Blog

All blog posts by James A. Chambers — focused on technology, hardware, SBC / Microboards, programming, scripting, gaming, and others!

Raspberry Pi 4 Bootloader Firmware Updating / Recovery Guide

October 26, 2019 / 11 Comments / , ,
Raspberry Pi eeprom

All of the previous generations of Raspberry Pi contained all of their firmware on the SD card. Starting with the Raspberry Pi 4 the device actually has onboard upgradable firmware stored on an EEPROM chip separate from your storage. Updating this firmware is very important as one of the first released updates reduces power usage of the Pi by 30% which also reduces how hot it gets.

In this guide I’ll show you how to update the bootloader firmware (no, it’s not apt-get upgrade, it’s a new utility called rpi-eeprom!) and also show you how to make a recovery SD card if your firmware gets corrupted and needs to be reflashed.

Raspberry Pi 4 Ubuntu Server / Desktop 18.04.3 Image (unofficial)

December 3, 2019 / 206 Comments / , , , ,
Fine, I'll do it myself

This is a unofficial distribution of Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 for Raspberry Pi 4. It is provided with the purpose of letting us all play with the new Pi 4’s new increased RAM and other capabilities until Ubuntu’s repositories are updated with support for the newest Pi.

Once official support is released through the Ubuntu repositories this project will effectively cease to exist (until, dare I dream, the Pi 5?). The image supports KVM, has support for the Pi 4’s new 3D display driver, and can also be upgraded to a full desktop installation!

New Trezor Native Ethereum Wallet Beta Guide / Features

August 25, 2019 / 2 Comments / , , , ,
Trezor Ethereum Wallet Beta Main Page

The support on Trezor was traditionally just a link to a third party service where you had to log in through the web interface and export your keys every single time. You can’t even see your balance until you do this!

Fortunately true native Ethereum support has arrived for Trezor in the beta! Not only that, but ERC20 token support was also added which has made Trezor now an extremely capable Ethereum hardware wallet. The beta wallet supports all Trezor wallet devices including Trezor One.

In this article we will examine these new features in depth and give a final verdict!

Examining the Brave Web Browser / BAT Cryptocurrency Token

July 25, 2019 / 2 Comments / , , , , ,
Brave Verified Publisher Wallet

The Brave web browser is a really interesting experiment. For users it offers an out of the box privacy setup that blocks advertising/tracking. The browser’s rendering engine is Chromium based so website loading/rendering/compatibility performance is comparable to Chrome.

In this article we will take a closer look at Brave and the BAT cryptocurrency and discuss.

Wireless Alternative Using Ethernet Over Power – Black Magic?

July 7, 2019 / 5 Comments / , ,
Ethernet Over Power Wall Rack

Ethernet over powerline tech has existed for a while but traditionally has frankly sucked. It was slow and had issues with reliability.

After decades of improving standards and technology this has changed dramatically and now makes a very cheap and attractive alternative to wireless in many situations. The latest iteration gives a 1200 Mbps connection right over your existing power lines in your house and is designed to work in “noisy” power environments without interruption.

Raspberry Pi 4 USB Boot Config Guide for SSD / Flash Drives

December 2, 2019 / 227 Comments / , , , ,
Raspberry Pi 4 with Samsung 950 Pro NVME SSD

The Raspberry Pi 4 is finally here and has a lot of exciting changes. One very major downside is that it doesn’t support true USB booting yet out of the box (like the 3 series did).
The Raspberry Pi foundation states that it is being worked on and will be added back with a future update. No timeline has been given yet for that to happen but they state it’s one of their top priorities.

Most of my projects heavily depend on having good performing storage so sitting and waiting was not an acceptable solution. In this guide I’ll show you a workaround to use USB devices as your rootfs device and use a Micro SD card as bootloader only which gives us full SSD performance after boot!

Early Bitcoin ASIC Miner Pictures / History / Analysis / Prices

June 7, 2019 / 2 Comments / , , , ,
Block Erupter ASIC setup

The most competitive Bitcoin mining operations today consist of entire warehouses of large ASIC miners usually located near sources of renewable energy or power plants selling off excess energy production for cheap. To get seriously involved in the Bitcoin mining space of today will require you to already be quite wealthy and to put up some *serious* cash.

But things were not always this way. I found a bunch of pictures in my photo library of my old mining rigs back from the dawn of Bitcoin ASIC mining and wanted to share them. Let’s go on a journey together back to the year of 2013 and explore what old school Bitcoin mining ASIC hardware looked like, how much it cost, and what we can learn from them today!

Join Mac OS X Mojave to Active Directory Using Built In Tools

August 1, 2019 / 4 Comments / , , , ,
Mac AD Join Successful

Joining a Mac to Active Directory has continued to get more and more difficult over the years. High Sierra and Mojave now require a Active Directory functional level of Windows Server 2008 or later and are still pretty tricky to get to join it.

When I started researching the topic I saw a whole lot of advice to install third party software to join a Mac to Active Directory. In most corporate environments installing third party software is frowned upon due to licensing and security considerations so I was determined to get the native Mac OS X tools to work.

This guide will walk you through the basic steps to join Active Directory without having to resort to using third party software.

Official Minecraft Bedrock Dedicated Server on Raspberry Pi*

October 23, 2019 / 19 Comments / , , , , ,
Minecraft Bedrock Edition logo

One of the most requested features in my Raspberry Pi Minecraft server guide is support for the Bedrock edition of Minecraft. This is the edition that powers Minecraft on iOS / Android / Xbox / Nintendo Switch as well as the free Windows 10 edition.

There’s one big problem though. The official Minecraft Bedrock dedicated server is only compiled for Windows and Ubuntu X86_64. Without ARM support it seems impossible to run the Bedrock dedicated server on a Raspberry Pi. I couldn’t find a documented instance of anyone doing it anywhere.

So naturally today in this guide we are going to do the impossible. But right off the bat let me point out that there is an asterisk in my article title. Why you ask? That is because unlike my other guides this one will not yield you a well performing server. That is because we will be emulating a x86_64 processor on ARM. This is slow. VERY slow.