TinyPilot KVM over IP (Complete remote control of BI PC)

IReallyLikePizza2

IReallyLikePizza2

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May 14, 2019
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I've built a new system for Blue iris which is mounted in my server rack, and does not have a monitor attached (Read here - Rackmount Blue Iris Upgrade)

One of the most annoying things is missing out on the remote management like IPMI/iDRAC etc since we are using consumer boards and CPU's. All of the motherboards that support those features are limited to i3's and Xeons and pretty much don't support quicksync at all

If I ever can't get to the system over RDP, I'd need to go and plug a monitor in. What a pain! So I got a device called TinyPilot setup, which just runs on a Raspberry Pi and uses some adapters to get the raw output from the HDMI. meaning you can go into the BIOS from the browser if you wanted to, enter a Bitlocker recovery key, anything



Ignore the cable mess, I'll clean it up later!

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Under the hood its just a Raspberry Pi

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Here is a link to the website - TinyPilot: Build a KVM Over IP for Under $100

Figured I'd share, as this is for sure an awesome feature to have
 
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Nice looking device. It is a bit disappointing that it doesn't(?) do more than 1280x720 resolution, but otherwise the HDMI capture device he used looks pretty great for the price. I've personally played with an LKV373 like he tried earlier, and it outputs motion jpeg at pretty decent latency so I think he COULD HAVE gotten it to work, but the solution would have been a lot more clunky. There are other HDMI encoding devices that can provide H.264 or H.265 video (and good quality audio) in a number of formats, but again that would have been clunky due to the size and extra power brick.

4-10 years ago I really wanted something like that, but what I ended up settling on was an old Avocent KVM-over-IP switch (8 ports) from ebay. I still use that in my server closet, but the remote capabilities are a pain because it requires a very old java plugin that modern PCs just don't like because of the ancient java version. There were single-computer-connection devices for $300-$400 at the time, but that was too expensive. The Avocent setup was less than $300 all together. It also supports remote virtual disk mounting, like for OS installation, but I never used that. I'm sure it is painfully slow for that purpose.

My latest server is built on an Asrock X470D4U motherboard which supports desktop Ryzen and ECC memory, and the killer feature is that it has IPMI. So I can do full remote management, sensor monitoring, OS installation, and even BIOS updates through a web interface with no plugins. I run unRAID on it which is a pretty great consumer-oriented storage server operating system with good virtual machine and docker support. The best part is that motherboard isn't actually super expensive. Yes it costs more than most other X470 boards, but it isn't an insane price. I paid $300 or something for it and have recently seen it at $200.
 
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Very impressive. Thank you for sharing. Did you fine the DIY easy to assemble?

Last RPi project here was a weather satellite downloading RPI using an SDR radio and antenna in the attic.

Yeah here still using an old Raritan 16 port KVM with a remote Java console that doesn't work much these days.

Mostly have gone here to Linux / BSD and see not much of a need these days. (PFSense/XigmaNAS ==> BSD)

I still do run a few instances of Windows server here.

Mostly they are running on Linux Oracle VB hosts these days. I never touch the Zoneminder box and console RDP to the Windows W2016 server to run Windows tuff all of the time. I cannot get away from that.
 
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