It's time to dig in the ol' mailbag.
I've gotten a ton of new specialty boards all powered by this, the tiny Raspberry Pi
Compute Module 4.
This Raspberry Pi's a bit different; instead of USB and HDMI, it has these two "board to
board" connectors on the bottom, so people can turn the Raspberry Pi into any kind of computer.
Pretty cool!
Today I'll show you a few new ones, like the 52Pi Routerboard and this—the PiGear Nano
with eight USB 3 ports, a slot for a 4G modem, industrial IO, and even an M2 NVMe slot on the bottom!
As always, links to everything in this video are in the description.
Diving right in, I got this package from Mirek in Poland,
and Mirek made the MirkoPC, which I reviewed last year.
Now there's this updated version, with this nice 3D-printed case, and a bunch of improvements
over the prototype I tested.
There's a new power switch up front, two more fan headers, and this one has PWM fan control,
but the best thing is he fixed the annoying power issues I had when I was testing my NVMe SSDs on it!
For more on the MirkoPC, check out my video from last year linked in the card right up there.
It looks like he also sent along a bag of Polish candy—I looked up this thing, a "Krówka",
and apparently it means "'little cows".
So yeah, if you're wondering why Mirek's stuff gets mentioned first, it's—it's bribery.
Anyways, he also sent two other new boards,
including this tiny little PicoBerry.
It's literally a GPIO header and a power plug.
That's it.
It won't work with Lite CM4 modules, because there's not even a card slot!
But I did test it, and it works great for those times when you literally just need to
power on a CM4, and maybe use serial debugging or a Pi HAT.
Going halfway between the full-featured MirkoPC and the tiny PicoBerry is the BitPiRat, or
maybe it's supposed to be pronounced Bit Pirate?
Not sure, but in any case, this board is tiny, yet still manages to fit a full-size 2280
slot for an SSD on the bottom!
And there's actually a ton of IO on the top, too, so you could use it a lotta different ways.
I think this board might be best suited for projects where you just need some good persistant
NVMe storage, and remember, you can even boot the Pi directly off an NVMe drive now—with
a caveat. More on that later!
Moving on from Poland, this next company didn't send me any chocolates, but they did send
a neat dual Router Board with a built-in OLED display, which integrates with OpenWRT and
can show you server stats and IP addresses.
It's 52Pi's CM4 Router Board, and it has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, a full-size HDMI port,
a USB 2 port on the front, a full GPIO header and this nice little built-in OLED display.
52Pi ships their own fork of OpenWRT, which is great if you wanna run the board as a router,
but I did have some trouble with it.
They use this little Realtek PCI chip for the 2nd Gigabit port, but the first version
of their custom image didn't have the driver for it pre-installed.
So I installed Pi OS instead, because just last week, support for Realtek network chips
was added directly to Pi OS!
This is really cool, because it means even other boards like the DFRobot one I reviewed
last year, and the Taco with it's 2.5 gig port, will work right out of the box with
Pi OS, with no extra driver installs!
Once I got both ports working, I did some benchmarking:
Using "iperf3", I measured each port's throughput, and both ports gave me 940 Mbps, which is
the maximum real-world speed you can get on a Gigabit port, so no bottlenecks there.
I also used "hping" to send as many tiny packets as quickly as possible through the WAN port,
and it could handle about 63,000 packets per second.
That's not quite as good as the chip used in the DFRobot board, which handled almost
76,000 pps, but it is a lot better than the Seeed router board, that used a USB to Ethernet
adapter, and could only put through about 37,000 pps.
Finally, I did a test putting through as much data as I could through both network ports
continuously, and found out the second gigabit NIC gets really hot—so hot that if you don't
add a heatsink or a fan, it'll actually slow down.
My first run went from pumping through 1.76 gigabits to just 1.2.
After I put this little Pi-fan on the board, I was able to get 1.8 gigabits without any
slowdown.
