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Introduction

Six years ago, the Raspberry Pi Foundation introduced the Compute Module: a teensy-tiny version of the popular Raspberry Pi model B board.

Between then and now, there have been multiple revisions to the Compute Module, like the 3+ I used in my Raspberry Pi Cluster YouTube series, but they've all had the same basic form factor and a very limited feature set.

But today, that all changes with the fourth generation of the compute module, the Compute Module 4! Here's a size comparison with the previous-generation Compute Module 3+, some other common Pi models, and an SD and microSD card (remember when the original Pi used a full-size SD card?):

In the past few weeks, I reviewed USB drive performance on the Raspberry Pi 4, and the importance of UASP support for USB drive performance.

Both posts generated great discussion, and there were three things I wanted to cover in this follow-up, namely:

1. Which drives support UASP
2. Real-world performance benchmarks
3. TRIM support

For reference, here are all the products I'm testing in this post (product links are to their Amazon product page, starting from top middle, clockwise):

You can use a Nikon D750 as a webcam or for live streaming, assuming you have a mini HDMI to HDMI cable and an HDMI interface for your computer.

While it's forte is stills photography, the D750 isn't bad at video; it can output up to 1080p at 60 frames per second, and has full-time autofocus, but the live view autofocus isn't that great, so I recommend manual focus if you don't have to move around much.

Why would you use a D750? Well, for the same reason you'd use most any other DSLR or mirrorless camera for video instead of a cheaper webcam or built-in camera on your laptop: the video quality is amazing!

Today I posted the first episode of a new series on the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera.

I plan on releasing a number of videos in the series covering how to use the HQ camera in various settings, like for astrophotography, nature photography and video, as a webcam or for streaming, for time-lapse photography, and for general photography.

I'll be updating this post with all the videos as I publish them:

A few months ago, in the 'before times', I noticed this post on Hacker News mentioning the Turing Pi, a 'Plug & Play Raspberry Pi Cluster' that sits on your desk.

It caught my attention because I've been running my own old-fashioned 'Raspberry Pi Dramble' cluster since 2015.

So today, I'm wrapping up my Raspberry Pi Cluster series with my thoughts about the Turing Pi that I used to build a 7-node Kubernetes cluster.

Video version of this post

This blog post has a companion video embedded below:

Note: This blog post has an accompanying video: I replaced my office lights for better video quality.

Earlier this year, I started recording more videos and doing live streams in my office. Originally I just used a webcam, a Logitech C920.

This is a frame of video from that webcam. It's adequate, but not too flattering, and you can see there's a lot of contrast where one side of my face is bright and blown out, and the other side is 'muddy' or 'flat'.

Reading a Hacker News post linked to a YouTube video yesterday, I spotted this comment by user tomerico:

I think [Shane Wighton's Stuff Made Here YouTube channel] illustrates well the transition from personal blogs to youtube videos.

If you go to his projects blog, https://shane.engineer/ you could see very detailed blog posts in the past that go deeply into the engineering, including code snippets. However, he only really go traction when starting to publish youtube videos, specifically youtube video with a clickbait subject (such as a self aiming basketball hoop).

What YouTube provides is a highly competitive environment that provides creators with constant feedback. This allowed him to identify and his niche as he uploaded more videos. With YouTube, the exposure these projects receive is orders of magnitude higher, while empowering its creators to be self sustainable with ads (and sponsors, patreon, and merch) revenue.

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?

At this point, I've showed you how you can use the Turing Pi as a Kubernetes cluster to run different things. I barely scratched the surface of what's possible with Kubernetes, but I'm planning on doing another series exploring Kubernetes itself later this year. Subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want to see it!

In this post, I'm going to talk about the Turing Pi's performance. I'll compare it to a more traditional Raspberry Pi cluster, my Pi Dramble, and talk about important considerations for your cluster, like what kind of storage you should use, or whether you should run a 32-bit or 64-bit Pi operating system.

As with all the other work I've done on this cluster, I've been documenting it all in my open source Turing Pi Cluster project on GitHub.

Video version of this post

This blog post has a companion video embedded below:

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.