We started the journey with the Geekworm KVM-A3 Kit for Raspberry Pi 4 kit from Amazon.com. Add a Raspberry Pi 4, power supply and sd card to get started.
Both the PiKVM instruction and the Geekworm instructions are handy to have. You will need to download the PiKVM image (PiKVM V3 HAT BOX Image, OLED/FAN preactivated). We created the SD using RPi Imager.
For us the RTC and the OLED display were enabled out of the box. We did need to purchase a CR1220 3v Lithium button battery for the RTC.
You will want to get the clock set and syncing correctly. The steps below must be done as root with the filessystem set to rw. Remember to set the file system back to ro when done.
- set the timezone
timedatectl set-timezone America/New_York)
- temporarily disable systemd-timesyncd
systemctl stop systemd-timesyncd
- set the correct time
timedatectl set-time 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS'
- update /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf
nano /etc/systemd/timesyncd.confNTP="10.101.1.101"
- restart systemd-timesyncd
systemctl stop systemd-timesyncd
Setting the static address is described in the PiKVM FAQ. It involves editing /etc/systemd/network/eth0.network.
The device we wanted to control had Display Port out. We added a DisplayPort to HDMI & DisplayPort adapter to allow the on-site KVM to share the screen with the PiKVM. It should be noted that with the adapter we chose the primary monitor is the HDMI output. In our case that requires a bit of fiddling after a reboot to get the two displays to mirror and not extend.
We also found that for our remote access www solution the display needed to be set to MJPEG/HTTP instead of the default H.264/WebRTC mode.