have you ever been in a situation where you might have broken a computer or
maybe the computer broke itself and you don't have a way to access it
fortunately for us most of the systems we work on here at LTT LMG ShortCircuit
whatever you want to call it have something called ipmi or Remote
Management it's like a mini computer attached to the main computer so if it
freezes or something you can turn the power off and on again but if you don't
have Hardware like that you don't really have a way to do that without physically
going and pressing the power button at least until now or I mean realistically
Solutions like this have been on the market for a while but this one the
scied Nano KVM light and I guess this
one's just the Nano KVM can do it for very
cheap wow oh it's so cute this is like
$30 or something like this this little Gadget right here you connect HDMI to
your computer USB to your computer and some of these pins to like the power and
reset switches and now you have full remote visibility and physical power
switch control over any computer you want you also through that USB have
keyboard and mouse now you might have heard of similar projects like the P KVM
which is an awesome way to do that uh open source kind of community project
but it's still pretty expensive even if you build the thing yourself you're talking an order of a couple hundred
cheaper than an Enterprise solution which does exist but if you're trying to
do this at your house $30 seems a lot
more compelling let's get the the big boy unboxed here o look at that we got
the little unit right there we got the little board this is like for the front
panel header so the power button just a little bit cleaner way to do that rather
than having to like run jumper cables off of this one oh look jumper cables
that's helpful USB cable a two a to c cables okay naturally the fully fledged
version is more expensive you're looking around $60 but it does have some little
cute goodies uh we can't see it yet but there's an OLED screen under here that
prints out the IP address of the device which can be helpful if you don't know
how to get that it's got buttons that are accessible like power and reset it
also comes with the little daughter board that you can plug right into the
headers of a computer that way you can do the power situation a little nicer
and it also comes with the jumper cables to plug that in ports wise they're
pretty similar but you can see the fully fledged one has an extra USB port and
that's for auxiliary power so the light is meant to run off of the computer it's
controlling so it gets power and also supplies the mouse and keyboard signals
to the computer through this one USBC Port but if that computer stops
supplying power for instance then this stops getting power that's why there's
an extra power cable on this one an example I could think of is like during
a BIOS update let's say the computer by default doesn't provide power from the
USB ports when it's off and you set the BIOS to change that and then you updated
the BIOS well now you can't fix it with this on this one you'll have external
power and you totally could I suspect that the pins on the light one there's
probably a PIN to Supply 5vt Power separately um so you could probably
still set this one up to have have external power it just requires a little
bit more work oh this one has two extra type-c ports what is what you see this
one two three oh I'm so silly oh that's so
cool okay actually I'm wrong you don't connect the little control board with
the jumpers you connect the control board with a USB cable that's what the
third port is for and that's why it comes with two cables plugging into
there you take this and you plug it into your motherboard chunk that's much cleaner I
like that actually just reading this diagram on the side these connections
here are for cereal and I have heard some Rumblings from Wendell that he's
setting it up so you could plug one of his kvms into this thing and instead of
it being a single computer KVM bam now
it's a four Compu KVM I guess let's power it on
boom Oh it has lights now you might notice there's a Micro SD card in here
already the light version does come with an SD card they just provided one when
they sent these to us while we wait for this to turn on and there is some
undesirables regarding the Nano KVM we should probably mention specifically
that the firmware is not yet open source and a hacker man's on the internet did
reverse engineer some of it and found some things that are not that great like
hardcoded secret keys for things which is not good and randomly a cat picture
they are a Chinese company so once they open source the firmware
and hopefully at some point Port Pi KVM
software which is really great software to it then that stuff should be resolved
and in theory you could roll your own software but for now you kind of have to
deal with that being the case it is still like a beta and they have
committed to like fixing the things that were mentioned by that dude but for now
buy or beware probably run it on a VLAN if you're going to use these things
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plans using our Link in the description this is um not looking great it's barely
doing anything I have a sneaking suspicion it's like very out of date
firmware or something see loaded the JavaScript
hey okay it's working now I suspect that
it was n getting enough power so I plugged in the extra power cable which
was charging my laptop before and now it's working
HDMI hey wow it's working look at that
kind of I can't interact with it let me see if there's a firmware update before
we go any further check for update there's a minor one let's let's run that
and then we'll try it it's one of those updates that doesn't have a progress bar
it just says update started in a spinning Circle for whatever reason the
update seems to just get stuck it shows pending in the developer console for
Chrome forever so I'm going to open this up and Flash the new image on the SD
card that's in here and then we'll try it again and see if it works I mean I
guess this is a good opportunity to see what's inside this one it's a bit
strange that they didn't just leave a a hole in the mold so you could get at the
SD card if you wanted like if it died and you wanted to replace it or something like that oh God yeah see like
that's not that easy to get to it hits the this so even having it open this
much I I still can't get at it wow cute
oh look at that it's got a little more going on on in here the bottom and this
is like you can see like how much is the same it's just got like a little hat on
top with the screen and the extra USB ports I'm not going to lie and say it
isn't kind of Jank that this screen is
just literally vibing in there it gets
held down a bit by the plastic on top
but it's still free roaming well the
screen says it's not working but I just accessed it oh yeah it's loading way
faster now so there's two different versions we're talking about here
there's the firmware image of the device which is what you flash to the SD card
and then there's like the version of the web interface that you're interacting
with I flashed the new image on there which seems to have fixed our internet
problems and then I just updated the application that seems to fix our screen
I think they borked something because every time I updated it says It's On
2.04 Again and that it has an update to
2.07 fast forward a few days and we got a response back from the C cype people I
think that's how you pronounce it doesn't matter the people that make the
Nano KVM which is what this thing is and uh it turns out it was a bug with their
CDN where it was like caching an old version of the firmware so when you
updated it was downloading and updating
to the version it was already on they sent us a little script to update it
properly which seems to have worked and look I have a computer output it's
actually kind of better than I was expecting to be honest I I thought it
was going to be a pretty choppy crappy experience like usable but not great
that's because it's based on a super tiny development single board computer
called the lchi RV Nano which is I mean the light version here it's almost the
entirety of the unit but it's very small
and it uses a risk five architecture so it's reduced instruction set and open
source technically and that's what makes it so cheap but it's also only three
cores I think technically one one major core one minor core and one low power
core and then 256 megab of DDR3 memory
on this little guy tail scale is great because you can remotely connect to it
without port forwarding uh it's basically like a peer-to-peer VPN if
you're not familiar and it is directly integrated I'm not going to set it up
but we can click the login to see what it does the fact that that's integrated
in is super nice oh yeah look at that login. scale click the button and log in
I mean aside from that there's not a whole lot else you can do I could try oh
look at that okay so one of the headers it connects to is a hard drive LED and
if your hard drive LED is blinking uh it
supposedly will display in here and I also could press the power button
although that is not connected right now you can issue wake on land you can open
a terminal you can run scripts oh you know what here let me try to mount an
image let's try and enable virtual USB
again does that oh hey look at that uh virtual USB just like lets you access
the SD card so here's all my ubun two isos in here if I want a boot off of it
I need to reboot it well let's try and reboot this computer and install Ubuntu
on it or at least start the installer oh it's working look at that it does
everything I would want in a KVM I mean realistically I'm not the type to like
wire in leads for my power button even though I do like the implementation of
it just like being a USB cable that makes it a lot less Jank than just
having a bunch of random wires running all over the place it seems to do like
KVM SL you know remote management
control of a computer stuff just fine I mean I'm booting up the Ubuntu desktop
2404 here it's probably going to take a little while cuz it's USB 2 but it is
booting it's a little glitchy the update experience wasn't the best but for $30 I
really can't complain I uh I think if you're looking for something like this
and you're the tinkering type this is probably good enough for you and you'll
probably like to screw around with it uh if you're more Normy and you like your
stuff to just work well I probably probably wouldn't go with this yet check
out a pi KVM those things are really robust uh but way more expensive and
look at that there's theun to is staller beautiful it works if you do buy one
make sure you flash the new firmware and then check their GitHub issues for how
to flash the new software for the dashboard because that was a whole kurk
buffle but overall pretty sick so thanks
for watching if you like this video hit the like button check out maybe the
ubiquity Cloud Gateway Max video that we did recently that was pretty fun