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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I want one of these with an LTE modem on it so that I can drop it in the rack (non-datacenter) and remote-in regardless of the WAN condition.

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It's a Raspberry Pi, so there's no reason you can't plug a USB LTE Modem into it.

You'd have to figure out how to get inbound connections - perhaps something like tailscale would do the trick.

Tor would work too

At least the TinyPilot firmware is Open Source https://github.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot - i don't know Pi-KVM. And it's a normal RaspberryPi with a debian-based os. So you should be able to just attach an LTE modem via USB and configure it via SSH, right?

Yeah, it should be pretty easy to add an LTE modem. Configuring the networking failover might take some hands on work; it would be a huge boon if either or both projects eventually took care of that for you too. I've had enough experiences where out of band management would be well worth the cost of the cell service that this is something I could see having wide appeal.

pikvm is open source as well: https://github.com/pikvm/pikvm

In fact, TinyPilot is based on ustreamer, that is developed by Maxim Devaem, the pikvm creator: https://github.com/pikvm/ustreamer

I've been trying to design one that takes VGA in as that's what servers come with. An LTE modem is trivial to add.

So is a VGA digitizer that plugs into a USB port, presumably?

For my design I don't want that, because then we're just making it even more complex. There's a VGA encoder I've been working on, I don't recall the chip ID but I found it in the Lantronix Spiders I have. I've been slowly trying to build a HAT with that that pipes into the Pi for everything else.

How many of these do you expect to manufacture?

If I can keep the cost down, I'm aiming for $100/unit, then I think I could sell quite a few. The nearest competitor, the Lantronix Spider, is $300+ if you can even find them.

COTS VGA to HDMI adaptors are readily available.

For my design I don't want that, because then we're just making it even more complex. I'd have to have an HDMI ancoder, then a VGA to HDMI encoder that plugs into that. There's a VGA encoder I've been working on, I don't recall the chip ID but I found it in the Lantronix Spiders I have. I've been slowly trying to build a HAT with that that pipes into the Pi for everything else. Then there is no daisy chaining adapters.

Almost weird that there isn’t endless numbers of such devices from AliExpress. Something like Wio LTE with some pieces of code from GitHub.

I am pretty sure all you would need to do is plug in a usb LTE modem to make that happen.

i used to have one of those "hdmi over ethernet" devices which i captured with ffmpeg and used for his purpose. worked well, about 100ms latency for the capture/conversion

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