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SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 is a strange, powerful RISC-V board

SiFive HiFive Premier P550 leaning on case

SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 is a strange board. It's the fastest RISC-V development board I've tested—though I haven't tested a Milk-V Megrez. It's also Mini DTX, which is an ATX-adjacent standard board size that won't fit in many Mini ITX SFF PC cases, which might be why SiFive and ESWIN are releasing a custom case for it (pictured above, which they sent along with the board for my review).

How to Recompile Linux (on a Raspberry Pi)

Because I get the same question on every video where I recompile the Linux kernel on a Pi to work on GPU or other hardware driver support, I finally made a video answering it:

How do you recompile Linux?

In my case, since I mostly rebuild the kernel for the Pi, I rebuild Raspberry Pi's Linux kernel fork instead of 'mainline' linux (the upstream Linux kernel source).

Raspberry Pi publishes a very thorough guide covering building and cross-compiling the Pi Linux kernel, and my video today mostly goes through that (with a few little tips on making the experience more convenient):

Don't pay $800 for Apple's 2TB SSD upgrade

M.2 NVMe SSD and Apple Proprietary Flash Card

Apple charges $800 to upgrade from the base model M4 Mac mini's 256 GB of internal storage to a more capacious 2 TB.

Pictured above is a photo of a standard 2230-size M.2 NVMe SSD (one made by Raspberry Pi, in this case), and Apple's proprietary not-M.2 drive, which has NAND flash chips on it, but no NVM Express controller, the 'brains' in a little chip that lets NVMe SSDs work universally across any computer with a standard M.2 PCIe slot.

System76 built the fastest Windows Arm PC

System76 built their first workstation-class Arm PC, the Thelio Astra, and it's marketed for streamlined autonomous vehicle development.

System76 Thelio Astra - Hero with Launch Keyboard

But I'm not an automotive developer, just someone who enjoys Linux, Arm, and computing. So I was excited to spend a few weeks (which turned into a few months) testing the latest Ampere-based computer to come to market.

I initially ran my gauntlet of tests under Ubuntu 24.04 (the OS this workstation ships with), but after discovering System76 dropped in ASRock Rack's TPM 2.0 module, I switched tracks and installed Windows 11—which went without a hitch!

Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb

Some broadcast engineering tasks are a bit too daunting for me to consider. Climbing the massive towers that power radio and TV stations is one of them!

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Recently, local engineer Aaron Cox had the perfect set of conditions for a drone flight to capture some of that risk, as the weather and timing of an antenna inspection lined up perfectly with his schedule.

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I'll summarize a bit of what we talked about in today's Geerling Engineering video, but if you want to watch that directly, it's embedded below: