Pi-KVM - Raspberry Pi Zero W Installation and Review

hey guys don here from novice beard tech and welcome back to the channel and guess what pi kvm can indeed be installed on the raspberry pi zero so let's get started [Music] now if you haven't seen my previous videos on installing the pi kvm on a regular raspberry pi 4 with the hdmi csi 2 or even the prototype version of the pi kvm i'll leave the links on the top left corner right over here but definitely i would check those out now what we're going to be doing today is actually installing the pi kvm os into the raspberry pi zero now this is yet another very cost efficient way of running a kvm or kvm over ip using the raspberry pi zero which is about seven dollars for the wi-fi module and the hdmi csi bus is about 32 dollars so if you total that out that's about 40 now the raspberry pi zero is definitely a lot less power than the raspberry pi 4. it's only on a single core one gigahertz cpu so the performance is not going to be there but still very functional now a couple of things you need to note is that you have to use the hdmi to csi bus because the micro usb port becomes unusable since it gets converted into a usb host device what's another thing that's really cool about this is that because it is underpowered device you can actually power it through the same port that you're going to plug your computer to so you actually don't need to run a second micro usb cord to power it i'm not worried about backfeed because it's the same voltage that's going to be coming from and to the device so yeah you could be able to plug this into a computer and have this running without having to use the extra micro usb for power now installing the os on this guy is not as straightforward he actually doesn't have a pre-made image that's because when you create the image you actually put in your wi-fi passwords and all that other stuff and that's another thing to note because this device is also on wi-fi the latency is a little bit more and i feel it's about like 400 to 500 milliseconds compared to the raspberry pi 4 which is 100 to 200 milliseconds now before i jump into creating the operating system there was a questions i do want to answer the main question that i see you guys ask a lot is how does it compare to teamviewer or vnc or rdp now keep in mind this is not that teamviewer or vnc or any desk or rdp requires the operating system to be installed it's a software layer of remote desktop while this guy doesn't require an operating system to be installed this has access to the physical machine so if you need to install an operating system or even if you're trying to fix a computer that needs to go into safe mode that doesn't have internet access this could achieve that so it's two different things this is actually giving you local access to the computer like you're physically sitting in front of it to access the bios boot up screens or safe mode or anything like that all right so now let's jump into compiling the operating system here we are on my linux desktop and i'm using this computer right over here it does require ubuntu 20.04 and above also requires a 64-bit machine now i'm gonna head over to his github which is pi kvm and pi kvm click over to pages and uh go over to building os he will actually have all the instructions here on how to build the os for the raspberry pi zero with the hdmi csi bridge so what i'm gonna do is basically follow the same thing i have not done this on this computer so um everything is gonna be different let me um arrange the windows properly so you could see what's going on and make that a little bit bigger so it does require you to install docker which is pretty good because it doesn't mess with your environment right here docker will actually put it into its own environment so whatever versions they're using to compile the software you don't have to worry about and at the end of this i'm going to show you a really cool software that he actually created which is ingenious i didn't even think about doing this until i used it on here so first what i did was just uh grab all the stuff that i need which was make curl bin utilities next i am gonna grab this and this is to install docker so i'm gonna paste that right over here sudo sh get docker and that's going to run give that a few minutes and this will install the whole entire docker now i also learned a new command on my previous video which is running the pico with micro python that when you use user mod with ag you can actually do new grp or new group you know instead of having to log out and log back in to refresh the group onto your username that's what that command does so i'm going to give that a try because i haven't tried that yet alright so now that everything is installed all i have to do is sudo user mod a g docker and my username and if i do sudo new grp how does that work so i just do no sudo new grp maybe i guess that works all right so now i'm going to git clone the os and i'm going to change my directory to download so i know where it's going to be and i'm going to get clone the os and don't worry about the space that means it doesn't get saved in the history i just did that by accident head over to os and this is the main important part we actually have to create a file called config.mk it's not in here right now so we have to create it so nano config.mk and we're just going to start going on with board equals and this is going to be zero zero w okay so zero w uh plot form equals v2 dash hdmi locale equals u en underscore us time zone equals and if you guys don't know what the time zone you're in you can actually just open another terminal and head over to user share zone info and atlas here and i'm in america's so that's the first thing i need to do america's would the nest no america and slash new york if you go into subdirectory ls america you could actually see new york in here and that's where i'm at okay root password root you can change that right here web ui underscore admin web pass wd oh this is supposed to be wd equals admin and ipmi password admin uh card is dev mmc blk yeah so zero and i'm just basically copying what he has over here now here's an important bit which is wi-fi e ssid equals and then your wi-fi name and then wi-fi pass word and then the password over here okay all right now that everything's uh done i actually went back in one more time just to fill those out we now do make os this takes a couple of minutes because it downloads everything it needs to and you know what it didn't work the user group i actually have to log out and log back in to grab the user so i could continue this process because new grp is it dash i should really rtfm this because i don't this is the first time i've ever played around with this command so it might be something stupid that i'm not doing so you know what i'm just going to log off and log back in real quick all right and we are back so what i'm going to do is pop back over to the downloads os folder and in here i'm going to do make os and there we have it it's running because i'm part of the docker group all right now it's done it took about 12 minutes or so even though on the ryzen 1700 but i did didn't do make you know j8 or anything like that so it's using single core just do everything which is fine i think it needed to anyway because i had so many things i need to download anyway the next thing we need to do now is to make image instead of making install so if you make an image it'll actually create the disk image that you could later use raspberry pi imager to load onto your raspberry pi zero okay now that everything's all done i'm just going to list the directory you're going to see a folder called images and there we have our image which is the bz2 now i don't have raspberry pi imager installed in here let me see imager yeah i don't have the imager installed in here so to grab that raspberry pi imager download spelled that wrong but it should be fine and i am going to download this for ubuntu save the file once that's done just open it up install now it might not recognize that it's a bz2 so we might have to decompress that so let me choose the os use custom and head over to downloads os images and yeah it doesn't see it that means it doesn't support that file on here it might be different for windows i'm not i don't really remember zip to i think it's dash d decompress zero two there you go so i'm going to decompress the image using bz2 dash d and then the image name so it will actually just give me the image file this way i could just import this into my raspberry pi imager alright now that that is extracted ls you could see that there's an actual image file there i'm going to use custom go back to os images and there we have it hdmi i would definitely keep this stored somewhere so you don't have to recompile the image and total time of this was about 20 minutes so it wasn't too too bad but yeah it's not too bad uh choose the sd card so i could just uh pop in the sd card here uh there we go and then you could just write to the disk so it's going to take about however long your sd card is going to write when you're done with that we're going to hook up the hdmi csi bridge and then hook the hdmi cable to the device we're going to be operating in my case it's odyssey x86 and then we're going to use a micro usb cable plugged into the second port of the raspberry pi to the machine that we're going to control on any usb port now keep in mind that some machines don't have it where the power stays running even though the machine is off so it does take a little bit more than normal to boot this up if you need the instant access or you need to power off the machines you might have to use that second power cord just to keep it powered but in our case and we're just going to plug this into a computer and we need to buy access to bios we could just reboot the machine once to get back into it and basically that's it so let's check out this really cool software we were talking about okay so i'm going to back out of the images folder and back into the main folder of os and what he has is this really cool thing called make scan which is really smart and i can't believe i didn't think to use it because i use that work all the time which is arp and what he does is make a scan he scans the network and arp tables the entire network of any device that starts with the manufacturer id which is the first three pairs so ba27eb would be the raspberry pi dc a2 a632 would also be the other version of the raspberry pi so let me see if i could uh so i made this a little bit smaller but and as you can see i have a couple of raspberry pies running uh four which is raspberry pi fours and one which is a raspberry pi zero and this is my ip for the actual pi kvm so let's check that out now right now i actually have it plugged up to another raspberry pi so let's do this we're going to log in with admin admin you can see it already takes a little bit longer to load that screen and i'm going to go over to the kvm and you can see this is it now one of the things i did notice that we have to do is actually go over to system and turn down the image quality to about 35 that's where i actually get the best frame rates about seven frame rates up to ten sometimes uh don't trust this this does tell you what the frame rates are but it's only when it needs to be so it could go up to five to seven sometimes i hit like nine it depends on what you're loading and you can see the latency is so different like i pressed it already and it took like almost half a second for it to respond so the latency is definitely a little bit slower and what i'm and you're able to control everything like you would normally do with the other kvm so what i'm going to do now is actually run the other pi kvm so what i did was actually something pretty cool i'm going to show you guys side by side on the left side we have raspberry pi 4 with the prototype board and on the right side we have the pi zero and i actually have both the outputs mirrored so basically on the raspberry pi that i have the two hdmi ports h90 and hdmi one are plugged up to the devices individually so it's actually mirrored so if i was to hit menu you could see the animation is so much better on the pi 4 versus the pi zero and the quality obviously this is at 80 percent compared to the 35 on the right side and if i was to say open a file program and that already opened and you can see how slow the mouse is trailing with the pointer that i have but on the left side it actually moves really smoothly compared to the right side with the mouse so the latency is like a lot less using the raspberry pi 4 and i definitely get way much more better frame rates oops i didn't mean to double click that i just mean to move this around and you could see like the right side is not even it's jumpy and the left side is really really smooth compared to what i have on the raspberry pi zero but ultimately they're both very functional the thing i really like about this is that i could utilize another raspberry pi zero project because i have these laying around and because they're underpowered i haven't really used these that much but with this i could now actually utilize this and use it for something good you know so it's great that it works on the raspberry pi zero and the reason why it works really well compared to a raspberry pi 3 of raspberry pi 2 is because the 0 and the pi 4 both have otg so it allows you to convert the port into a usb host device which allows you to communicate with your keyboard and mouse and also have the other features that he added like image and ethernet sharing anyway that's it for me guys if you guys have any questions about this hit it down in the comments below if you guys are new to this channel consider subscribing also hitting that bell notification icon so you know when the next video is going to be out and as you say my nerd cave hack till it 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Channel: Novaspirit Tech

Views: 25,653

Rating: 4.9364405 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, raspberry pi zero, pi zero, zero w, kvm raspberry pi zero, kvm zero

Id: xCL5AS0t5Is

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021