Early in 2020, I kicked off the Ansible 101 live streaming series. I wrote an Ansible 101 retrospective post and decided to give it another go, this time covering Kubernetes.
Starting late in 2020 and wrapping things up today, I streamed a new 10-episode series, Kubernetes 101 (the first episode is embedded below).
I didn't know it at the time, but my results testing the EDUP WiFi 6 card (which uses the Intel AX200 chipset) on the Raspberry Pi in December weren't accurate.
It doesn't get 1.34 gigabits of bandwidth with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 like I stated in my December video, WiFi 6 on the Raspberry Pi CM4 makes it Fly!.
I'm very thorough in my benchmarking, and if there's ever a weird anomaly, I try everything I can to prove or disprove the result before sharing it with anyone.
In this case, since I was chomping at the bit to move on to testing a Rosewill 2.5 gigabit Ethernet card, I didn't spend as much time as I should have re-verifying my results.
A few months ago, I replaced my Core i9 MacBook Pro with a Raspberry Pi 4 model B with 8GB of RAM for a day, and I made a video and a blog post about the experience.
Obviously there's a vast difference between a new Core i9 laptop with 32 GB of RAM, a dedicated GPU, and a 2 terabytes of fast storage and a tiny Raspberry Pi running ARM. So it wasn't a fair fight, but I could do a lot of things well enough, and every generation of Pi has gotten better.
A few weeks ago, someone from Mindshare Management asked me if I'd like to do the same test, but this time with an almost one-for-one replacement laptop: the new Kubuntu Focus M2.
Review video: Check out the video that goes along with this review:
Last year, I wrote a blog post titled The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan.
And in a video to go along with that post, I detailed the process of drilling out a hole in the top of the official Pi 4 case and installing a 5v fan inside.
But that solution wasn't great. The fan was a little loud and annoying, and would stay on constantly. And who wants to damage the nice-looking Pi Case by putting a hole right in the top?
A week or so ago, I got the following email in my inbox:
Almost exactly one year ago, my GitHub Sponsors account was approved, and I issued a meek call to action:
You can now sponsor my open source work through GitHub Sponsors: https://t.co/h2GXLE9ZP6 #opensource
There are many Raspberry Pi projects where I spend a few hours (or dozens of hours) building something with a Pi, and realize at the end that not only could I have purchased an off-the-shelf product to do the same thing for half the component cost, but it would work better too.
But this is not one of those projects:
The Raspberry Pi and its HQ camera make a surprisingly potent webcam, and if you want to cover the basics, and rival the image quality of all but the highest-end dedicated webcams, you can do it for under $100.
Above is a single frame from a recording I did with the HQ Camera on my Raspberry Pi Zero W connected as a standard USB webcam using the Camera app on Windows 10 on my Dell laptop.
On November 18th, at 11 a.m., the first episode of my upcoming Kubernetes 101 livestream series will start on my YouTube channel.
The first episode will be available here on YouTube: Kubernetes 101 - Episode 1 - Hello, Kubernetes!.
You can find more details about the series on my Kubernetes 101 site, and there is also an open-source Kubernetes 101 GitHub repository which will contain all the code examples for the series.
In the spring, I presented a similar livestream series, Ansible 101, covering all the basics of Ansible and setting people up for success in infrastructure automation.
After the Raspberry Pi 400 was launched earlier this morning, there was a lot of discussion over the thermals and performance of the upgraded 1.8 GHz System on a Chip inside:
I wanted to spend a little time in this post testing overclocking, performance, power consumption, and thermals in depth.
There is also a video that goes along with this post, if you're more visually-inclined:
Today Raspberry Pi Trading announced the Raspberry Pi 400, the latest in the series of small education-focused computers that started with the original Raspberry Pi in 2012.
For years, people have come up with creative ways to hack a Pi into keyboards, like the Original Pi in an old Mitsumi keyboard, or the Pi 3 A+ in an official Pi Keyboard.
But the Pi 400 delivers something many have desired: an official Pi 4 board built right into a Pi Keyboard, in a space- and performance-efficient way.
tl;dr: I successfully got the Intel I340-T4 4x Gigabit NIC working on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and combining all the interfaces (including the internal Pi interface), I could get up to 3.06 Gbps maximum sustained throughput.
Update: I was able to boost things a bit to get 4.15 Gbps! Check out my video here: 4+ Gbps Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.
After my failure to light up a monitor with my first attempt at getting a GPU working with the Pi, I figured I'd try something a little more down-to-earth this time.
And to that end, I present to you this four-interface gigabit network card from Intel, the venerable I340-T4:
