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