DIY Raspberry Pi KVM-Over-IP Under $60 with Pi-KVM

hey guys what is going on it's don here from novaspirittech and welcome back to the channel and today i got a really exciting video for you guys which is network kvm on the raspberry pi called pi kvm so let's get started before i begin i do want to show you guys my excitement on this this is something that i wanted for a very long time and this has to be one of my top number one projects ever on the raspberry pi now if you guys didn't know what a kvm is or ipkvm or network kvm it basically stands for keyboard video mouse and it allows you to connect to a computer or a server like you're physically standing in front of it like local access or console access whatever you want to call it and it's very important for people who do system administrations even if you have a home lab it's one of the best tools that you could have for that type of environment now i personally love using this stuff to fix people's computers that's just my thing about it it's like if i have somebody's computer or desktop that i'm fixing i bring it to another room hook this up and now i don't physically have to stand in front of that computer to install windows or install linux and stuff like that and wait for the commands because you know when you're installing those operating systems there is no network access you physically gotta be in front of the computer but having this setup allows me to fix people's computers remotely or even network administration this could allow for that and it's on a really good budget so the version that we're gonna be taking a look at today is the diy pi kvm which is the one where you would have to make your own cable and also provide yourself with either a usb hdmi or the hdmi csi2 with both of these setups you can get the whole thing all set up and ready to go and under 60 now if you ever try to purchase an ipkvm they don't go cheap i mean the cheapest i think i've ever seen was about 300 and being able to do this on a raspberry pi for under 60 it's it's amazing the problems i have with either ilo or eye drags or even some ipk vms is the lack of support meaning they still use java applets and and if you get old and if you have even older ones they might need activex and keep in mind activex and java applets they're starting to be phased out we're having harder and harder time to even install these applications on our browsers let alone having something like activex so this software basically modernizes that and you're able to use the browser and also vnc you can vnc into this guy and have local access it's that it's that good now i do want to thank the developer which is murphy he has been a great guy i've talked to him on his discord through email and he's given me all the insights on what's going on so we're gonna jump right into that now you could go to his website to download the image as well as other builds and what's good about his image is that it runs off arch linux and he maintains the package so once you install the image once you don't have to keep reflashing all you have to do is pacman and you can update it and you will get all the bug fixes and everything so anything that happens on his github as far as the project goes once you hit a pac-man update you're basically getting the latest updates and you don't have to re-flash it now there are two versions on the download where you could download one for csi bridge or the hdmi to usb bridge depending on what you want to use and uh i'll leave all the links to the parts down below on what we're going to be using now heading back to his main page i'm going to show you something if you go down a little bit he is having this brand new hat this is like version 3 of the hat where you could actually pre-order and in a couple of weeks i'm actually going to be trying to get that as well to do a full review this has more components than what we're going to be doing on our end because we won't have the atx controls but this has atx controls along with the lcd screen and uh ethernet passthrough tons of features on this guy and it will be ready for the raspberry pi 4. and if you want you could pre-order it now it will be coming in a couple of weeks in the making of this video popping over to this github if we go down you can see it supports raspberry pi 2 3 and 4 and raspberry pi 0. now on raspberry pi 4 and raspberry pi 0 there is not much extra components that you need because they both support on-the-go cable now for raspberry pi 2 and 3 that's where you actually need a separate arduino board to control the keyboard and mouse inputs so it's not as simple to get the two or three to work but if you have a raspberry pi zero or four it's you just need to make the usb cable and you're basically ready now for it full hdmi video here's the thing the hdmi csi bus allows for better control of the hdmi controls like you could get resolution changes color fixes video compression a ton of features that you could manipulate and change even the edid you could change on the hdmi csi bus but if you use the usb dongle while it does work and it does achieve better frame rates you don't have all those controls and there are times where if your screen goes to sleep on that computer it will knock off the hdmi display and it won't even come back until you reboot the raspberry pi so it's not as reliable as the hdmi csi but it does get more frame rates those are the two differences but i would highly recommend if you can get the hdmi csi so you can get more features with it like changing resolutions and everything now you do have way lower latency on the hdmi csi bus you get 100 ms video latency compared to the usb dongle which is 200 it also has bootable features where you can upload an iso image onto your raspberry pi and mount it as a flash disk or cd arm drive so that's pretty cool as well as ethernet passthrough so if you have an ethernet cable only one towards that location you can plug it into your raspberry pi and use the usb as a usb ethernet passthrough and provide whatever server or computer that you're working with internet through the raspberry pi which is really cool and it works through wi-fi as well so if you have a wi-fi connection on your raspberry pi you can still use the usb ethernet passthrough and provide internet for that computer mind blowing a couple of other things is like i said the vnc that's really cool because you could use vnc instead of having to go into a web browser and uh atx controls atex controls is pretty huge on certain things where you could actually control the power reset button and all this other stuff long press short press anyway it's amazing and there's a lot of things going for it the best of all is that you have so much of these features for under 60 like if you do want to you could actually get his hat which provides all these without having to solder now this is the diy device over here you can see this image this has all the mosfets to trigger the power button and the reset button and everything else and you can see the hard drive activity lights this is what you need to build if you want to do it yourself we're not going to be building the atx controls all we are going to be using is the usb line as well as the hdmi and that's it for this whole thing so i'm going to show you how it looks so the first setup that we're going to be looking into is the usb hdmi setup and the one that i have right now is not the link that i have down in the description below because the one down in the description below is about 12 and it's a lot easier to use but then again all hdmi usbs have these little weird quirks though so it's not as stable as you want it to be now as far as the usb cable that i'm using it is a splitter cable and i just put some keplon tape onto the power side of the usb cord that goes into the computer now this is very important i would highly recommend not doing this i just got lazy and i just taped it up but i would disconnect the cable completely because you don't want the power to feed back to the usb port and blow out your usb port so do as i say not as i do everything that i have will be linked down in the description below so if you want to build your own setup it's pretty easy again i highly recommend testing out his kit because it has everything under the sun on there so once you download the image from whatever you want you burn it into the sd card and it's completely headless you don't need to hook up a monitor to it to set it up the first time all you need to do is head over to that url log in with admin and admin and i already have vnc enabled but we're going to pop over to kvm and you can see it's already hooked up to my seed odyssey x86 and um let me see popping into here this is how it looks just running it now if i wanted to pop open a keyboard because i can't press certain keys on my web browser i can i could just hit over the system show keyboard and if i needed to hit the windows key i can and it'll pass through the windows key or if i needed to press any other key now this you could tell is really made for linux because if you go over to shortcut look at this resub resub if that's how you would say it alright that's how i would say it but you could just do resub and it will completely do a reboot on the system and you have all these shortcut keys that you could press as well as macros you could record your macro and have it completely repeat or do whatever you want to do on this thing your drive is what i was talking about you can actually mount like a usb drive into here if i was to click ubuntu select it as flash because i know that's a flash disk and i could connect it to server and you'll see the disk over there as far as atx control like i said i don't have anything hooked up to it but you could do reset power button long or power button short and then over here is your system now the resolution you can't really change because i'm using the usb hdmi right now but if you're using the csi version hdmi csi you could change this and you could change the stream size and there's more settings you could play around with and yeah ultimately this gives me remote access to the computer physically now you might be thinking hey i could do this with vnc or some other software but what you can't do is this watch if i go over to the power button restart the computer and now it's physically going to go into the boot and i can hit delete a couple of times and i'm in the bios you can't do this remote and this is some sometimes you need this just to set up people's computers or set up servers this is why you would get this kvm and for such a low budget i'm i don't know my mind is blown every time i go through this so let me show you guys if i go over here to uefi or windows boot manager or i only got three items or four items right here right so i'm gonna go over to drive and pop this in here flash connect to server and i am gonna reboot this thing so i'm gonna do discard changes and reset reset without saving and if i pop back into the bios again and i hit back over here there we have it another option right there linux file cd gadget that's my ubuntu cd that i just inserted and i could boot directly from here and if i had a windows disk or windows usb i could boot from the windows usb and that's what i mean now let's boot back into the system and i can show you how smooth it actually runs and i'm just going to pop over burn firefox and show you guys it does do 30 frames per second on the usb hdmi and i will do youtube nova spirit tech and i'll just pop the video that's right here and this is full screen and i'm still getting like 30 frames per second over the web browser i mean it's not in 1080 right now i don't think or maybe it is but the quality is not that great streaming over because the the way how usb uh hdmi dongle works with this but you see this this is streaming off my browser at full 1080 off my computer let's pop over to the hdmi csi setup and we could see the difference in speed and quality and what we could adjust over there all right so now we switched over to the hdmi csi-2 and you could see that it looks pretty much the same but the biggest difference is i could actually now change the resolution so if i go into system settings and go into displays there's a list of resolutions that i can actually change and it will adjust to it so if i want to go to 720 hit apply there you go the resolution has changed to 720. now if i wanted to switch back to 1080 i could do that using the csi bridge that's what's the huge difference between the two not only that it's a lot more stable when you're running this now i'm going to keep this configuration and i'm going to show you a full screen image that the video that i was playing before and i'll pop that into full screen now it plays just like it would before just a little frame drops like not frame drop but it's a little bit less instead of 30 frames about 25 frames per second so you do lose that five frames per second due to the bandwidth of the csi bridge but supposedly on the cm4 we should be able to get 60 frames per second like this but now if you could see how this is working i'm gonna actually pause this and show you if i go in the system i actually now have a stream quality setting and i could change the compression so if i go down to ten percent it's going to reset this and you could tell the difference between that you see how it's all pixelated but it's the stream compression and that may that means i could work this using a wi-fi connection not ethernet so if you have a raspberry pi zero uh low quality content like this you can at least still stream at 25 frames per second just in the lower quality now i could adjust this back up there i could actually modify the eidi files and give it more resolutions there's just a lot more i can do using the csi bridge and it's a lot more reliable now one more thing i want to show you guys is if i was to go into the terminal and once i'm in here you would type s u dash to get into root and the password for root is root and in here you would change to a read write system and then i could do pack man dash syu and i have not updated this version yet but you'll see that once this updates it's actually going to pull the latest so i'm going to hit yes on that it's going to pull the latest version of let me see if i can find it here um kvmd right here so it will update the kvmd and the kvmd up the uh platform and the kvmd web terminal so everything gets updated if there's a bug or any fixes or updates like that once you run this little command pacman capital syu you get everything updated when his raspberry pi hat comes in i will re-review that and actually talk a little bit more about his project and how he came to be and where you could get all this stuff i hope you guys enjoyed this video i had my mind was blown when i found this and i was testing it it was so easy to set up i would highly recommend you guys checking it out if you guys have any questions about this hit it down in the comments below i will also leave a link to his discord this way you could ask the developer directly if you need any help and if you guys are new to this channel consider subscribing and also hitting that bell notification icon so you know when the next video is going to be out and as i say my nerd cave hack till it hurts

Channel: Novaspirit Tech

Views: 122,390

Rating: 4.9509144 out of 5

Keywords: novaspirit, tech, cheap kvm switch, kvm-over-ip switch, raspberry pi, diy kvm over ip, remote access computer from anywhere, kvm switch, raspberry pi kvm, raspberry pi kvm over ip, kvm over ip, hdmi to csi-2, hdmi, arch linux, pi-kvm, kvm raspberry pi 4, otg, kvm setup, budget kvm, diy, raspberry pi projects

Id: plP9Y1likRg

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Rohja]

That's cool. I was looking for a KVM for my NAS last week and it seems to meet both hobbies : diy and self hosting. Thanks for sharing.

[u/AutomaticGarage5]

For my nas I looked far and wide for a motherboard that had ipmi so that it could be remotely configured and managed. That meant increased cost and less feature set in the mobo. This device would allow any mobo to be controlled remotely including installing the os which is huge. Can wait to buy the pi hat for this

[u/TheGolan]

Noob question: What is KVM?

[u/MaxPast]

To those who want to control multiple servers remotely, here is a little hack:

There are 8-port manual KVM switches at Aliexpress for about $40-$60. Something like this one: https://aliexpress.ru/item/4001013433331.html

If you add 8-port Ethernet relay for about $30 and solder a little, you will get a remotely controlled 8-port KVM which enables you to change the "head" and even connect them into a hierarchy of such devices, which gives virtually unlimited number of controlled servers :)

A sample of such relay: https://aliexpress.ru/item/4001084947996.html

I prefer to use Lantronix Spider as a KVM device because it has everything on board and costs not that much, working flawlessly, especially if you look for used devices at eBay.

The official Lantronix Spider page: https://www.lantronix.com/products/lantronix-spider/

[u/pingmanping]

Is this one pi per server?

[u/seonwoolee]

I just set this up and it's fantastic. I had kind of regretted not selecting a motherboard with IPMI, but with this that's a non issue

[u/jlove2908]

Does this use tiny pilot?

[u/coffee_guy]

Shy not use RDP or even SSH?