RX 6700 XT, and instead of putting it together myself, I thought I'd share in the potential disaster in a live stream—tune in at 10 a.m. US Central time on March 3 (or watch below):

In case you didn't know, the Raspberry Pi turns 10 today!

That's right—the Raspberry Pi model B (pictured above, front left) was launched on February 29th, 2012. And it sold out immediately.

That seems to have become a theme with every Pi model, but for anyone who does have a Pi kicking around in a box somewhere—or if you're lucky enough to find a Pi in stock—check out my latest video, where I go through my top 10 Raspberry Pi projects (all of which I've built, and most of which I'm still running today!):

A couple months ago, Axzez reached out and asked if I'd like to test out the Interceptor—an ATX-style mini motherboard for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, complete with 5 SATA ports.

The board is meant to be used as an NVR (Network Video Recorder): You pop a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 on top, you plug in up to 5 SATA hard drives for storage, and then you plug IP cameras into the 3 extra LAN ports (via an RTL8367RB switch) on the back, and you can store IP camera footage on the drives, and access it over the network.