 No, you are live awesome for live actually live and in person. We're going to go a step further. This is a little bit different doing here because we did it live and in person. How long has it been a year, year and a half since we saw each other in person? I think I feel longer. I don't know. I can't remember before the pandemic started sometime in early 2019 three to six months before you move here. Oh, yeah, just when the pandemic was starting. Okay. Yeah. So yeah. So I've been in the studio for quite a while now, but it's just, you know, the pandemic kind of makes you at least I secluded myself as many people did. And now we're vaccinated. We have our antivirus. We have antivirus installed. So now we're here in the studio together. So yeah, hoping to do this more often and I hope to go to his studio too. So yeah, pretty cool. But welcome to the Home Lab show. We're going to be talking about raspberry pies today. This is episode 16. And for those of you, we are going to switch it back. But for those of you that are visually watching, we do have this funny colored thing, which is on Twitter. So if you're listening and post to the podcast, go on Twitter and you'll see it. It's a raspberry pie rack. And we just thought it made a good prop. There's a bunch of raspberry pies in there. Oh, yeah. That's for a completely separate project. It's not directly related to other than we're going to be talking about raspberry pie today. So you probably should talk about racks and things anyway. Yeah, we haven't done a dedicated video on raspberry pie. I feel like it's something we've been talking about a lot, but we just never really said like this is our video to deep dive into it. And we're going to do a video on this rack after this is done recording. So you'll see that on one of our channels. I don't know which one yet. Yeah, yeah. It is and it is a 3D printed rack, but we're that's going to get it some dedicated because that's going to be more of a visual element. But the topic for today is raspberry pies. We'll talk briefly about what we wouldn't use your raspberry pie for, but there's a lot of things you can use a raspberry pie for and they're really just a fun project for it. Before that, we got to think of that sponsor of our show and that is the node. Yes. You know, I keep willing sometimes I'm going to have my Linode shirt on. I had it out. I'm like, I'm going to wear that to Jay's and I forgot. So I have like two of them, but the pandemic weight is making it impossible for me to wear them. Currently, but but yeah, the show is literally brought to you by Linode. The website is running on Linode. The podcast is distributed by Linode and pretty much actually all of the servers that are externally facing for learn Linux TV are on Linode. So it's not like a thing that we don't use that we're telling you to use. We use it and it's being used. And if you're on our site, you're using it. Yeah. Jay has a lot of tutorials that you've shown how to get started with Linode servers and you know, we've built a lot of projects on there. So it's great when you don't have the ability to build your home lab in your office, you can build your lab in the cloud and use our offer code to get started with that Linode offers as a good offer that they sponsor a show with to get you started with Linode, get you some time, get you some hours and get rolling with it. Yeah, absolutely. Check them out. All right. Now, because this is the brief part, but I want to start here. What shouldn't I use Raspberry Pi for and we've debated about this your name is it's not exactly. I would say full fledged desktop replacement. I think it can be. I just think it depends on what you're doing. Yeah, I think there's going to be. I think the first thing I want to talk about is this this opinion that Raspberry Pi shouldn't be used for anything other than, you know, like something that's not important, something that's not production ready something that's just a test case for it. I think that reputation came from back when it was true. It was actually very much true. You wouldn't want to use Raspberry Pi for virtually anything. I remember when I first started with it, like, I think it was the first one that crashed a lot. If you plugged in too many things, it would just, I mean, it's still kind of like that, but not so much. It was just really hard to use. So I could totally understand where that reputation came from, but I wouldn't depending on what is being used where I wouldn't really think twice about a Raspberry Pi in production at a company or a home lab, depending on what you're using it for, which you'll get to, you're not going to run, you know, call a duty on the Raspberry Pi or anything like that. Yeah, that's true too. Well, one of the other aspects is the fact that with the Raspberry Pi, the people go, well, I need a web browser working on it so I can, you know, and most things I access are going to be on the web problem you run into in Facebook is an easy example of it. You know, there's a lot of elements that have to be rendered on those pages of the more advanced websites that are taking advantage of it. And that's where you'll find some of the limitations that even though it's just a web browser, this is where it can be a little bit of a hang up to be a full pledge desktop replacement. But depending on what you're doing on it, it can be a good developing system. It can be for writing code and things like that. I mean, it really you load up your ID. It has great out. So come come off those few years ago when Raspberry Pi came out, great display support. Matter of fact, dual screen support with the Raspberry Pi 4 now you can actually use it for some pretty good and in-depth things, but you just have to think about that. It isn't like the inexpensive solution to buying a desktop. I just want to get that out. There's a question that came out a lot, but that is true. I think there's going to I think it's going to improve because some of the drivers currently aren't in the best state where they could have the better performance. Yes. Anytime a web browser tries to use the GPU for rendering at any point, it's going to struggle with that. I do feel that if you have uBlock origin on the browser and you have the 8GIG version, specifically the 8GIG version, that's when it becomes more likely to run it as a desktop. If you're on the 4GIG version, I mean, you can. If you have like two or three tabs open, I feel and they're not really advanced, but an 8GIG Pi with, you know, you're being kind of selective over what you're allowing to be rendered by running like Pyhole, which we'll talk about on the other end of that or just, you know, having uBlock origin installed as the add-on on the browser, that'll