Pi-KVM - DIY CHEAP Raspberry Pi KVM over IP Prototype Version 3 Review!

hey guys it's don here from novus bear tech and welcome back to the channel and today we are going to be checking out the pi kvm prototype version 3 so let's get started in case you guys missed it a couple of weeks ago i actually built my own using a raspberry pi 4 and hdmi csi using his software to build this kvm over ip or the pi kvm now if you guys are interested in that video i'll leave a link on the top left so you guys could check it out and also anything we talked about in this video will be linked down in the description below a couple of weeks ago when i uploaded that video he was still working on the prototype of the pi kvm and i'm very excited to actually get my hands on one right now but before that i do want to give you guys a little bit of a story time of the developer because it's actually a very interesting one so maxim the developer of the pi kvm back in 2015 was actually frustrated because one of his home servers kept shutting down he had no way to power back on or even have a kvm to you know navigate to wherever he needed to he did look into kvm options at that time but to get a kvm over ip even now cost upwards of about 500 just for one unit he didn't think that was feasible including the fact that you don't even know what software you get with those whether it's running java or activex or whatever it is he's going to be relying on that technology so he ended up deciding to build his own using arduino in a raspberry pi and a vga analog input so he could convert the signal and stream it on the web while it worked on his version one it was like one or two frames per second and he was able to get hid interface using the arduino he decided to improve on this project a lot he then upgraded and bought hdmi to csi bus and ended up using hdmi signal instead but still he was still getting the one and two frames per second that's because of the mpeg streaming software he was using the mpeg streamer software that he was using is actually unlike ancient technology really it's very very slow i mean it works for like octoprint if you're going to do a time lapse or something but for anything real time it's really not that great so he literally spent the next year and a half developing his own software called the ustreamer which allows him to actually stream almost near real time like what we see here and the technology behind it is that he was actually able to utilize each core to encode the image and then time it correctly so it could stream it back this way we could get up to 20 to 25 frames per second compared to one to two frames per second and it is open source so if you needed to stream your own videos or stuff like that you could actually just grab the software and utilize it once this user software is out he was actually able to implement way much more stuff into his idea turning this into a full-fledged really good ipk vm or kvm over ip not only do we have a really good website we could use for this guy he's actually added stuff like mass storage device that you could send over through usb ethernet over usb you could even connect this to a four port hdmi switch and basically have more monitors connected to this and also implementation of ipmi honestly now with all the advancements that he's been making with this guy i wouldn't be surprised to see this being on a cm4 or the compute module 4 because realistically you don't need the usb 3 device on this and you could probably use the pcie lane for something else but yeah i definitely see him using the cm4 in the future to be honest what he wrote out to me was a lot better so i'm actually going to upload the story and i'll leave a link down in the description below so if you guys wanted to read it but ultimately this is what we're faced with which is his version three of the pi kvm now there are three kits available that you can actually purchase and due to what's going on in the world right now the prices may vary and also shipping is a little bit varied because of again what's going on in the world now the first kit is the base kit where you can actually just get the pi kvm hat the second is the aum which is the advanced usb module and then the third one is included with a case and a fan and an lcd screen the base kit is around 120 to 150 and honestly i think it's worth every penny the aum is 30 and then the the case kit with the fan and the lcd screen is 30 as well but don't judge its book by its cover because this is not the case you're going to get he's still in the manufacturing process of the case itself so i told him to send me over the 3d files and i ended up 3d printing it myself just so i have some sort of display so don't even consider this being the actual final case this is not it this is just something i 3d printed myself now to talk about the hardware this is the base kit to start off we have a rj45 port here now this is a serial console so if you're familiar with cisco where you have the blue cable and you can plug in the rj45 cable to serial port that's what this is for right after that you have a usbc and that usbc is also for serial interface then after that you have your power now rotating to the side you have pins for the lcd screen then you have pins for the fan that's for the case kit now moving around you have the top pins over here which is for the aum or the advanced usb module we'll talk about that in a little bit but we're gonna move over to the back side where you have your hdmi input your otg output and that's where you would plug the usb to the computer that you're interfacing with and then you have another rj45 port now this rj45 port is actually for the ipmp which is to power on or reset or read the power led or the activity led and that's basically it for this device as far as the advanced usb module on top this is basically like it's version one the whole thing on top here you have your ps2 connector pins on top so if you have older devices that requires ps2 input that's where you will plug that in then you have your flash drive this is for older devices again that doesn't support booting through flash media that you would need to plug something into here and it's like a pass-through and then on top you have your hid which is the human interface device and then your mass storage device that you plug into the computer it's got to be a separate plug again that's only really needed for older devices or some mac computers that he was telling me for newer generation computers you could just basically use the normal otg port and i have not ran into any computers that actually required this aum so far but then again i didn't test it on a mac and that's basically about it everything else you would just plug right into your raspberry pi like so and that's how it looks everything connected together now as far as connecting this to a hdmi switch i am using this version which is easy code and i'll leave a link down in the description below for this and this is about 75 for a 4 port hdmi input that supports 4k at 60 frames per second and you have multiple devices that you can plug into to plug it into raspberry pi you would actually just use the side micro usb connected to any port on the usb on the raspberry pi and that is it that's able to control it and then for keyboard input and mouse input you would have to use usb 3 or usb4 don't use the connectors in the back because you're only going to be stuck with that device so you can see how it says keyboard if you plug it in there all you get is keyboard you don't get the mass storage device or anything else so use the usb 3 or usb4 if you want those devices and that's basically about it everything else is pretty much self-explanatory like hdmi out or hdmi in so let's jump into the software here we are at the login page of the pi kvm and you can just grab your ip address from the screen on top or you could just check out your firewall to see where it is and to first log in the password and username is admin admin and you get presented with these three options which is kvm terminal or log out now i'm going to pop over into kvm and you can see it's actually connected to my raspberry pi right now and i could do basically anything i want to do if i'm in front of it or like almost remote desktop and basically that's the whole point of this and you can see this is a 2080 by 720 resolution i could change this if i want but for demonstration purposes i'm just going to leave it here and you can see if i was to pull up a window i could just move this around and it's literally like i'm sitting in front of the computer now what i can do is go to the hdmi switch and say i could switch to number three now you can see i don't have to illiterate through this because it's one of those boxes where i could just tell whatever input i want and now i switched over to number three and i have this hooked up to my udu x86 which is an older machine that i was playing around with i do have gnome installed in here and it is actually doing a little bit of mining actually i have the miner going off for xm rig and i'm just playing around with this seeing how this works out but you can see this is um another computer that i have it hooked up to and i could just switch by using the hdmi switch and this is gnome it works perfectly fine like i'm sitting in front of the computer and that's the whole point like i could configure do everything i need and i don't need remote desktop connected to this machine to have me connect to it now i'm going to switch over to input number two and if i hit click you can see it's going to be frozen at this state that's because the machine is actually asleep and you could tell because you could see this light is blinking my ipmi control is actually connected to the power and led for it and in order for me to wake it up all i have to do is do click power okay and you can see the light changes it's now solid and it woke up the machine as you can see and this is my manjaro machine which i was playing around with the other day and that's it i have my manjaro here i have local access to it and one of the biggest features that i like about this is that i could actually connect the drive to it and i was telling you guys earlier the mass storage device you can actually upload an image if you want so you have any isos you can upload i uploaded a couple already so i'm going to do since this is manjaro i'm going to click solus and since it's a flash drive i am going to connect that to the server and now i have flash drive connected to the server so if i was to go start power and power off oh i should have hit reset now i'm going to go power turn that back on and i'm gonna go into the bio screen you see this this is something you can't get with remote desktop or whatever you're looking for i could go over to save and exit and boot into my little gadget and there you have it solas that's the iso that i mounted earlier so now i could fully install an operating system without having to be in front of it or attach a usb device to it and it basically could do whatever you do like if you're sitting in front of the computer and there we have it solus is booted up off the usb flash drive if i needed to i could install the device launch to install the iso whatever i want now one of the things i didn't implement on this which you can is you could share your ethernet so basically if your device that you have hooked up to don't have ethernet connector onto it you could have your pi kvm pass through the ethernet over to it again everything on this that we talked about will be on their wiki so they have little options that you can set up so i'm going to leave this and show you the terminal and i know because he might have made some updates by now i'm going to hop into terminal and do the update now one of the cool thing is that i can't write to the drive so if i was to do touch test it's a read-only file system that's to protect the sd card so it could prolong the life of the sd card i can't do anything or write to it so in order for me to update the system i would have to go into super user mode and the password is root and what i'm going to do here is again i still can't write to it so i have to do rw to change it to a read and write system and then i could do pac man syyy and now it could read the latest repositories and update anything if it needs to and that is basically it once you're done with that you don't even need to reboot the system you just do ro and it turns it back to the read only system now a lot of the configurations are actually in etc slash kvmd and in here there's a couple of files and override is where we have not cd it's supposed to be nano or vi and then here is where you would change all the stuff that you want this file is where i actually made my input so i actually called it the hdmi switch input number one you could change the name of it you could change it to say raspberry pi number two would be my odyssey number three would be my uru like you could change the name to all this stuff and this is how it connects through the usb and it tells how to trigger each pin so i know which screen it's on and you can add a lot of other stuff to this like i was saying vnc could be added to this if you look up their guide or if you wanted to add the ethernet passthrough it's all done through these files that's what you also get when you have the serial console input so you can actually operate through here and configure the system so that's it for me guys but this is a really really cool product especially with the prototype that is going on and allows you to do so much more stuff and if you have any questions mainly like stuff you want me to test not like how to change passwords which you could find on either his github or his discord but stuff you want me to test on this guy let me know down in the description below and i'll give it a try and i will be revisiting this again because he's doing so much more updates especially the h.264 update that's going to be coming soon with audio and everything i definitely want to test that in the future also i will be doing a lot more home lab server stuff this year so consider subscribing if you are new to this channel and also hitting that bell notification so you know when the next video is going to be out and as i say in my nerd cave hack till it hearts

