Introduction # The Odroid H2 and the Odroid H2+ are some of the few single board computers which offer PC like interfaces including 2x SATA, an NVMe slot, 2x 2.5 GBit ethernet (1 GBit for the H2) as well as dual RAM sockets. Besides the interfaces the board is equipped with a powerful, yet energy efficient x86 processor and includes an on board power supply. In my opinion, the board is the perfect fit for an open source NAS system build.

I wanted to try FreeNAS on my Odroid H2+ NAS system, unfortunately the driver for the Realtek RTL8125B was missing on the FreeBSD OS which is used currently used by FreeNAS. After reading some post which say something like “There is no way in hell there will be a driver for the RTL8125 unless a big company needs it…”, I came across the following forum topics which pointed me to the actual driver supplied by Realtek.

It is nice to have a good CV/CC supply in the lab, especially if you want to power-up your prototype for the first time. Unfortunately those supplies are normally big and heavy and you don’t want to carry 9+ kilos from the lab to the living room in order to do some work on the couch. A while ago I ordered a DPS3005 module to have a useable CV/CC “supply for the kitchen table”.

Introduction # For a while I used a Netgear Firewall Router as network switch and internet router. An additional Raspi Zero provided a Pi-hole. Actually I couldn’t find a good alternative for the crappy Netgear router because most devices today only provide 4 LAN ports and I need at least six. So I ordered an eight port switch and started this little weekend project. What I wanted was a simple OpenWRT router with one WAN interface and one LAN interface together with an additional Raspi Zero which could be used for other services.

Today it is often not necessary to add external IO to a micro controller. If you realise a shortage of pins, you can just step up to the next package and get additional pins without any hassle. But what if the package is set for some reason, you want to add new functionality to an existing project or it just makes sense for the board layout? There are many reasons why external IO might be a good solution.