XAIO ESP32-C3 Expansion Board Getting Started Guide

Published: February 1, 2023 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 12 Comments / , ,
Seeed Studios XAIO Expansion Board Getting Started Guide

I recently covered using the XAIO-ESP32-C3 with the Grove Expansion shield to create a sensor panel to be used within Home Assistant via ESPHome. That shield is only around $7 and doesn’t have very many bells and whistles on it. That is a really fantastic and inexpensive solution to expand your available Grove ports and add more sensors or other Grove accessories to your build.

Today I want to cover Seeed Studio’s larger and more capable expansion shield. Instead of using ESPHome to program the device for us though we’re going to set up the Arduino IDE to work with the XAIO-ESP32-C3. That means we’ll be able to run our own code and test out the various capabilities of the larger expansion board.

Let’s get started!

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Pine64 Pinecil Soldering Iron Review

Published: January 30, 2023 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 10 Comments / , , ,
Pine64 Pinecil Mini Soldering Iron Review

The Pine64 Pinecil is described as a “smart mini portable soldering iron”. It’s very popular and has incredible Amazon ratings among a crowd that largely is probably unfamiliar with Pine64 as a company that makes single board computers.

I was in dire need of a soldering iron upgrade and Razor Burn mentioned to me in one of the comments on the site that he had the Pinecil and loved it. I’ve investigated other Pine64 products before on the site as well and have other hardware from them. It’s also a RISC-V device!

Today I’ll review the Pinecil and cover why this soldering iron is so popular. Let’s get started!

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Using Seeed’s XAIO ESP32C3 with Home Assistant / ESPHome

Published: January 29, 2023 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 2 Comments / , , , ,
Home Assistant - ESPHome Sensors Installed

I’ve been working with the Grove series of sensors lately as I previously covered in my K1100 Grove Sensor prototyping kit article. The next step after getting my prototyping kit set up was to try some of the expansion shields for the Seeed Studios XAIO modules such as the ESP32-C3. This will allow me to connect a whole bunch of sensors to a single board.

We used LoRa in the last article to upload sensor data to the cloud. Today we’re going to take the complete opposite approach. We are going to use the open-source Home Assistant suite to upload data to a locally running Home Assistant server. Home Assistant already integrates nicely with everything in my home letting me access it all in one place.

In this article we’re going to take the next step after prototyping one sensor at a time and try using a XAIO Grove expansion shield to connect a whole bunch of sensors to a single board and then view all of their data within Home Assistant. Let’s get started!

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Converting Minecraft Bedrock / Java Worlds with Chunker

Published: January 27, 2023 / Last Modified: January 27, 2023 / Leave a Comment / , ,
Convert Minecraft Bedrock and Java Worlds Using Chunker

People have been asking me for years how they can convert a Minecraft Bedrock world to Java edition (or vice versa). The answer in the past was that you needed to use one of the tools that could read both formats and convert between them such as Amulet. It wasn’t a very fun process though and not many had succeeded over the years.

Recently I was asked this question again though and when I went to look up what the current map editors supporting both formats were I found a surprise: Chunker! If you look at the text in the bottom of the screenshot above you’ll see “Proudly made by Hive Games under exclusive license to Minecraft”. This is actually an officially sanctioned tool with official Microsoft documentation.

In this guide I’ll show you the current capabilities of Chunker and how to use it to convert a Minecraft world between editions. Let’s get started!

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All Hail the Rock 5B: SBC King of 2023

Published: January 25, 2023 / Last Modified: April 3, 2023 / 11 Comments / , , ,
Radxa Rock 5B Review

With the Raspberry Pi 5 delayed until 2024 and older models unable to be kept in stock the single board computer market is wide open for competitors to really shine this generation. I’ve reviewed dozens of board and spent literally thousands of dollars trying to find boards worthy of your money and that are good enough to step into a lot of the roles people were using Raspberry Pis for.

Today I’m going to be reviewing the Radxa Rock 5B and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve been waiting for years for a single board computer to come along that is powerful enough to squarely beat the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. The Rock 5B not only beats it but leaves one wondering how Raspberry Pi is going to catch up.

Let’s get started!

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StarFive VisionFive 2 Firmware / Bootloader Update Guide

Published: January 24, 2023 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 22 Comments / ,
StarFive VisionFive 2

If you’ve just received a new StarFive VisionFive 2 you may be having trouble to get it to boot with the latest images. This is because your firmware needs to be updated before using the latest version.

In this guide we’ll cover how to update the firmware on the StarFive VisionFive 2. Let’s begin!

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StarFive VisionFive 2 Official Debian SSD Boot Guide

Published: January 23, 2023 / Last Modified: April 1, 2023 / 39 Comments / , ,
StarFive VisionFive 2 SSD Boot Guide

The StarFive VisionFive 2 comes with a M.2 M-key PCIe 2.0 slot that we can use with a 2280 NVMe drive. Unfortunately at release it’s not possible to boot from the NVMe drive but this is expected to be added to the device through some combination of SPI+NVMe booting.

In the meantime we are going to bootstrap the boot process using a SD card and then clone that SD card to our SSD to be used as the root partition. This essentially will let us have our system’s root partition on the SSD (much faster).

Let’s get started!

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StarFive VisionFive 2 High Performance RISC-V SBC Review

Published: January 23, 2023 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 14 Comments / , , ,
StarFive VisionFive 2 - Top View

I’ve reviewed several RISC-V boards on the site at this point including the Lichee RV and the Mango Pi MQ Quad. All of those boards only had a single core CPU though and aren’t suitable for high performance applications.

Today I am going to review what SiFive describes as “the world’s first high-performance RISC-V single board computer (SBC) with an integrated GPU”. We’ll explore the capabilities and performance of the board and see if it lives up to these claims. We’ll also compare it to a Raspberry Pi as it has the same number of CPU cores as a Raspberry Pi.

Let’s get started!

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Google Pixel Buds Pro Review

Published: January 20, 2023 / Last Modified: January 20, 2023 / 4 Comments / , , ,
Google Pixel Buds Pro Review

I’ve had the original Google Pixel Buds buds (first generation) for a couple of years now. That line (and the second generation of it) was cancelled some time ago in favor of the Pixel Buds A Series.

As of late though my original Pixel Buds have been acting up and the left headphone will often be dead when I open the lid for the case. I would have to leave the lid of the charger open after taking the left headphone out and putting it back in again for it to charge correctly and then I would be able to finally use them for whatever I pulled them out to do. It was time for an upgrade.

Today I’m going to review the Pixel Buds Pro series with active noise cancellation. I’ll specifically be comparing them to my original Pixel Buds and the A Series. Let’s get started!

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Mango Pi MQ-Quad SBC Review

Published: January 11, 2023 / Last Modified: February 4, 2026 / 7 Comments / , ,
MangoPi MQ-Quad Single Board Computer Review

I have reviewed the Mango Pi MQ-Pro (a RISC-V board) in the past and I was impressed enough that I wanted to try one of Mango Pi’s other boards. Unfortunately this one is not a RISC-V board but it is much, much more powerful than the Mango Pi MQ Pro as it has a quad-core processor instead of a single core one.

Today we’ll be taking a look at the Mango Pi MQ-Quad single board computer including the available operating systems, the specifications, build quality as well as do some performance benchmarking to see how well the board performs.

Let’s get started!

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Using E-Key M.2 WiFi Adapters with Orange Pi 5

Published: January 3, 2023 / Last Modified: April 16, 2023 / 11 Comments / , , ,
Orange Pi 5 E-Key to M-Key WiFi Adapter Guide

Orange Pi has not released the WiFi module for the Orange Pi 5 yet which has left some people in a difficult position. While working on this problem I discovered an adapter that claimed to be able to let me use normal E-keyed WiFi adapters (commonly found in laptops and tablets) with the Orange Pi 5 using an adapter.

I received and tested the adapter and I am pleased to report it works perfectly! There are some caveats though such as you need a driver for your WiFi card within your OS (and often firmware as well).

In this guide I’ll show you how to get this working with the Orange Pi 5 using Linux. Let’s get started!

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Using Corsair Mice / Keyboards on Linux without iCUE

Published: December 27, 2022 / Last Modified: April 23, 2026 / Leave a Comment / , ,
Using Corsair Mice / Keyboards in Linux without iCUE - ckb-next

When I replaced my old keyboard I decided to get a keyboard with Cherry MX Quiet switches as I love mechanical keyboards but wanted to cut down on the noise. It’s still fairly loud but it’s definitely much quieter than my non-quiet models I’ve used before.

I had used Corsair keyboards before in the past on Windows but not since I had switched my main desktop to Linux. Unfortunately when I connected the keyboard the RGB was stuck on a solid red with no way to change it.

Fortunately there is an amazing replacement in Linux called ckb-next that is available in most major Linux distribution’s repositories. In this guide we’ll cover how to get the utility and what it can do.

Let’s begin!

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Orange Pi 5 NVMe/SATA SSD Boot Guide

Published: December 27, 2022 / Last Modified: March 31, 2023 / 159 Comments / , ,
Orange Pi 5 with Heat Sinks

The Orange Pi 5 has a nice M.2 NVMe slot but unfortunately most of the official images will not boot if you try to directly image a NVMe drive. Fortunately there is an easy way to get this working that people who frequent the blog will almost certainly have seen before.

We are going to bootstrap the boot process using a SD card and then clone that SD card to our SSD to be used as the root partition. This essentially will let us have our system’s root partition on the SSD (much faster).

Let’s get started!

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Lichee RV 86 Panel Getting Started Guide

Published: December 24, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 2 Comments / , , ,
Lichee RV 86 Panel Getting Started Guide

The Lichee RV 86 Panel is a RISC-V powered Linux computer complete with screen! It comes as a low cost kit with everything you need including the Lichee RV module.

In this guide I’ll show you how to get going with the Lichee RV 86 panel including getting Linux on there and getting it connected to WiFi. Let’s get started!

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Orange Pi 5 Review – Powerful, No WiFi

Published: December 13, 2022 / Last Modified: April 21, 2026 / 274 Comments / , ,
Orange Pi 5 SBC Review

The Orange Pi 5 has finally arrived! I received my pre-order and the board is great. So should you go out and buy it? Probably, but there are some things you should know first that you may not be expecting.

The biggest thing to know is that there is no WiFi/Bluetooth included. If you were planning on using Ethernet anyway this doesn’t have much of an impact. If you do need wireless capabilities we’ll cover what options are available.

In this review we’ll cover what you need to know about the Orange Pi 5 including it’s onboard capabilities, the available RAM options as well as benchmark the board. Let’s get started!

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