Hi guys!
When I saw this tiny little guy, I had to go in and get it. And so I received it today. My first experience is…the software is a bit rough at the moment. And now I’m having trouble with the keyboard detection. It’s no longer working, and I"m not sure what’s wrong. Basically, it worked initially, but after I unplugged it to dump some isos onto it*, the USB keyboard emulation seems to no longer work.
And since I’m one of the very first users…I think have no documentation (yay). I see there’s a Chinese forum where more people mention a USB keyboard issue, but I don’t think this is sorted.
Anyone else tried it? How’s your experiences so far? Any ideas how to fix the keyboard issues? Still, for all its initial wonkiness, I clearly see this as the future for a KVM device, instead of a full blown Raspberry Pi board, which I think is a bit overkill.
*: The ‘full’ version comes with an embedded 32GB microSD, of which 8GB is for the OS, but the remainder is a separate partition for ISOs…you connect it as a USB storage to a PC and drop your ISOs there. At the moment you don’t seem to be able to mount a random file from your PC via the browser UI. Only ISO files it already has in its own storage.
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Wow, nice! At that price it’s way better than the PiKVM! Keep me posted on the resolution of your problem. Have you written to the support?
Posted on their github. All they have is a Chinese forum. And the wiki is…rough at the moment. Chinese only (not a problem with a translation extension) and a lot of “Todo” sections there. Basically the UI right now has no configuration options, besides “checking for updates” which didn’t tell you which version you’re in anyway. While I was testing I saw the check for updates had a blue dot, so I guess it did manage to reach their servers, and after checking and installing an update…seems that menu had a slight improvement, and now it does say current running version. But that’s it.
But there’s no denying the huge potential for this tiny device. It’s way cheaper and smaller, and consumes way less power. The physical limitations I can see is the NIC is only 10/100 (no gigabit connection), and no wifi. Everything else is software, which I reckon they’ll be working on.
Chinese…I don’t know how, but they manage to always create the worst UI. Also, chinese…I will definitely block Internet access except sometimes just to check for updates. The 10/100 NIC is enough for KVM, not for transferring ISOs 🫤 By the way, keep me posted.
Sometimes…and sometimes they have rather good UI. But usually it gets pretty messed up when translated. I’ve found the network speed to be pretty decent for image transfer, even at the inefficient MJPEG format they’re currently using right now. They said they’re working on better encoding. Today I found that the remote keyboard/mouse work on certain desktops, but sometimes stops on text mode or when on BIOS. And then you continue booting, and it works again. Not sure what’s going on with the hardware identifier they’re using…
So…yeah, once they fix the keyboard/mouse issue, and add the function to remotely load ISOs (not only the ones on its own storage), it’s going to be golden. Since it has SSH, I think in theory you should be able to upload the ISOs remotely using SFTP or similar, but I haven´t tested just yet.
I ordered 5 of these when I saw they are finally available. I probably won’t use them until pikvm is ported to it, there is a lot of talk about the firmware being closed source currently.
Yeah I agree with that. I was giving it a spin. They produced a release with open source attached on github, but not sure how much of the source is in there, and that release seems to be a bit outdated compared to the release I got running on my nanoKVM right now.