Channel: Novaspirit Tech

Views: 79,390

Rating: 4.9487371 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, prototype, ipmi, raspberry pi ipmi, ps/2, keyboard and mouse share, raspberry pi otg

Id: dTchVKxx7Fo

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/onenerdyguy]

woah wait, the pi-kvm hat is out now?

[u/r1ckm4n]

This is great. KVM over IP appliances are quite expensive. I wish this was around when I was running an MSP. Would have saved me such a headache.

[u/FlightyGuy]

This is a really cool project.

How much bandwidth does it use in a 720p session like the one in the video?

[u/Veliladon]

I built one of these from parts a couple of weeks ago. It's been like magic.

It's so beautiful. sniff

[u/Taubin]

Man those jump cuts are too much.

Sounds like a really interesting project though, I'm definitely interested.

[u/phr0ze]

Check out Tiny Pilot. Open hardware/software. It uses a pi, and a standard hdmi capture card and it gets great frame rates.

[u/dan_dares]

needs to be called the Pi KVYumm

[u/Nassiel]

I've been searching for this during years! You made my week mate.

[u/Aurailious]

Is it one server per device? I wouldn't mind a version that is 1U or 2U that I can attach to the back of a rack. Maybe with an integrated switch and PDU. Probably simpler to lay on a shelf though.