How To Make Your Own PiKVM

what's going on everybody it's Carmine from barine Tech and today we're going to have a new video on the pi KVM so if you're not familiar the pi KVM was a project that was made to make a more budget friendly KVM it was based on the Raspberry Pi and I believe it's an open source project and mine isn't in a case right now but this is what it's going to look like when you're all done so you have a CS2 Bridge or CSI bridge I forget off the top of my head but this is what makes see Raspberry Pi can use HDMI and here's a Raspberry Pi 4 you could use other pies but the pi 4 I believe is the one that's recommended for the best performance because of its hardware and I also have this nice case that I printed up but I need to do some modifying because these don't sit properly in this case so I need to figure that out but like I said that's the Raspberry Pi Pi KVM I'm going to go over really quick some of the stuff so you can set one up too so let's get right into it so for this project you are going to need a bit of Hardware like I was saying I just double checked so this this uh little maker board is a CSI Bridge so this makes it so your Raspberry Pi can use HDMI like natively through the ribbon cable here of course you're going to need a Raspberry Pi um I've seen people use Pi fours 3es zeros seen a lot of people talk about but I think the pi 4 probably gets the best response because of the hardware in it so I'd probably check out one of those if you can they have all the documentation on the Pik AVM site which we'll go through really quickly after this I just want to cover the hardware first and and then uh we'll go through that but I think the pi4 is probably your best option you're going to need a usba a to power block so you can plug that into the wall I got a USB a male and female cable cuz they're going to need that for the splitter I got a USB splitter so I have a female side and then two male ends and then I also have a USB to USBC to power the pi now this was my mix of Hardware that I got there's also an HDMI cable that you're going to need so you could use it off the board and if you're going to use DVI you're going to need a DVI HDMI adapter as well that's just kind of tucked into my Mini PC my rack right now so I didn't pull that out but this is like the Base Hardware you're going to need if you want to set the pi KVM the way I did I found that this mix of Hardware works pretty well the only thing you're going to have to do is on your splitter you're either going to have to cover the Power Pin which I don't recommend if it's not set up properly you can Shore down and Pass power through to the USB in your target machine um they do make power blocks that you can put into USB adapters that would probably be your better option um but you know I recommend what you should do uh don't do what I did if unless you want to but uh you're going to need the USB cables and everything else and then after you connect it all you're able to you know if you get like a nice case like we talked about 3 printed in the last video you can print out one of these cases I actually tried working with this case but it just didn't have everything set hit right so and I was still kind of troubleshooting everything so I didn't get to put everything in place but that's enough talking about the hardware let's get into the pi KVM actually one more before we go through this this was something that I really got confused with trying to figure out how to get this all cabled up so let's just go through how I cabled it up really quick so I have the female end over here of the cable this is going to be what's going to power the USBC to the Raspberry Pi so that's what's going to use this usba a to USBC cable so that's going to plug in like this so now this end is going to go to the Raspberry Pi now I have one end over here that's a USB 3 so this is going to go to my target machine cuz I want the USB 3 Connection and then I have this end over here that isn't USB 3 and this is what's going to go to the power adapter in the wall so that's where this female the male USB cable comes into play so I plug that in over here now I have the male end and then I have my plug for the wall and then that plugs in like that so now I have power to everything I have I have USB to my target machine and then I have USBC to the pi so then the pi will get the USBC the target machine will get the USB 3 on the on the usba a connector and then the other one goes into the wall so then you can plug all that in plug your HDMI in and then everything should come offline if it doesn't double check your connections and make sure that the CSI bridge is connected properly to the pi it should be the that's a little tricky to see but you can see that it has that blue tab on the back that should be facing your USB interfaces so double check that to make sure it's right because that always confuses me with the ribbon cables but I'm going to get this cable back up and plug it into one of my machines and we're going to take a look at the py KVM web interface so before we get really going with py KVM we are going to go over to their site and grab some of the information that we need so you have a whole bunch of stuff and you can see actually there's Nova Spirits video on P km so shout out to him he's the one who really told me about it and madebe me want to build one of these I've actually been pushing this off for quite some time because you couldn't get Pi for the longest time but that's enough about that let's actually get into setting up the py KVM so if you go over here it has documentation or the DIY we're going to do the DIY and it's going to bring you over to a GitHub page it's going to break down all the information on the DIY py KVM and it's actually going to give you all your Hardware support so this was actually something that I had to read through quite a bit because Tred to figure out what matches and we can go through here and you can figure out all your stuff through here and then there's also more links so over here it's going to show you some more information so like the rber pi4 board like I was saying you could use a pi 02w they going need one of the CSI Bridges or you could use one of the USB HDMI dongles the CSI bridge is what's more supported so recommend that you get one of those you can get the ATX capture if you want I I passed on that or you can do a VGA video capture pass test on that as well here's the main parts and then they give you some wiring so that's if you're going to be wiring up the ATX controller and if you're going to be doing that here you go so here's the USB and how they recommend to do it so this would be something similar to how I have it except they use a little board to split the USB power that's also another good option as well it saves it from having the power back flow through but you can pick it up however you want and I'll have links to all of the stuff that I got from my board and my pack km setup in the description below but that's really the basics of the setup the only other thing we have to do is grab the OS so let me just grab that real quick okay had to take a look they have the downloads in a few spots and they're kind of hidden but if we come over here to the pvm V2 that we were just looking at they have the flash the memory card and this is actually a link I'll bring you over to the os's so over here you can come through which one you're going to grab so I did the DIY pvm V2 platform and I did the Raspberry Pi with the CSI Bridge so this is the one that I downloaded I'm just going to cancel that um you can grab whichever one matches your Hardware that you're using if you're using a pi Z or pi4 if you're using the USB dongle or CSI Bridge whichever one you're using is what you need to grab the softwares don't interchange so you need to grab it specific for your Hardware that you're using after you grab that you just got to flash it over onto a Micro SD card put in the pie power it up and then you're all set set the pi should come online and then you should get the P KVM portal so now that we have our P KVM online everything else we do need to come over here and change the password so I'm just going to putty in really quick and I have a session save for it so I'm just going to log in as root and put my password in it's your first login into the shell via putty or SSH the first the credentials by default are root root they're different than the web interfaces admin admin we're going to change both of those right now so if I come over here to change password you're going to do read write so now you can see Pik KVM is in read write mode the Pik KVM OS is based off of Arch so it's a drro of arch next we're going to do is password root so it's p sswd and then you're going to put in for the root account we're going to change the password to something new it's going to confirm you see now we Chang the password now we can do kvmd Tac HT uh HT password set admin it's going to do the same thing it's going to ask for the password again we want to set it's going to confirm and now the password is all set so if we come back over here I could actually go back I could do a terminal and if I do Sue it's going to ask me for my password I think I typed it wrong so we'll try that again so I'll do Sue and then I'll put in my new password and you see now I got root the same thing if I log out admin admin will no longer work so I need to change it to my updated password and you can see over here I did so that works so that's how you change your password in P KVM other than that there's really not much else to do unless you want to go on your router Tye a static lease your all set to start with P KVM and configuring your machines one other thing you might want to do is if you start having an issue that you can't get your video to work which I had in the beginning is you can run a command to check your status so it's system cuddle status kvmd so this is a build-in command to check out the P KVM info so you can see that the service is running for the kvmd and it also breaks down your different pieces which this was really helpful in me troubleshooting mine so if you have a capture issue it's going to tell you capture device not detected or you know it can't get the image or it's going to say that it can't get the HTTP site working so this is really helpful to use to troubleshoot your pie if you're having an issue with getting the KVM working properly so again it's system cuddle status kvmd it's right up here here if you need the command this was super helpful in me troubleshooting my issues that I had and the only other issue that you might have is the Pik KVM is specific to the target's resolution so it's not going to be able to see all these images so I just want to see if it has I'm going to find the page that has the accepted resolutions and then I'll just show you really quick so over here on the FAQ or somewhere in the documentation here's the current resolutions so the resolution must be greater or than or equal to that used by the KVM capture so the maximum display resolution is 720 and the signal has a 1080 resolution you will not see the image the P KVM does not perform down scaling at the same time the P KVM will try to show at least something more than nothing so if the input signal of has a resolution of 1920 x 1200 and the display supports 1920 x 1080 the image will show but cropped at the bottom so at least you have the opportunity to adjust the parameters so what does this mean so if you're running you know like your new Windows machine it's used in 1920 by you know something else it's probably going to take a downscale for the P KVM to properly use it so it's going to try its best to give you an image and then from there you're going to have to crop it and adjust the resolution so the KVM can actually work I tried working with proxmox and it seems that it doesn't like the resolution to do like a shell um a terminal connection to the proxmox node so I don't know if it's a resolution change in the Bios or what it might be but you're going to have to adjust your target resolution it's always dependent on your target resolution so if you and now it's going to go through and update my py KVM if I didn't do it that way you could also do with the curl command like I said and that probably be what you're in need for your first update but other than that that's really it you see it's going to go through it's going to update to the latest packages that's really it that's the P KVM that's how it works that's how we're going to set it up and yeah so I just threw everything back in the P KVM case I printed up so you can see here's the case base and then everything just kind of sits in there it has screw holes but they don't really seem to match up the best with my CSI adapter but it has it has you know all the interfaces for the USB and then over here on the side it has it for the HDMI so it when it sits right it just kind of feeds through and you can do it right through there and it gets mounted down but that's the py KVM case so you might want to print yourself up one of these two or you could order one offline so after you get everything connected and your pivate KVM plugged in and everything wired up you're going to go to the IP address of whatever your P KVM is if you're not sure what that is you could use use angry you can use angry ip scanner and you could put in your range real quick I'll just put in mine I have a zero and I have a 255 I'll just put in as so I have a sl24 this will scan through your whole network really quick and it'll tell you all the host names that it can resolve and if I come through over here let's see still working there it is py KVM is 125 so that works for me so I'll just close this out and then I went to 125 so you'd go do whatever address your P KVM comes up as and when you first log in it's going to be admin admin but I already changed that so I'm just going to put in my credentials and then you're going to come to this screen right here so you could either have a terminal window which will give you a terminal into the P KVM but it won't be as root you would have to still switch users to root or you can go back and you could do a KVM window and you can see over here that I have a connection to one of my auntu machines so this is actually one of my mini PCS that run auntu as a Docker setup and I can come over here and I can type uh let's see so I can do uptime and you can see it's all active it's me typing in there and it gives me my up time and here's where the KVM really comes nicely into play so if you're not familiar with what a KVM normally is in a server rack you would have you know let's say three four five servers you would have what's called a KVM switch and it would connect to multiple devices so you could use one keyboard one Mouse One display and you could switch between machine to machine and you could have a serial connection in or a shell Connection in however it might be so if you you know the machine doesn't have ipmi which is another like backend server access thing uh but it's old and it uses outdated protocols and everything else so it's becoming less common to have the py KVM would be a really nice solution because it's supported it works right in your browser over HTML so it it really is a nice touch and we have a lot of different controls in here so I'll just start off from left to right we have shortcuts so if you're on like a Windows machine you can get your you know um control delete or print screen or anything else you have your shortcuts over here you can push text to it so if you're working on commands that you want to push through I could go over here so let's say I want to do that's fstab I can push through and you can see actually I typed it wrong but it pushed it right through to my shell and there you go it gives me the commands so if you're working with commands that maybe you're copying out of documentation you could just paste them in here and then it'll paste it it'll push it right through to your machine really nice you can record macros so if you have certain keystrokes that you constantly using to configure all your machines you could record the macro over here and then you could just send it through look like You' also upload scripts so if you have scripts your machines you want to use maybe a setup script you could do that as well one feature that I think is really nice is py KVM is set so you could also upload isos to it so if you want to let's say upload an ISO let's say I'll grab that so you could just select image to upload you can either get the URL from a link or you could browse and I have a lot of my isos already saved on my machine let's say I want to get the you know proxmox 8 ISO I could can do that upload it to here and then from here I could just select it I have the PO one in here right now I could select it and I could just push it through and you could flash it or it'll send it as a CD ROM so you could do it either way but you could flash this onto the box and upload it right through there it's a flashing machine which I think is a really nice touch it saves having to go back and forth between USB drives and everything else the next box over here is ATX controls I don't have the ATX controller so I can't really go over this it's another board that I just didn't grab but you can grab one of these and you could have it set it up so on your target machine you actually have ATX controls so you can power down reset it and push these controls out to it next over here is our indicators for Network keyboard mouse and display you can change these around how you want um I didn't really go too crazy with it you can change the video mode and you could reset the keyboard you could show a keyboard so so you can actually get a keyboard on the screen you can see I'm actually typing into it so it's a really nice little simple feature in case your physical keyboard's not you know doing it you could also take screenshots of whatever you're doing which again is something helpful to have you know maybe there's some commands or something an error that came up on the screen you need a screenshot of it you could take it right through the P km and that's really about it for the py KVM in the actual KVM window but this is really what it is and I just got it all set up and this is going to be a great tool and we're probably going to use this more on the channel so it'll be something that's not going to disappear so that was a bu KVM I know we going over a lot of different stuff in this video but I just wanted to cover everything that I had difficulty finding in other videos or Guides Online so that was all the information that I needed to get my Pi KVM working so I hope it helps for you guys I also hope that now that you have an idea of all the hardware you need you could prevent the four Amazon orders that I needed because I kept realizing either I ordered the wrong product or I was missing stuff still so I hope my guide will help you guys get your py KVM working a lot faster than it took me and I hope it gets working right away so you can start configuring your systems hope you guys enjoyed this video and if you did make sure to drop a like And subscribe maybe even comment below what you're going to use your py KVM for to configure in your home lab like I said I appreciate everybody for watching I have a Discord server that I'll have a link to below and I'll also have all the Amazon links for all the products on this video as well as some of the other stuff that I use in my home lab below thank you all for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Barmine Tech

Views: 1,842

Keywords: DIY PKVM, Portable Keyboard Video Monitor, Homemade PKVM, Keyboard Screen Combo, DIY Tech Projects, Electronics DIY, Raspberry Pi Projects, DIY Monitor, Keyboard Display Setup, Custom Computer Peripheral, DIY Electronics Tutorial, Homemade Tech, Raspberry Pi Display, Keyboard Screen Combo DIY, DIY Display Solution, DIY Tech Gadgets, raspberry pi, raspberry pi 4, pikvm, diy pikvm, homelab, home server, server management, home server management

Id: tOILgsoQL2s

Length: 19min 57sec (1197 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024