So it performs adequately, and any other networking performance issues, like using it as a VPN
or firewall, would come down to the Pi's own CPU performance, just like the other boards
I reviewed last year.
Right before I shot this video, 52Pi actually updated their official OpenWRT image, so I
grabbed it and flashed it to the board, and what do you know?
The driver for the second port is included, so I could use both network ports to build
a router in OpenWRT.
But software bugs aside, the other headline feature that got me excited about this board
in particular is the ability to use Power over Ethernet instead of USB to power it.
That means you could just have a couple Ethernet cables plugged into it and no need for an
extra power supply!
These dip switches should let me choose which port the PoE power goes through, and all
I'd need to do is add a PoE HAT.
In theory.
Unfortunately, no amount of installing drivers or recompiling kernels gets past the problem
that PoE support on this board is just...broken.
I tried two different PoE switches, on both ports, with two different working PoE HATs,
and no matter what, I couldn't get the 52Pi board to power itself using Power over Ethernet.
And it's not just me.
Nobody else is able to get it working, either.
So that was a bit disappointing.
If you're okay without PoE, at least not with the version of the board that's out right
now, the board makes a decent router otherwise.
Switching gears a bit, I got this little box a few months ago, but haven't had time to
test the fun things inside.
It was sent by Nikolai in Germany, and it has the PiCam!
It's made by Taskit, and they make a number of embedded products for IoT systems.
The PiCam system is based around this little board, which works with eMMC Compute Modules
and exposes it's camera interface on the opposite side.
Adafruit actually sells the board by itself for $40 in the US, and you can find it internationally
through Ledato.
But they sent me a few pre-built kits: the first one has a Pi Camera v2.
The second one has a High Quality camera, and the third one has this funky night-vision
camera with adjustable focus.
Their setup is pretty cool: if you use their software, it'll boot up as a WiFi hotspot.
You log into it, then go to a predefined IP address and put in your WiFi password.
This is kinda useful because this board sacrifices connectivity for a tiny size; you can't just
plug in a keyboard or a network cable!
Out of the box, it runs TensorFlow on the camera feed, and you can preview it in your
web browser.
This web UI is powered by MotionEye, a web interface for monitoring camera feeds.
You can do things like set up a timelapse camera, take pictures when motion's detected,
or identify interesting things like birds, people, or heck, even my cell phone!
Anyways, the CM4 gets really hot with TensorFlow running, so I logged into the PiCam with SSH
and disabled TensorFlow with the commands you see here.
After that, I re-added the camera to MotionEye and the Pi ran quite a bit cooler without
object detection running.
I like seeing more camera-focused products for the CM4, because even though it gets toasty,
it has more than double the performance of the Pi Zero 2 W, while being just as small.
I'd love to see someone put a PiCam and CM4 directly on a telescope for some astrophotography!
But now we come to it, the board to end all boards.
Well, at least if you love USB.
And that's because this board has not one, but [count and point] one... two... three
USB hubs built-in!
I mean, I get it.
Almost every video where I show off a new board that just has a USB 2 port, the first
few comments are "but where are the USB 3 ports?"
Well, I think UUGear heard you, because in addition to the eight USB 3 ports on the back,
there's a Mini PCI Express slot AND an M.2 NVMe slot, all driven through USB 3.
In some ways, that's not as performance-optimized as a design using a PCI Express bridge, like
you might remember on Radxa's Taco board.
But it is easier to make sure everything works out of the box—no extra drivers are needed.
And earlier I mentioned you can boot a Raspberry Pi from an NVMe drive now.
But the caveat is that you can't boot from NVMe if the board has a PCI Express switch
like the Taco.
Well, The PiGear Nano gets around that problem by running its NVMe SSD over an internal USB
port—meaning booting from it works great, since it's just a USB drive!
So with this board, I could conceivably set up an LTE 4G wireless modem, boot it from
an NVMe SSD, and plug in eight USB devices.
So...yeah, I'm gonna do that!