really help. You're still not going to get intense performance out of it. It's going to be a bit slower, but it'll work. I mean, some people I've seen are on really old computers with spinning rust hard drives are going to feel like that's a speed improvement depending on what you're coming from, but I mean, like this laptop here with an NVMe hard drive on it and Core i7. No, it's not going to measure up to that. We have to be honest. Right. Now, one of the reasons in what makes Raspberry Pi so popular is the base board itself usually starts about $35. I mean, there's variations if you get more memory and things like that, but it also allows you to have a very repeatable platform and this is a challenge for writing Linux drivers or, you know, this is the Windows world challenges. There's variety in computers, so finding drivers and compatibility can be a little bit challenging, but when you talk about Raspberry Pi, they're all the same and being that they're all the same. I know if I have a Raspberry Pi 4, you know, barring any memory constraints, the card i flash and set up and configure or however I want to build my Raspberry Pi project, absolutely repeatable and this has led to widespread adoption. I've done consulting recently on a big project client that was building a bunch of things that needed to be deployed. I helped build the deployment script for one, but that was kind of cool. I build one of my lab, send the script to them. They can repeat it and that was the goal. They needed to mass deploy this at a chain of restaurants across the United States. Easy enough. Every restaurant requirement is Raspberry Pi and any NHD output. They can blanket send the same thing with the same script to manage the entire fleet of them across every one of these chains. So it's actually, you know, really strong reasons to use it. Now we're going to start diving into some specific things and I'm actually surprised. The first one Jay has on the list is NextCloud. How does NextCloud run on a Pi? It runs pretty well. Now I think one thing I didn't add to our list of topics that just came to me. I really do want to mention because this always comes up. Everyone asks like, can I run more than one app on a Pi? Yes, you can. I mean, honestly, what's stopping you? You have Apache, Nginx. You have a config file for each of the websites. You can load it up with 20 different apps if you want. It probably will take 10 minutes to boot at that point or start up everything if it even just saturates the memory and doesn't fall over. But the thing is about that you have to be careful. If it's a few things, you can get away with it. I had, I'm one of mine. I have a smoke ping on there and I have Nagios on there and another app. I can't remember. The thing is those apps don't take that much CPU or memory. So there's no problem with that. But the minute you're trying to run a bunch of apps on there, you're starting to slow it down. You have to be reasonable. I prefer to have one Pi per app, but the problem is if you're running 15 apps, you have 15 pies. That's, that's more expensive than just buying a server at that point that could handle all those things without even needing to have a bunch of pies. I mean, just, just think about it like try to just watch the CPU, the memory, make sure it's not overly saturated and you should be fine to run more than one. Just don't go crazy. Yes, on the topic of like virtualization, that's another one that it may or may not be the best virtualization platform. I know it is supported. Yeah, but I don't know that it's recommended is probably I just kind of, I've had a few people say, look, they're supporting it. I'm like, ah, by the time you had a hypervisor and slice that up. So that's probably not a good use case for it either. Kind of like Jay was saying, it's going to come to the, can I multitask better if I use virtualization on it? Right. So you, you want to optimize it with bare metal as much as possible. Yep. Yeah. Sorry. Have allergies. Okay. So basically just run what you can watch the CPU, watch the performance and you should be fine. So next cloud it, you know, you have to really, I mean, with next cloud, you have to really know which pie you should have because if you have the eight gig pie, you're in pretty good shape. If you have the two gig version, you can run it. Not well, but you can four gig. You can run it okay. But I guess the big question is, are you planning on running clabora office on there? I don't think I've tried that yet. So I don't know if the container for clabora office works with it, but if it does, you know, you're using more memory for that too. So it could be your next cloud server. Absolutely. I've known other people that have done it. It's obviously not going to be as fast as in a VM, but it's okay if you have like everybody in your family, like, you know, 10, 15, 30 people going in there because you have it remotely accessible. Yeah. That's going to, it's going to start to have a little bit of troll there. So, but as long as you're managing your expectations with it, if you're the only user, just a handful, four or five people, I don't really see a problem with X cloud running on there. I think it'd be fine. Absolutely. You know, and obviously you're using it because you're learning next cloud, you're learning how to set it up and configure it. You're not trying to run this with 30 people collaborating on it either. So there are users, number of user limitations still going to be there. You're limited to the processor, even if you do have the 8 gigs of RAM. So another thing that you could run on the Raspberry Pi is open media vault. Yes. Now, I feel like when you're getting, getting into the NAS territory, how feasible that is depends on what's pulling from the NAS and what's loading it, like, like the bandwidth. You can absolutely add an SSD. Yeah. So you can add an SSD. You can add, you know, you could definitely do that in an M2 SSD even. You're probably not going to get the full performance of that SSD, but it's going to be very good compared to what the SD card is. I think you might agree with me on this. I think the idea is to use the SD card as as less as you could possibly. Yes. Because anything up that SD card, I don't care what SD card you have. And I think it's Jeff Gehrling has the videos on the speed of the SD cards. That's probably the best resource to go for that. He's done a combination video and write up. Well, if I was trying to include that in a show notes on there, but you're not heard to find if you search the different SD cards, but they are not as fast. Right. And his channel is awesome, by the way, for this kind of thing. If you guys haven't seen it, Jeff Gehrling, but so if you have like, like Tom was saying, you have the best SD card you could possibly get. Maybe it's number one on his list. You're still not going to have the best performance. Add an SSD, load your, you know, whatever directories that are going to be busy off of that SSD, especially with open media vault. You definitely want to dedicate an SSD or some kind of external storage for the actual storage. So it's not adding IO to the SD card, which is what you're always trying to avoid. I mean, you could even just remap your home directory to the SSD, for example, to get that off of there. And that's what I do. I usually have a home directory that's on like one of those low profile USB three flash drives. It's fine. It works pretty well. So with open media vault, that's important, especially also if you have a bunch of people trying to transcode video off of that, and that's the back end storage for Plex, you're probably going to struggle. So if it's just something for just backing up your files, your laptop, things like that. I don't see any problem with that at all. Just be conscientious of the use case, the IO, and you should be fine. Yeah. And one of the cool things, believe Tony is using it for this purpose, Tony of Sunday morning Linux review. He's never really been much on the YouTube channel, but one of the cool things he was doing was his parents live geographically somewhat far away and he used open media vault to be an easy backup for all this data at the house. He because he built a cool little small raspberry pie setup, I believe is what he did for all this offsite backups. And it's kind of a nice way to do it because hey, you know, maybe you don't want to put it in some cloud place, even if you're encrypting it, it still has an expense attached to it. If you have someone who'd say, Hey, I'll give you some closet space and you know, Tony's parents were willing. He has a couple hard drives attached to a. That's awesome. Yeah. And that's how he makes sure he's got a geographically separate offsite backup in case of disaster for a place to keep all his files. And that actually reminds me of another app that I didn't have on the list, but I should have had in the list sync thing. Yes, that's so much easier when you have sync thing on there. So you just put that raspberry pie somewhere with a really fast disk attached to it and then install sync thing so that your computer is syncing to it all the time. You don't have to remember to have manually run that our sync job that you haven't ran for the last two weeks because you're too busy. You know, it happens to all of us, right? But sure sync thing. It syncs things. Hence the name sync thing. Yeah. So now I've done plenty of videos on that and one of the cool features they added a sync thing is untrusted nodes and that means you can have a node in your syncing group. That's external. That's untrusted. That's encrypted. So it is blind to what it's syncing, but it does sync all of it and that's a great point. Yeah, you don't put the encryption key on that particular unit. Each one of the other nodes does have the decryption key on it so they can treat it as an untrusted node, but it will still provide backup. So yeah, it's kind of a, I should do a video on that of deploying untrusted nodes on a Raspberry Pi. That might be kind of fun. Yeah, absolutely. I'd like to see that. It's a good use case. I wrote this down. I don't know why, but Internet site. I guess I probably could have started with that. If you just have a internal site inside your house or wherever you have your homelab, obviously probably your house, you could have an Internet site and why would I want to do that? I remember one time my roommate kept having problems with the media server. It wasn't Plexus before that and I didn't really feel like explaining how to SSH into the box and restart it. Just throw it up on a Internet site with a button they can click on to restart a service. That could be really great for somebody in your house that's not as technically inclined and maybe they use some of the things that you're hosting in your homelab because set up an Internet site with buttons on it, restart media server, restart, whatever, whatever you're running. So that way they don't have to feel like they're taking a technology class just to figure out how to get the stuff working again. If something goes down, you could just put it like maybe with not fabric, but I'm blanking on the name of the Python library Flask. That's what it is like something like with Flask and you can have the buttons on there and just have your own menu and then Home Assistant obviously could be the same and that's another app as well. Yeah, but but even then Home Assistant will you could expose the various things through a Raspberry Pi there as well, especially with the lighting and then you could have like a display, a touchscreen. I mean, Internet, Home Lab, Home Assistant, excuse me, I only include Home Assistant there. It's like a website with buttons on it, but I don't mean to make it sound like it's not a advanced application. Home Assistant is freaking awesome. I love it. We should probably do a video on that here in the future, but that's another thing that you can run in Raspberry Pi. Yes, and then now there's a kind of a cool thing you can do with it though. The coding T-Mux server, but I would also add coding T-Mux, also a remote access like a jump box when you have to have something. Yeah, Bastion server, maybe even have it at the client so you can get into it and pivot from there. That way you can really choke create a choke point for the connection. There's a lot of little things you can do your use of T-Mux on it to have all your sessions on their convenience. So basically what the scenario plays out like is, you know, let's just say I'm writing some Ansible code or I'm just doing some, you know, terminal stuff and I have it in T-Mux on the Raspberry Pi. It has a static IP and all of that and I'm on my laptop. I'm doing my thing and then I need to move to my desktop. I could bring the laptop downstairs or I could switch or I could bring the computer with me, but it's just so much better that whatever computer I'm using, I could just restore the T-Mux session and I have all of my work on that. And that's kind of how I work. Even before I have my own business, when I'm working at a company, I'll have a server on the stack somewhere. That's just mine. It's just where I keep my T-Mux stuff and it's not externally available because I mean, in that sense, I don't really want anyone from the outside getting hold of what I'm working on, but it basically means that if my laptop dies, my battery runs out, I can't get to a charger fast enough. I don't care because it's a central point where all of my work is being done and I could just connect to it. And I think that's a great fit for that. Tom mentioned a Bastion server. So for, you know, remote access, there's so many possibilities with that. I'm thinking like WireGuard, for example, Zero Tier is a good way to have it be networked with other computers and things like that. Having a development environment in your pocket, you could just take your Pi with you. And then I saw a video where someone is literally plugging it in to their laptop via USB-C, which is providing power and an interface that they could connect to it with and they could just bring it with them and they have this development environment. Then they activate Wi-Fi and have their friends sign on to all the apps that are helping develop. And it's like you literally have like a, like a development LAN party kind of thing going on. It's just so fun. Yeah, next one in, I know you and Phil and once again, Phil, if you guys didn't know, he's one of our Linux friends from the Sunday morning at Lakeshree, you guys are both a big fan of, is it pronounced value, V-O-L-U-M-I-O? I know how to spell it. I don't know how to pronounce it. I say volumio. Volumio. That sounds good. Volume I-O, volume I-O. It's like volume, but you take the E off the end of it and add I-O at the end and you just attach some, you know, decent speakers to it and you have a jukebox. So mine actually has an NFS mount via AutoFS to TrueNAS where all my music is. And I still buy CDs. I'm one of those. And I rip all of my CDs in 499 kilobit AUG because I want the, you know, it's lossy, not lossless like FLAC, but it's, in my opinion, the best lossy format you can get. And they're fairly large files too and it plays them. So I literally just open up a web browser and I just start browsing my stuff. So on your end, like you could just tell them what you see if you go on your browser to music. I'll let you, I'll let you see it for yourself. Then you could describe to our audience what you see. So music.home.network, home-network rather. A home. Yeah, home-network.io. If people talk, I type exactly what they say. I-O, dot I-O, dot I-O. And for some reason, music.home-network.io. I think you misspelled that word. I did smut. Yeah. So these are the things that we edit out of videos when we're talking things. Yeah, you don't realize just how often. Literally, I'm not going to have you play anything because you'll actually hear it. But you, but he's seeing, what he's seeing right now is a website with all of my music on there showing the last thing that I was playing and it's just a play, pause button. Anybody that's on the network can view this and view your music collection and activate it. So it's like a jukebox that anybody in your land, I mean, it'd be kind of weird if you expose this to the public internet and then someone hacks it and starts playing music when you don't expect it to. Well, it might be fun. Someone can read. That's a good way to have random playlists. It's just expose your playlist to the internet, let people pick it for you. Yeah. It's like, I'm just, I'm just cleaning my house and here's Metallica. Yeah. Here you go. But it's so cool how you could just go through your music collection and you could tell it to update, re-scan and you don't even need to have a monitor on that at all. Just literally a, not even network cable, Wi-Fi. Just plug-in speakers, power and expose it. Volumio is great. It's one of my favorite things to host on a Pi. And yes, our friend Phil turned me on to it and now I can't stop using it. Yeah. I know he has, he hasn't set up a series of them because Phil bought a farm and so literally his barn has different music areas in it. And it's the most geeky farm on the planet. It is. It's a very geeky farm. To do an onsite video to show that off. Yeah. That's so cool. It's solar powered and all kinds of fun stuff. Yeah. We got to talk about Kubernetes. Kubernetes. Now, Kubernetes is what's actually loaded on the rack of pies that we have in front of us here. That's a pretty cool project. And when, when Kubernetes, you want to control a lot of physical servers and not everyone can afford a lot of physical servers, but at $35, it's not cheap for how many pies you have here. But right. It was, it was about within reach. Gosh, I forgot how much I spent on that. But the cool thing about Kubernetes is that you can start with one controller and one node, preferably two nodes. And that's it. Stop. You're good. And don't even buy anymore. Like when you get to a point where they're really heavily loaded and they're kind of struggling at another one. And then it'll start to span, you know, span the workload out so you can just buy them as you need them and keep adding them. Now, the big problem though is that most containers are written for x86. They will not run on the pie, which is horrible. I mean, it's just the way it is. But thankfully Linux server.io has solved that problem because anything that I've ever wanted to run, they have an ARM compatible container there for you to run either just via straight Docker, Kubernetes, however you run your containers. You could just use their images. They're great. That's where I get mine from. And that's it. Immediately when I ran into, I tried to run containers. I can't. Oh, man, I can't find an ARM version of anything. Then Linux server.io, excuse me.io, I go there and there's everything. So, yeah, just like Tom mentioned for the people that are listening and not watching. It's a, I'm a little slightly colorblind. It looks like green and purple, more like a teal or a bluish, like a blue-green turquoise basically on the ends. And then it's more like a violet purple. Yeah. Go on Twitter. We did post pictures of it. So in the background, these are the raspberry pies, the ones that we're talking about. If you've ever seen any of my videos in the background, you have the glowing fans. That's my Kubernetes cluster. And you will still see that for a month from now because I record videos ahead. And I think a month, at least for a few weeks. And then you'll start to see this one when we do the video. But it's going to be a fun project. And I think we should probably talk about racks because where are you going to put your pies? And we should probably describe a little bit about this if you want to tell the audience what it exactly is. So what we did was we found a project and we'll have the show notes as well. This is 3D print. We have some 3D printers at my office. And some of my staff really, really look for anything to 3D print. So the schematics for this are out there and it's a 2U has rack ears on it. One, two, three, four. How many are here? I think there's 10. 10? Should be 10. Yeah. Yeah. There's 10 raspberry pies and a 2U rack on it. It's obviously really shallow. So this could fit in. I mean, this is only is maybe half an inch more depth than a pie itself. You could throw in one of those audio racks. Yeah. And it would fit in a shallow audio rack as well. But we 3D printed all these individual modules and then we screwed it all back together. And I see screwed all the back together because although it's 3D printed, it's printed small in individuals. So you have to hold it together with some screws. When we do the video on it, and of course, it's also described when you look at how the project is put together. It's pretty simple. It's relatively other than you have to have 3D printer and expensive to print, but it creates a really nice setup for all your pies. Now Jay went ahead and got the pie hats on here, which allows for PoE. So we're powering this off of a PoE switch. So all of the hookups come from the very front of the rack. So you install a PoE switch, then you just use a series of patch cables that go up to the pies. And now you don't have to worry about powering all the pies like with a series of cords. You only need one cable going to the pies. It keeps it dead simple from a configuration standpoint and provides you have enough air flow around your rack. Cooling is relatively simple at that point. And they slide out. So for the people that can't see what I'm doing. Yeah, they slide out early. Each one slides out. So it's just literally like this little tray that the pie screws onto and then you just slide it right in. And only thing really holding them in there is just a little bit of tension, which isn't too big of a deal when you're putting them in. I mean, you could print them slightly like adjust the print to make the sled slightly bigger. Right. I can't even. Just realizing it's hard to see if you're not looking at it. Not directly looking at it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, there's your roof. There it goes. Yeah. So we have it reversed. It's hard to see. But anyway, yeah, it looks like a really cool project. And these are things that are making me actually want a 3D printer. I've been a little oppositional to that, but I think I'm kind of coming around now. Yeah. Looks pretty cool. So and that's one option. Yeah. And the rack that's that used to be behind me, there's nothing wrong with it. The one that had the glowing fans, you should probably put a link in the show notes for that one. They have a four pie version. I think mine was like the 12 pie version. They have some in between. So that's an option. If you guys want something that's, you know, you can, it's not even, that wasn't even a rack mountable rack that I had. It just, it just fit. It happened to fit in there. So I just had it sitting down. The problem is if you nudge it hard enough, it's going to fly right out the back of the thing. So I commented verbatit counting or 12. Yeah. There's that. It's sensory overload. There's all kinds of, I redid my office. So I don't know what's what anywhere. Yeah. So people, yeah, people were cropped into the very organized part of the office for those of you. You haven't seen the floor. There's a project over here. We've tripped over a couple of times. I hit my shin and my foot. Yeah. I'm building a new Proxmox server. So yeah, that's another video coming. Yeah. All right. So let's talk. Compute modules. Compute modules. So those are a very interesting idea. It's almost like this, like this rack. But it's actually it's more like a blade server, I would say, because the compute modules look like sticks of RAM. They are Raspberry Pis. The newer compute modules are supposed to be as powerful as Raspberry Pi 4. The problem is getting a board for it. So if you buy one, great. What are you going to slot it into? Because the compute modules don't have an HDMI port. They don't have a network port. They don't have a power anything. They don't have any ports at all because they're meant to slot into a what looks like a motherboard, kind of like you would slot in a stick of RAM and the motherboard provides everything. So you have an ethernet cable going into the motherboard and it'll basically distribute the the net has built-in switch basically. So there's one network cable, one power cable, and it powers all the pies now with the older compute modules which fit the Turing Pi one, which I have reviewed is going to be orders of magnitude slower from an IO standpoint than the Raspberry Pis we have in front of us right now because they're left. I can't remember the speed they're limited to, but it's pretty slow. Like they're decently fast, but the IO is going to be even more starved. So it's not something I would say go out and buy a Turing Pi one and compute modules because honestly it's cheaper to buy a Raspberry Pi or two or three or four or twelve than it is to buy a bunch of compute modules. But where it starts to get great is the newer compute modules are supposed to be as good as the Pi 4 in terms of IO, so no trade-off anymore. And that motherboard that they slot in, the Turing Pi 2, I'm pretty sure they fixed all the issues, one of which was the like you put it was ATX modable motherboard. Power switch doesn't work on the front of the case. So you have a power switch that's just for decoration. For example, there's no IO shield on the back of it. So you have this big gap where everything goes. You have like a hole with wires going in. It's still a cool idea, but my understanding is the Turing Pi 2 fixes all those problems. The power button works. There's no gaps in the back. It looks professional and it's as fast as the Pi 4. I will be reviewing it, but they reached some kind of supply chain issue like everybody is running into nowadays. So it's not out yet. That's why I haven't reviewed it, but I've been in constant talk in communication with them. I'm still here. I still want to do it. So the minute they have it available, I will, but it's going to be cool to have it because you'll have compute modules that you'll be able to just slot right into the motherboard and grow your cluster, whatever you're doing. And I think it'll be worth the price. I don't think the Turing Pi 1 is as worth the price. I didn't pay for mine. So I like the price of mine, but I did pay for the compute modules. I think they're like $30, $40 a piece. So there's that. So it's just an option at least and definitely something to look into. Look at the Turing Pi 2. I'm afraid it might be one of those issues where honestly, I hope scalpers don't get ahold of it and make it one of those kinds of things which could happen, but just keep your eye on it. Join the mailing list or something for it. Now kind of related to that, there are a few other projects and one of them that is interesting is they use that module for one of the handheld gaming systems. The, yes, I don't, I think you, you probably own that if I had to guess. I have this one. Yep. Pie boy. That was and this one. And this has the modules. And so the GPI case for, you know, now that we're talking about, I always want to talk about retro pie. Yeah. And everyone's like, Jay, this is not homelab related. Why are you injecting video games yet again? You know what, you have to have some fun when you're done with this. I think there's a Venn diagram of homelab people and people that love gaming or even the retro gaming. I think there's a Venn diagram that there's a bunch of those people in the middle. The problem is with these cases when it comes to handheld gaming for retro pie is that they're not perfect. So the GPI case by retro flag is my favorite, but it uses a Raspberry Pi zero. So there's going to be quite a few games you can't play because anything big, Super Nintendo starts to have a little bit of trouble. Anything newer than that is just going to choke regular NES game boy games on the GPI case. Perfect. Now the one that Tom is holding is actually the Pie Boy DMG, which fits in actual Raspberry Pi 4. So it has all the same power as a Raspberry Pi 4. My big gripe, I know everyone's going to be rolling their eyes. The buttons are slanted the wrong way, so it makes it very hard for me to play. Like you could tell the difference and I'll explain to the audience. So on the right, they're going this way diagonal from the top left to the, you know, down to the right. And the other one is slanted, you know, from the upper right down to the lower left. So when you're playing Super Mario World and people that play games know exactly what I'm talking about. Your thumb is on the Y button and then the, you know, halfway down your thumb, you're pressing the B button to jump. You can't do that on that on that at all. So if it wasn't for that, the Pie Boy DMG would be the perfect one to get. But then of course Retro Pi, you can hook it up to a TV if you don't want to do the kit because when you do these kits, you do have to install a patch, which they provide you and you just overwrite the files. It's very easy to do. But if you update it, the screen stops working because you have to reapply that patch. There's some rough edges, but if you want a simple Retro Pi, just hook it up to your TV. It's probably easier for most people. Yeah, but it's cool though that there's the use of these compute modules allow you to build these custom essentially they look like a Game Boy very similar to it. And there's, I think there's some new coming down these ones. These ones aren't even compute modules at all. No, this one's. That's a Pi zero. Oh, that's a pie zero. They do have ones that use compute modules. I don't have any of those, but I think the problem is they all use the old compute modules, which is going to be equivalent to the Pi zero. Got it. So it's like, if you're going to go that route, wait for the anything compute module related, whether it's homelab, gaming, wait for the new ones. You could actually buy them right now. They are out and you could buy like a development motherboard. There might be a new motherboard out that someone else has put out yet. That's the problem. You buy the compute modules. What do you put them into? Well, that's the problem. So we need to wait a little bit longer for the motherboards to start to come around for those right now. A project I've talked about before. I've done videos on this and this is something that's just really cool is motion iOS. This is turning Raspberry Pi's into some advanced surveillance systems. They can even coordinate with each other, so to speak. So you can make one of them the main motion I and then you can use even some of the slower. I believe I even did this demo on a Pi Zero where you can hook up some of the Pi zeros, but then use your Raspberry Pi 4 to bring all the data from the other camera systems. The motion iOS, I think I had done one of the videos I did was talking about it being my sump pump camera and it kept an eye on whether or not I had a flooding issue or a sump pump problem. It's kind of cool to actually see what was going on and because it was under my house, but they work really well for doing all kinds of projects where you want to do capture trigger notifications. It also did time-lapse options and had the option to send it all back to another storage server, even at such as TrueNAS. So you can actually build your own NAS and then have your cameras set up however you want. I believe Linus Tech Tips actually brought some attention to the project by showing off a way they had printed some 3D printed using the Pi cameras and 3D printing them into specialized holders to make it an outdoor camera. So yeah, definitely a really cool project that is pretty flexible and I imagine at some point there's ways, I think someone had mentioned, I did not test this, that you can load some of the object recognition modules on a Pi 4 and tie it all together to go a step further. There are some more advanced projects, I can't remember the name of it, that allows it to do object recognition. So not only will it tell you if there's a trigger event, it can tell you if it's a person triggering the event. Oh wow, that is so cool. I might want to look into that. Yeah, those are kind of a cool concept because the Raspberry Pi is having a power for that and so you can say, I don't want to know if you've seen a cargo by, I want to know if you've seen a person standing up there because recognizing if a dog came by versus a person is a pretty big deal because you want to know what is the, this is honestly threat modeling here. Is it a threat? Did someone try to take my package or did I get a package delivered by someone? Yeah, there's so many cool things you could do with Raspberry Pi. I think that's why I love the platform so much because it's just your imagination is the only limit. Yeah, and at some point, I'm going to dive back into Raspberry Pi again on the channel and I get caught up with other things. Spoiler alert, I'm doing a Proxmox series because everyone has been asking me to do one, which I've already done one, it's really old, but I'm going to be working on that sometime after that is done, then I want to just start looking at like, you know, booting Raspberry Pi's over the network, things like that. So it'd be so cool and you can do this. You could boot a Pi over the network and it's OS and everything would just work. Yeah, nothing just just hands off just it'll reload itself and it'll be great. So I can't wait to look into that and that's why I'm not really talking so much about, you know, that side of things because I haven't done it yet, but I will and maybe that'll be another video. Right now, another one we didn't have on the list here, but I think it's really important is for security testing and Kelly Linux on a Raspberry Pi works great and is also a popular solution for penetration testers. I have some friends that work in that business and what they'll do is, you know, ship a Raspberry Pi to a client location that they needed testing that way they can easily have internal access and I've even talked about using like zero tier that way you don't have to do with any firewall mappings or anything like that, but of course, there's other ways to do it like reverse SSH shells and a few other ways, but the goal is to have a powerful tool within another network that you want to do your penetration testing with and there is a, you know, Kelly has a specific build just for the Raspberry Pi. So it's optimized for it and it's already configured. So you're not doing anything special and tweaking it to get it to work. It's an image based on that. So and it's a really popular solution and for those you want to play with something cybersecurity dedicated, you know, task oriented like Kelly Linux, it's cool because Pi gives you really solid access to all those things now. Downside is of course, it may not run quite as fast, but a lot of the tools when it comes to penetration testing is not about speed and analysis. It's more about finding an exploit and leveraging different things and being able to poke at things on a network and being able to do it remotely. Matter of fact, if you follow any of things like I do, I love the Dark Knight Diaries podcast and you'll hear Raspberry Pi's come up frequently as the devices that they try to get implanted and embedded in networks and NASA was made famous a little bit because they found some Raspberry Pi's on the NASA network once and they weren't sure how they got there and that's actually a fun thing about Raspberry Pi because they're so common and prolific like, oh crap, how'd this get here? Yeah, a particular episode of Mr. Robot comes to mind immediately. Yes, very similar things. People have seen that show know exactly what I'm talking about, but I kind of accidentally skipped Piehole. Yes, I can't play that. Well, I don't think we really skipped it, but we kind of mentioned it a little bit, but there's not really much to say because it's easy. You just there's like a one line command you run and it turns your pie into a ad blocking DNS black hole basically, which is pretty cool because you know, you don't have to run the extension in your browser, although you probably should if it's on a laptop if you go off site. But I don't run Piehole anymore because I felt like it was just blocking too much. But I could have easily tweaked it and made it better if I spent more time on it. So take that with a grain of salt. Piehole is awesome. I think it's probably one of the most popular first apps that people run in the home lab. And I've also run it on a as a Proxmox VM. You don't even have to have it as a Raspberry Pi app. You can install it on just straight up Debbie and running on a VM. Just run the command. Obviously check it first. Make sure someone didn't, you know, go in there and start putting things that don't belong. I get nervous about telling people to run one command and you're fine. Just just, you know, be careful, but there shouldn't be any problems until there is anyway. But just you just run it and you get this interface you can use. You can go in there. It'll have block list that you update. You you essentially configure all your computers to use the Piehole as the DNS server. And then you'll start it'll start blocking ads. What's interesting to me is that it seems like some sites are starting to be able to detect Piehole even though your laptop isn't blocking the ad and it's something else on your network that's blocking it. It seems like they're starting to get a little they're starting to notice that if you run into that. Yeah, there's the ad there. The war on ad blocking is going deep. So it's that war is going to go on for a long time and there are some sites that will just realize if you're sync holding some of what they consider essential to their site. They may block you or not load the rest of the site. So that is the love hate until we find a better model to make the Internet work better. I would like an independent an independent rating of the annoyance of the ads on a website. Yeah. And if it was like rated as you know basically not annoying that let it let the ads come through. Yeah. As soon as you start dealing with auto playing music and videos and things I hate that if there was some I wouldn't mind ads coming through and supporting a site if it was like if there's some kind of way of like I don't want Google to rate it right. Right. All of our sites are great for ads. You should run our ads on there was something third party that doesn't have a horse in the race to just kind of give an independent review. That's kind of like a big job to do. Maybe it could be automated. I don't know. But I wouldn't mind some ads coming through. It's just the really annoying ones that they shake. They have these flashy colors. They start playing audio. That's challenging. I guess what I'm saying is the reason we're doing this is because the ads are annoying. Nobody wants websites to go out of business but just make your ads less annoying and it won't be a problem. Yeah. It's trying to find that happy middle is always a challenge. Right. Now something that someone mentioned in the comments. I believe it was Corey here in the comments but I do think this is a good idea and there's actually some fun things you can do business related for this one bridging for free PBX it can work internally and there's actually I think three CX does this as well that phone software that their business use cases. One of the challenges when you're setting up a PBX system now free PBX issue will or at least hysterics. I know can be running a pie. I've not actually done it but I've talked to people have done it but what you need is kind of a concentrator. So instead of if you have 10 phones instead of 10 phones reaching out through the firewall the 10 phones talk to the Raspberry Pi and a Raspberry Pi creates the bridge to get you out with the phone service. So that way you're not having to have call quality management between the phones and the pie. You only got to manage it between the pie in the outside world one of the other things that's really cool and I was like you know you grab one of those like the anchor makes them with the battery backup in them that chart or a combination charger with a battery for portable like portable charger phone turns out those make amazing UPS is for Raspberry Pies just got to make sure that the voltage output is the right amps for the pie otherwise you get under voltage thing just as long as you pay attention to that I impulsively bought a few and they didn't work so as long as you make sure that first you should be more than fine. Well if you're setting this up and let's say you have a client with a rack of servers and things like that you can set up the Raspberry Pi to be have its own separate battery backup that can allow you kind of lights out management to get in and pivot into a client even if there's no power because you'll have some survival time of the device also mentioned that like the nut service. So if you actually have the UPS talking to the Raspberry Pi using Linux and not then the Raspberry Pi distributes all the shutdown commands servers. So if there's an interrupted power it sees it it can communicate and talk to it and tell everything to start shutting down and I bring up the you know using that little battery backup because the Raspberry Pi being on longer than the rest of the things in Iraq if possible can be really handy if you can somehow get Internet to it just a few different little business use cases to think about and from a business use case they're also very inexpensive to leave at a client when we've had to get remote access to something persistently when we know things are being changed if you have it set up to like phone home either using an SD Wan solution like zero tier or a reverse shell that's automated so you can get always access to it. One of the problems you run into is when someone replaces the Internet or breaks something Comcast is notorious Comcast shows up by clients we can have a whole episode of all yeah all the problems with they've done before is just going hey we're just going to bypass this fancy looking PF sense router you have here and we're just going to plug the network right into the Comcast and then all of a sudden no one's network is on there but if the Raspberry Pi was set to DHCP it will gain access we can see what was done and things like that so they have all kinds of little you know benefits like that that are really cool and the inexpensive nature of them it is that back to we said beginning there's a lot of good commercial business you case use cases for these I'm going to throw in a couple bonus tips that you reminded me of for some reason so one thing about HomeLab that I think a lot of us will benefit from is that well we don't have a 24 seven operation most of the time if you have a HomeLab and chances are that when you're sleeping you don't need the servers to be on so you can literally and I'm not talking about your Raspberry Pi's here I'm talking about your hypervisor your TrueNAS all those things you can actually put a cron job in those and shut them all down at like two in the morning when you're not you know you're not awake and then have a Raspberry Pi right next to them that has a cron job wake on land fire up your servers at 7 30 in the morning or 6 30 whenever you wake up so that way the servers automatically shut down automatically come back up and that'll save your power bill I was doing that for a while and it made a big difference so I think I had mine shut down everything at 12 30 midnight power everything on at 7 30 in the morning so I saved power another thing is I had a business throw out a laser jet printer and I think a lot of people already know where I'm going with this it was an HP laser jet printer and they threw it out because the version of Windows they're upgrading everyone to didn't support it anymore HP didn't write a driver for it there's just no way to get it to work so I'm like I'll take it and they gave me a brand new toner cartridge with it as well I might print what 50 pages a month in the toner cartridges had like a yield of 1200 and then I hooked up a Raspberry Pi to it with cups and I made this non Wi-Fi USB HP laser jet printer into a Wi-Fi printer anyone in the house can use yeah it shared it out and I think when we first launched the podcast I think that was the first comment someone said is hey using it for a can solve the Windows printer nightmare because you can use it as its own dedicated print server that's exactly the was I just image the it's one of those things that I never have to change I just take an image of the SD card it has the printer set up if anything ever happens I think the SD card did go bad once all I had to do is just restore it to a new SD card because I had all my config and it was fine so that printer I think I think it died eventually I used it for at least two or three years and the toner cartridges are still good because I'll print that much they outlasted the printer but it was a great use case you can make a printer into a wireless printer yeah and something I don't think I know I don't do much of it I don't think that you do either but once you get into Raspberry Pi because of the standardized IO pins on there there's a ton of IO devices that you can plug into this everything from temperature sensors to you name it you can find something that's one of the advantages they have of having very standardized platform is there's a lot of companies that make these extra things that will plug into those so you're like hey you know I can use as a water sensor to make sure my basement doesn't flood or a temperature sensor for things matter of fact we've consulted with some clients that they have a bunch of industrial sensor information it Raspberry Pi is being self contained in a sealed case that has passive cooling which by the way that's a cool option if you haven't seen them there's some these like metal cases where it brings the heat to the house yeah yeah I think I see one over there industrial control environments and being able to sense the different things going on there is a pretty cool use of the Raspberry Pi and once again because it's an expensive device if something happens to it you're like yeah you know that happens sometimes that happens yep I think we just talked about as much of the pie stuff is we covered our list and then a little bit more yeah solve the pain nightmare problem inadvertently for you yeah we'd like to solve problems yeah that's what we do yeah because Microsoft certainly isn't properly solving the pain nightmare problem was that one problem that they properly solve the first time yeah I'm not going never mind we won't know we won't talk about Microsoft today all right well I think that's our podcast then all right all right well thank you for joining us and thanks again for line over sponsoring this and we'll see you next time take care see you later.