youtube

Today I released a video about how—and why—I 3D Printed my Grandpa and put him on my bottle of ketchup. Watch it here.

I sculpted a bust of my Grandpa in high school, gave it to my grandparents, got it back after he died and my Grandma moved out of her house (I wrote a tribute to my 'Grandpa Charlie'), and I kept on moving it around my office because I didn't have room for it:

Grandpa by Jeff Geerling, terracotta, 2001.

I decided it had to go, but asked my extended family if anyone wanted the statue (thinking it would be sad to destroy it). One enterprising cousin suggested he could 'copy' the statue in smaller form using photogrammetry:

I shoot the 'A-roll' for my YouTube videos with a Sony a6000 and a small Glide Gear TMP 75 smartphone teleprompter:

Until recently, I had these mounted on a tripod just off the back corner of my desk:

Some people mount semi-permanent camera rigs on a pole on their desks (example), but my adjustable-height desk (by UPLIFT) is not rock solid, so sometimes when I'm typing or accidentally bump the desk, anything mounted to the desktop wobbles.

For lights, monitors, etc., a little wobble isn't a problem. But even with image stabilization in my camera, the wobble becomes noticeable if I have the camera physically attached to my desk.

After I posted my Raspberry Pi Blade server video last week, lots of commenters asked what you'd do with a Pi cluster. Many asked out of curiosity, while others seemed to shudder at the very idea of a Pi cluster, because obviously a cheap PC would perform better... right?

Before we go any further, I'd say probably 90 percent of my readers shouldn't build a Pi cluster.

But some of you should. Why?

Well, the first thing I have to clear up is what a Pi cluster isn't.

Note: This blog post corresponds to my YouTube video of the same name: Why would you build a Raspberry Pi Cluster?. Go watch the video on YouTube if you'd rather watch the video instead of reading this post!

A few weeks ago, I received two early copies of Uptime.Lab's CM4 Blade.

The Blade is built for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, which has the same processor as the Pi 4 and Pi 400, but without any of the built-in IO ports. You plug the CM4 into the Blade, then the Blade breaks out the connections to add some interesting features.

A 1U rackmount enclosure is in the works, and 16¹ of these boards would deliver:

• 64 ARM CPU cores
• up to 128 GB of RAM
• 16 TB+ of NVMe SSD storage

That's assuming you can find 8 GB Compute Modules—they've been out of stock since launch almost a year ago, and even smaller models are hard to come by. More realistically, with 4 GB models, you could cram in 64 GB of total RAM.

After months of testing various SATA cards on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, the default Raspberry Pi OS kernel now includes SATA support out of the box.

In the past, if you wanted to use SATA hard drives or SSDs and get native SATA speeds, and be able to RAID them together for redundancy or performance, you'd have to recompile the Linux kernel with SATA and AHCI.

Sure you could always use hard drives and SSDs with SATA to USB adapters, but you sacrifice 10-20% of the performance, and can't RAID them together, at least not without some hacks.

There's a video version of this post: SATA support is now built into Raspberry Pi OS!

MyElectronics, a small business in the Netherlands, specializes in small computer rackmount solutions. They sent me these two racks (a 1U and 2U Raspberry Pi rack) and asked me to test them out and compare them to the 3D Printed Raspberry Pi Rack I built earlier this year, based on a design by Russ Ross.

They also have a 3U Raspberry Pi rackmount unit, but I won't be reviewing that here.

The contents of this review are summarized in this video I posted on YouTube:

SpaceX's Starlink internet service uses satellites in low-earth orbit to provide high-speed Internet to underserved parts of the world, especially places without easy access to cable or fiber.

SpaceX's Starlink beta opened up in my area, so I installed Dishy—that's the nickname for the large white satellite dish above—and I've been testing it and comparing it to my Cable internet.

I have Raspberry Pis monitoring my Internet—one on Starlink, and one on Spectrum. And I also have a power monitor measuring power usage. And I've tracked everything since day one to see if weather like snow and thunderstorms affect service, and how Starlink compares to Cable.

Here's the bottom line: Most of the time, I couldn't tell I was using Starlink. And that's good. Everything felt the same.

If you read the title of this blog post and are thinking, "10 Gbps on a Pi? You're nuts!," well, check out my video on using the ASUS XG-C100C 10G NIC on the Raspberry Pi CM4. Back? Good.

To be clear: it's impossible to route 10 gigabits of total network throughput through any Raspberry Pi on the market today.

But it is possible to connect to a 10 gigabit network at 10GBase-T speeds using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and an appropriate PCI Express 10G NIC. And on my Pi PCI Express site, I documented exactly how I got an ASUS XG-C100C working on the Raspberry Pi. All it takes is a quick recompile of the kernel, and away it goes!

Harbinger of the Internet of Dings

Last year, I built the first version of what I call the "Raspberry Pi Bell Slapper." It was named that because it used a servo and a metal arm to slap the top of the bell in response to a stimuli—in this case, an email from a donation notification system for a local non-profit radio station.

This year, that same radio station had another one of their fund-raisers (a radiothon), and to celebrate, I thought I'd do the thing justice, with a better circuit (using a solenoid instead of a servo) and a 3D printed enclosure. And this is the result:

There is a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a custom solenoid control HAT on top inside the case to the left, and the solenoid right up against the bell, which is mounted on the right.

I also posted a video on YouTube exploring the project in detail: The Raspberry Pi IoT Notification Bell.

Ah, the feeling of unpacking a brand new computer:

In my case, I'm actually selling the 16" MacBook Pro pictured above and replacing it with a 13" MacBook Air and 10 Gigabit Mac mini.

Once you turn on the new Mac, what's next? Do you: