livestream

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.

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.

I also have a full video up with more demonstrations of the GPU in use, you can watch it below:

...or at least, not without a lot of patience or a fat wallet.

But why? And are there any signs Raspberry Pis will become available to the general public again soon?

To be clear, I'm speaking of the mainstream SBC Raspberry Pis, like the Pi 4 model B, the Compute Module 4, the Pi Zero 2 W, and even in many cases the Pi 400. The Pico and Pico W are both readily available, at least in most markets where I've looked (local shortages always exist, but typically not for months or years like with full-size Pis).

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):

For a few of my task-oriented livestreams, I wanted to be able to have an easy-to-follow list of tasks present in an OBS scene, with an indication of which task was currently in-progress.

I had seen a similar overlay on NASASpaceflight's livestreams (example), and liked the simplicity:

I started searching for an OBS plugin I could use to replicate that overlay, but was coming up with nothing. There was some plugin that seemed like it fit the bill, but it had been abandoned a while back. Most of the other overlays were a lot more specific to gaming, had few options for customization, or only worked with services other than OBS.

Earlier today I did a livestream on my YouTube channel to attempt using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

As with all my testing, I'm documenting everything I learn in this GitHub issue, which is part of the Raspberry Pi PCI Express Card Database website.

It's only been a few hours, but I've already gotten good suggestions for better debugging than I was able to do on the stream. And someone pointed out it might be the case, due to 32-bit memory limitations on the BCM2711's PCIe bus, that no GPU with more than 4 GB of onboard RAM could work. Though it's hard to confirm there'd be no software workaround—even 1 and 2 GB graphics cards (AMD and Nvidia) are crashing the kernel in similar ways.

The full livestream is available on replay and is embedded below:

For Pi Day, I'm going to livestream my second attempt at getting 16 hard drives (well, 12 hard drives and 4 SSDs) recognized by a Raspberry Pi.

The first attempt went decently well... but I wound up running into power supply issues.

This time around, I will hopefully have those issues solved, and also we may have a little fun building a software-RAID-on-hardware-RAID (depending on how crazy we want to get). It probably won't work like I expect, but that's what makes it fun!.

Over the past four months, I live-streamed a series of episodes covering all the basics of using Ansible for infrastructure automation in my Ansible 101 series on YouTube.

In the last episode of the series, I asked viewers to send in questions that I could answer on the final live stream, and there were many great questions sent in. Some of those questions and my answers are posted below, and you can also view the entire episode in the embedded video below:

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Matias

View this Q&A in the livestream

How do you organize your Ansible tasks? What are the best practices for Ansible?

In late March, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US, I decided to make my Ansible books free to help people level-up their skills at home. That offer was generously extended by Device42 in April.

Something happened that I never expected, but in hindsight is pretty amazing: while the books were free, paid sales went up 400%!.

Anyways, in the midst of that, I also realized after getting my equipment in order for live streaming, I could teach a free 'Ansible 101' course on YouTube. So I asked people if they'd be interested, got a very enthusiastic 'YES', and tried to make a concise but somewhat entertaining live series on all things Ansible.

Update: The upgrade was a success! The site is now on Drupal 9.0.0, yay!

I'm planning on upgrading my www.pidramble.com website from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 LIVE on my YouTube channel today, in honor of the #D9Launch today!

The site is currently running on a single Raspberry Pi on my desk in my basement... so this would not only be the world's first live Drupal 9 upgrade, it may possibly be the first-ever Drupal 9 site running on a Raspberry Pi!

Fingers crossed, I hope Drupal 9.0.0 will be ready to go by 5:00 p.m. US Eastern time (today, June 3rd)—if so, the stream will begin at that time, and I've embedded it below:

May 19 Update: It was a total success, yay! This site is now running Drupal 8.

Over 100 days in, the big day has finally arrived—it's time to upgrade this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8! The entire process has been documented, one hour at a time, in my 'Drupal 7 to 8' live streams. Visit that link to view all the previous episodes, from setting up a new Drupal codebase, to running the first test drush migrate-upgrade command, to upgrading this site's theme from PHPtemplate in Drupal 7 to Twig in Drupal 8.

Some of the highlights: