This Raspberry Pi controls ANY PC (BliKVM)

might be awesome and it might not there you go this is the blee kvm it's a 100 kvm over ip solution powered by a raspberry pi compute module 4 and the open source pi kvm software i reviewed a couple other pi kvm solutions on my main channel last year but those were based on the pi 4 model b and some add-on hats this bleak kvm is even simpler but still packs in all the basics so i brought this box to the radio station where my dad works and i'm going to let him install it but i realized after making the last video on a pi kvm i never explained what a kvm is or why you'd want to use one so i figured i'd ask my dad so dad what is a kvm what does it stand for and why do you use them and have you had any experiences lately that makes you want to put this in pretty quickly so a kvm is keyboard video and mouse and it basically is getting the keyboard video mouse from a computer that's somewhere and accessing it from a keyboard video and mouse somewhere else a long time ago we used to have cable runs to a switcher to our desk or to our workspace now it's all done over the network so the kvm boxes like this are really awesome because once it's on the network and however you can get to it through your security and software you can get to it and that's what we're doing today and i recently as an example if an on-air computer runs 24 hours a day it's every piece of audio everything we do goes through it except for live mics the computer locked up on sunday morning 10 30 and we had a guy who realized it was probably locked up we had to drive in come and see that it was locked up and then hit the reset button to get it powered back up and then get it lined up and on the air so if if we had this box installed already he would have been able to do all that from home it's actually put this thing together at home so i'm going to show you how it goes together and all the features of it before we install it here in the blee kvm box there are a couple tools including a phillips screwdriver as well as a little nut driver that you can use to tighten the fan nuts when you put the fan on other than that there is the blee kvm itself in an anti-static bag and inside of here it includes a fan and you can see the the breakout cable for the atx connections for power reset activity and power led so let's get this thing open and see what's inside you can see on the front there's an oled display out of the box it is not plugged in so you'll have to remember to plug that in when you put this back onto the case so put that aside and it comes with a fan this is a 30 millimeter fan and it's actually not too bad since this fan is a little bit bigger than the tiny fans used in a lot of raspberry pie cases it can actually move more air and be a lot quieter doing it i mentioned that this fan in the past is kind of buzzy and whiny kind of an annoying fan to listen to this one's not too bad you can still hear it but the the sound that makes is a lot more pleasing than the tiny fans like this one it also comes with this breakout cable and this plugs in over on the side here and this other end goes to your computer goes to the computer that you're going to control and has a power switch reset switch power led plus and minus and hard drive led plus and minus or activity led alright so we'll set that aside for now and we'll get to the board itself which has four more phillips screws that are holding it in place all right so here's the board itself and one thing i like about this case it has nice labels on everything so you know what you're doing and you know where it goes the only thing not really labeled is this antenna port which if you're going to buy one of these and want to use it wirelessly you need to buy your own external antenna and this antenna connector goes into this little slot so you can put the antenna outside the case in my case i'm not going to do that but here's the board itself the blee kvmv 2.2 it has pretty much everything you need for a kvm the one thing that would be cool that they could include is an hdmi output so you could actually use this independently and log into it and and see the console and stuff without having to use ethernet or wi-fi or serial port connection but the board has a usb 3.0 so there's two usb 3 ports that you can plug a flash drive or hard drive or something if you want to keep images on it that you'll use to flash tier your pc or anything else that you want to mount to your pc there's an ethernet port this is not power over ethernet but someday they might make a version that has power over ethernet built in which would be really cool but because of that there's a power input it's usb c and you should use at least a three amp power plug like the the one that raspberry pi foundation makes so that you don't have power issues with this board there's a usb otg port and this does a connection from pi kvm into your pc so you can control your pc a keyboard and mouse and mount flash drives and things the hdmi input goes in through this chip into the csi connection on the raspberry pi itself so there's a little switch here uh four lanes and two lanes you can actually get more bandwidth if you want to try to do 1080p i i don't know how that works i've only done 720p on here this is the connector that goes out to the atx connections on the pc there's a little fan header ground and 5 volts so this only supplies 5 volts for 5 volt fans like the one it includes there's a micro sd card slot now something to note is you will need to supply your own raspberry pi compute module for one of these guys there are two types there's ones with emmc and there's ones that don't have emc if you buy the kind with the mmc you can only boot it off of this emmc and the microsd card slot does nothing so you can take your pick for some people having emmc built in is nice because it's like one less part that you have to get you don't have to buy a separate micro sd card but for other people they like the flexibility of being able to boot other things by just switching microsd cards but that is something important to note that if you use an emmc compute module 4 you can only use this emmc you cannot use the microsd card slot so you can't switch operating systems as easily you have to flash it and i'm going to do that on this one to flash it you switch this little jumper here plug power in and plug this into your computer mac or pc or linux or whatever and you use raspberry pi's rpi boot utility to flash mmc and i have a guide for that on my website but it's not too complicated it's a little slower but it is nice because i don't have to use a micro sd card so you'll need to supply a compute module for you'll need to supply your own usbc to usb type a port this this plugs into the otg port and will let you control a pc so you just plug this into one of the pc's usb ports and you'll need to if you use wi-fi supply your own external antenna and that would connect to this port on the compute module 4 like so and to use that antenna you actually have to switch something in software i'll have a guide up for it i actually have had some trouble with this on the pi kvm image so i'll put up a guide for that or i'll link you to the issue depending on how far i get before i post this video so those are the things that you'll need to add on i'm going to put the compute module 4 in here like so and then another thing that you might want to do is is put a rtc battery this is a 1220 lithium battery little 3 volt battery i think i actually ordered some but they haven't come in yet shipping delays and we just had a big snowstorm here but you can put that in so that your pie can remember its clock between reboots that's useful and i will probably put one on here soon but i just don't have one on hand yet it's a pretty simple board but it has all the features that you'd need for pi kvm so let's put this all back together first i'll install the fan so the fan is all wired up and i'm going to put the board in remember i have the pi on the bottom and before i close it up i'm actually going to flash the emmc on the compute module using this otg port or this otg port and plugging in power here so you need to switch this jumper over and then i'm going to plug it into my computer now that it's flashed i'm going to switch this jumper back into the normal mode and we'll get this the rest of this thing put together so i have the red goes to 5 volt and black goes to ground on the board here all right fan is connected out of the way and then i'm going to plug the oled display in okay that's latched in put everything together here and get all the screws in all right now that everything's put back together i'm going to take this along with my cables and a power supply that my dad will provide and i'll take it over and we'll get it wired into the pc first we have to get the computer out because we're going to install the cable uh to get control of that baby while it's remote get these cables out and they really don't accumulate much dust here that's really very happy about that and never never drop a computer when you've got it out as i recall don't do that so all right especially if it has mechanical hard mechanical hard drives yes all right so put this down like that get our you are going to clean it a little bit aren't you i am going to clean it i look it inside here every time you get a computer on the bench you get a chance it's it's your only chance to clean it for who knows how long right and you know we're lucky we don't have a lot of traffic but that doesn't stop dust from being sucked in by fans and did i tell you we had snow come over here watch out i wish i had one of those there's fans that cost 300 or so if somebody wants to throw one in the mail i would love to have one of those and the outside we can always clean there okay so now we gotta locate the where this guy gets plugged in and how we're gonna route it out to that box okay last connector is in and last pin is connected and i'm gonna pull this out and run the cable through there and save us a little space see if this guy just pries out for us nicely i did ask about a breakout board or something and they said that i think there is something that you can get for a pci slot um but it didn't come with one so that's something to keep in mind we're just gonna shuffle it through this little serial port here i'm gonna go around here keep that cable away from the fan and uh see if we can get it through just like that okay and that's some cable manager yeah double check our pins are all in there nicely good ready to go all right oh you remember to remove your tools it's glowing like a really cool computer led lighting not rgb though all right we put this back in okay cable lift so uh so this box needs usb the box we installed there hdmi so i got an hdmi cable i got the ethernet cable run under here so i'm going to just plug the pieces in on this box and power in goes in the front that's good so i'm set it on top and see if it'll set nice or i'm gonna have to use a little sticky double-sided something or other and we'll see how it works so i got my hdmi and this is the hdmi in because i'm taking out hdmi out of the computer and then i've got my ethernet cable that i ran before it's going to go in the front i've got my usb cable i'm going to find a usb port here the usb shuffle yes millions of times so i like that usbc uh this goes to the usb channel i don't know what otg on the go on the go there you go that works but cool term and then uh i'm gonna set this up here come back clean up the wires one of the monitors on this has to go to two locations so we use that to send that over cat cat5 and then here's the cable coming out the back for the control oops okay so we have to find the tape we'll have to use that double little velcro there so this will go just like that all right there it is and then we'll have to look at the top screen is that correct to get the ip address that's no problem the network too for it but all right there you go all right uh you'll need power for it yes oh yeah power raspberry pi micro center supplied not that supply i bought it but i'm just saying raspberry pi standard power supply important to use a 3 amp power supply yeah yeah so it's booting you've got a card in there right you ready this one has a cm4 with the built-in emmc there we go says hello okay hello let's see yeah 77 yep 77. so uh 192.168.1.77 connection is not yeah private going to come with a valid certificate by default all right there we go and i think the default password is admin admin there it is let's see if it works kvm all right so you've got a computer it's saying 640 480 but that means nothing to me anymore but there are i do see the yeah the atx and power and the hard drive light is lighting up so those are definitely working it looks like we might be having an issue with so yeah so let's go uh let's just go over here see what the computer's main screen is like all right so uh here if we go to display settings and let's just see if it sees two displays uh oop detect did not detect another display let's if i shut down can we restart it over here let's see because as we should we're talking to the box right there it goes and so now it's off let's see so now we're going to try to restart it and i go here click power long or short it should be a short one that's all i need it gives you a warning so okay hit it yep and i see the power led let's see if this thing boots up i heard it that's that beep signal there it comes i'm going to unplug and plug the uh hdmi cable because we had it working before that's and i'm in the right port hdmi in everything's there so try 1080p there we go now we do have it so if i was at home and i had just restarted it i would go and find my favorite software the one that keeps us on the air keeps the audio flowing any broadcasters watching this with your favorite simeon oldest old version and the other thing is i go i like to go full screen because then it's you know it's a better view and you it says press and hold escape and in windows when you go up you can always click that and it goes back to the other view so so anyway so this is the uh this is the real deal it's the log i could move around it it's pretty responsive you can see the uh movement again that's not that's not a bad feeling for a remote thing i don't know what it would be at home but there are some settings too you can tweak right can you show those yeah so there's settings that you can tweak to get uh depending on the quality you want you know like here we don't need a lot of quality because it's mostly text so we could reduce quality you can reduce the frame rate which is huge that has a huge impact on it yeah i was going to tell you too this one if you ever have funkiness with the keyboard or mouse you reset the hid it doesn't harm a thing but it resets that port uh just hit ok and then it does a reset and you know everything should be good that's rare but it does happen yeah and so you got the uh the drive light you see the hard drive you got the power light uh the uh the macro i did not play with macros much yeah the drive option so that is interesting too because you can't select an image on your remote computer right to load into the computer that's uh local well yeah you know you know there you go so now it's off so now i'll do another short one to see if that brings it up right so which it did right we saw that already yeah okay and it shows that it's on and we could see there's there it is and you can and the other cool thing is you could actually get into the bios if you need to and make changes because this is not connected internally on the computer it's basically like using your own yeah it's keyboard you could go in and make a change to the bios if you needed to remotely and again it's great to get the activity lights up there it's just uh enormously helpful to know when you're at home you might be on vacation somewhere so wait who works on vacation cut that out don't let mom see that one yeah and so here it is the uh log in remotely so i'm if i'm at home all right so it's up it's good and uh move around or move around your mouth yeah so you can see yeah on the other computer yeah so he's moving that around and look at that there's no hand on the mouse yep and it's moving around it's kind of like vnc except it's kvm i'll have bob remote in and get us back on the air with this this is the main computer we're on the back up right now and i have them get in there the one we installed at the station is working great but we did hit a few rough edges pi kvm's defaults limit you to 1080p at 50hz but apparently with the compute module hardware it might be possible to do more resolution since it has double the csi lanes also we didn't do it in the video but make sure you set your own password for the root account and also for the admin account in pi kvm there's also an atx breakout board accessory for 30 bucks that makes it easier to plug the thing into a pc but it doesn't look like it splits the signal one last thing i wanted to mention is i'm not sure whether bleedcube is contributing back to the pi kvm community but i hope they are because this device is a really good showcase for how simple and inexpensive an open source kvm over ip solution can be thanks for watching our first video it looks like the blee kvm is working okay for you and hopefully we'll be doing some more projects like that and and other things relating to radio raspberry pi's electronics things like that in the coming months on this channel i probably won't post things here as often as my my main channel but go check that out too and subscribe if you're not but uh yeah i might show some up here too and it might be awesome and it might not there you go subscribe for that

Channel: Geerling Engineering

Views: 86,061

Keywords: raspberry pi, blikvm, kvm, pikvm, pi-kvm, tiny pilot, ip kvm, kvm over ip, remote access, remote control, pc, atx, power, control, vnc, radio, studio, drop, computer, windows, linux, pi os, open source, review, software, latency, geerling

Id: 3OPd7svT3bE

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/geerlingguy]

My Dad and I installed a BliKVM at his radio station to control their main on-air PC (which happened to lock up the weekend before we recorded this video, so it was extra motivation to get it working!

The video goes through the board itself (which uses a Compute Module 4 for a very compact little setup), assembly, and installation into a PC.

I've asked blicube if they might consider making a PCI Express card-shaped version, so you could slot it directly into a computer (though not connected to the PCIe bus!), and have your IP KVM built directly inside the PC. I think that would be great for SMBs like this radio station who have PCs they want to be able to remote into (and need full ATX control, not just VNC-like remote access).

[u/AppleLauncher]

How is this different from pikvm?

[u/gargdada]

I was looking fwd to CM4 pi-KVM solutions for a while but they arrived at a time when securing a decent priced CM4 on a timeline is really tough. I understand that they are projected and tested to be an IPMI alternative. But will they work with audio input and output as well??
eg - A LAPTOP with no battery backup and with specific licesed software, connected to Bli-KVM can AFAIK be used for all text based work but can these be used to channel Teams calls as well (no camera, only 2-way audio)?

[u/AppleLauncher]

How is this different from pikvm?

[u/AppleLauncher]

How is this different from pikvm?