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RPi 4 PiKVM V2 DIY
π¬ Hardware
Raspberry Pi 4 board with 16GB MicroSD card.
PiKVM SD card image used is the one For HDMI-USB dongle - download here
RPi4 Power consumption ranging from 2.7W to 6.4W depending on the workload
For power supply and USB connectivity, I have chosen the "Variant #2: Power supply + Y-splitter based on power blocker" from the PiKVM v2 guide with:
x1 Raspberry Pi Official USB-C Power Supply
x1 USB C splitter (male->double females)
x1 USB-A to USB-C cable (male-male)
π as power blocker for the VCC of the USB-A male connector that goes into the PC/NAS, I've used a small piece of tape over the right-most pin on the connector to block the 5V pin
Similar diagram as my setup:

The "USB C to Double USB C Splitter" used:

For the video capture device I've used an HDMI-USB dongle for my testing lab.
Anyway, a HDMI-CSI bridge board is better for video encoding, resolution and latency.
On-boot configuration
Setup WiFi SSID & Password if necessary in the pikvm.txt
file from the SD Card (on another PC), by adding the following variables:
WIFI_ESSID='mynet'
WIFI_PASSWD='p@s$$w0rd'
PiKVM Shell commands
su -
# use "root" as password
# Commands [root@pikvm ~]#
# Update system
pikvm-update
# or
rw
pacman -Syy
pacman -S pikvm-os-updater
pikvm-update
Wake-on-LAN
rw
vim /etc/kvmd/override.yaml
###############
# Wake-ON-LAN #
###############
# NAS DXP4800+ - TrueNAS
#kvmd:
# wol:
# mac: 6C:1F:F7:56:42:93
# Asus MINI PC
kvmd:
wol:
mac: 9C:5C:8E:02:0D:3F
kvmd -m # syntax check
systemctl restart kvmd
Mass Storage Drive
Insert the USB into an RPi USB3 port.
Open the PiKVM Terminal/Shell. Use the following procedure.
Identify the USB drive and its filesystem type using, ensuring it's recognized (e.g.,
exfat
for Ventoy)Add a mount entry in
/etc/fstab
to automatically mount the USB drive at boot, with read/write access and permissive permissionsEnsure the mount point exists and is writable, using
mkdir
,kvmd-helper-otgmsd-remount
, ormount -o remount,rw
as neededManually mount or reboot the system to apply changes, allowing access to the USB contents under
/var/lib/kvmd/msd/usb
su -
rw
# Check USB drive presence and FS type
lsblk -f
# e.g. Ventoy thumb drive
sda
|-sda1 exfat 1.0 Ventoy 4E21-0000
`-sda2 vfat FAT16 VTOYEFI 626B-4255
# Add mount entry
nano /etc/fstab
# Add the following line at the end of the file
# This says to mount it automatically, do not fail if it's missing, mount it read/write by default, and allow all users and groups access to it
/dev/sda1 /var/lib/kvmd/msd/usb exfat auto,nofail,rw,umask=0000 0 0
# Make the filesystem Read/Write
kvmd-helper-otgmsd-remount
# If this is not working, mount the /var/lib/kvmd/msd manually as following
mount -o remount,rw /var/lib/kvmd/msd
# Create dedicated mounting directory
mkdir -p /var/lib/kvmd/msd/usb
kvmd-helper-otgmsd-remount ro
# Reboot PiKVM or mount manually for testing
mount /var/lib/kvmd/msd/usb
ll /var/lib/kvmd/msd/usb
df -hT
/dev/sda1 exfat 58G 52G 5.5G 91% /var/lib/kvmd/msd/usb
Tailscale on PiKVM
https://docs.pikvm.org/tailscale/
# Tailscale
rw
pacman -S tailscale-pikvm
systemctl enable --now tailscaled
tailscale up
reboot
ip addr show tailscale0
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