Pi OLED for Jetbot

Preamble

The official JetBot uses a 128×32 OLED using a SSD1306. However, other sizes exist, such as a 0.9″ 128×64 OLED. This can also be used, by just passing a different height argument to the SSD1306_I2C class constructor.

Pi 400 and PoE

Preamble

While it is obvious that the official PoE and PoE+ HATs can not work with the Pi 400, and that the Pi 400, while having a PoE IC on the PCB, isn’t actually PoE capable, nevertheless, there may be a (somewhat) elegant solution in the form of the Pi-Supply PoE Switch Hat…

TL;DR – Pi 400 can not work with any PoE HAT.

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Raspberry Pi – Avoid using SD cards!!!!

Preamble

SD cards are just awful. They will fail, and bring your Pi down with them, don’t kid yourself about it. Fortunately there are some ways to avoid them, or to at least mitigate the issue…

Raspberry Pi clusters

Preamble

After watching Jeff Geerling’s videos on Pi Clusters, and the Turing Pi, I decided it was time to finally build a cluster…

Setting up a Pi Zero W streaming camera on OS X

Preamble

Trying to set up a Pi Zero W streaming camera on OS X should be a relative easy task, no? Think again. Just getting the OS installed correctly for a local log-in via SSH, over a USB connection is bad enough.

Top tip: Have a reliable SD card reader…

The best Pi?

Preamble

The “best” Pi 4, or just the best CM4 carrier board…?

Netbooting RPi – booting worker nodes from master node

Preamble

After reading Building Linux Clusters by David H. M. Spector, I am looking for a method to bootstrap slave/compute/worker nodes, across a network, in a Pi/Linux cluster. This process uses old-skool boot floppies on the slave/compute/worker nodes to contact the master node and then bootstrap from images held on the same master node, across the network – thereby centralising the boot images/process.

After searching I haven’t found one that jumps out from a Google search [Ed. – maybe you should have searched more carefully?]. The only thing that I can think of, that is remotely similar, is a video of Jeff Geerling’s that showed a new Pi using a beta functionality called “Network Install”, with the Pi downloading an image from a remote Raspberry OS image server – effectively booting across a network.

Can this functionality be adapted to boot (i.e. download a boot image) from a local repository/server on the master node of a cluster?

Answer: Yes, of course you can… it is blindingly obvious (if you’ve had enough sleep)…

Bare Metal OS – from Kernel to Vine

Preamble

I found this amazing tutorial on building an OS for the RPi from the ground up, literally…

Using pi-bootstrap

Preamble

Instead of using Ansible to modify a running Pi OS base image, how about creating, and preconfiguring, an image that is ready to go?

Uses PIMOD, and pi-bootstrap.

I came across the pi-bootstrap repository/template whilst looking for a method to bootstrap slave nodes in a Pi/Linux cluster, after having read about a network bootstrap process which is documented in Building Linux Clusters by David H.M. Spector. This process uses old-skool boot floppies on the slave nodes to contact the master node and then bootstrap from images held on the same master node, across the network – thereby centralising the boot images/process.

However, pi-bootstrap is a bit of misnomer as it won’t actually bootstrap a RPi,  but rather, just create a preconfigured SD card to boot from, using Github actions. Nevertheless, that is still pretty useful…