All right, so after doing all that and spending some time using it, I did find a few issues.
First of all, you can't power up an infinite number of USB devices when you're running
the board off USB-C power.
You can hook up a better power adapter to the power terminals here and supply anywhere
between 7 to 30V of power.
Also, for some reason when I tried booting the system off an NVMe drive, I ran into about
90 seconds of delays until the system was running.
I'm not sure why, but I did see a few errors during startup.
I could use the system as usual after it booted, though, so maybe it's my own fault.
Not sure.
I also had a little fun playing a game of "Will it RAID?"
with all 7 of these USB flash drives.
I put 'em in RAID 0 and ran some benchmarks.
The crazy thing is I could get almost 300 MB/sec of sequential read performance, but
it kinda falls off a cliff for anything else.
You can only write about 24 megabytes per second or like 2 to 3 megabytes per second
for small files.
And that's RAID 0, which is the best performing but most risky RAID level.
Nobody ever said cheap flash drives in RAID were a good idea!
Except maybe Red Shirt Jeff, I don't know...
But there are plenty of other features on the board too, like all this IO on the back,
including CAN bus and a 1-wire connection.
UUGear maintains a tool called `pgnano` that lets you control everything from the command
line, or even this neat little web UI.
The UI works pretty well and lets me control this tiny little stoplight on the back.
Oh and how could I miss the cute little built-in buzzer?
Well, actually that could get really annoying...
Anyways, the PiGear Nano is put together well, and I love how they support the hardware with
software and a user manual.
They didn't just throw some hardware over the wall without any thought towards practical use.
I asked why the board has all the USB in the world, and they said a client needed it for
some sort of industrial testing.
When UUGear decided to mass produce the board, they had a decision to make: do they drop
half the USB ports to save a little money, or leave 'em?
I mean, the answer is pretty obvious.
Who wouldn't want 8 USB 3 ports?!
They also designed a pretty nice enclosure, too.
Right before recording this video they sent over this case design, and so I printed it
and slapped it all together.
My 3D printing abilities aside, it's nice to see a well-rounded case design too.
Now, what else is going on... ah, remember the CM4 Retro Lite I talked about last year?
Well, Stoned Edge is back, and it looks like he and his friend have finally finished it.
And they seem to have spared no expense.
The thing looks like a Switch Lite, except, of course, it's not.
It runs RetroPi, and the finish quality on the thing is brilliant.
And since it runs on a Compute Module 4, it can run practically any game up to the PSP
and Nintendo 64 era without a problem.
And it even has a docked mode!
Usually people stop on a project like this once they have a working prototype, but this
goes a lot further.
I mean look at this thing!
They even designed a custom battery and this custom splash screen, though I'm sure if they
tried selling anything Nintendo would have a word about it.
The rest of the community hasn't been getting much rest, either.
There are a bunch of other boards I haven't even mentioned yet!
There's Retroflag's new GPi CASE 2, which is looking pretty slick.
There's RGR's Mini SS Main Board, that fits in a mini Sega Saturn case.
There's a massive relay control board from Aljaz Titoric.
And Will Whang is back with this absolutely tiny Pi 4 Cluster HAT, which is like a CM4
cluster board for ants.
And in addition to those boards, I'm also planning on more in-depth videos on a few,
like the one everyone's been emailing, tweeting, and messaging me about—this Axzez Interceptor board.
It has 5 SATA ports, an ATX power header, 4 Ethernet ports, and more, and I'm partnering
up with someone to make a very fun build with it.
There's also the BliKVM, which is like the Pi-KVM I reviewed earlier this year, but built
with the Compute Module 4.
I'm going to go see how my Dad sets it up at his radio station, and maybe that'll be
the first video we post on our new Geerling Engineering channel.
Finally, I have a new industrial PC from Lincoln Binns, and I plan on talking more about what
it takes to make an industrial Raspberry Pi in a future video.
So, subscribe.
And until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling.