For those prices I could buy an old PC to do out of band management and have over half the money left over. The appeal of JetKVM/NanoKVM is they're price competitive with an extra PC for a tiny fraction of the physical and power footprint.

For feature parity, the old PC will require USB OTG, HDMI input, wiring for ATX control, and a software stack.

Sipeed makes a PCIe KVM card for around $80 that drops into standard PC cases.

I'd assume it runs off the 5v standby power when the primary ATX supply is sleeping. =3

https://github.com/sipeed/NanoKVM?tab=readme-ov-file

A pi4 is $35 + parts, and can do a PXE server as well... but it is the OS/kernel upkeep that always hits proprietary devices.

Small recycled PCs can certainly work too, and reminds me of the https://guacamole.apache.org/ project. =3

The firmware is open source and you can compile and flash your own. You can even run your own version of their cloud access offering

https://github.com/jetkvm

Also you can SSH into it:

https://jetkvm.com/docs/advanced-usage/developing#developer-...

And the serial console is available over USB UART (SBU)

If it's attempting to be a covert op it's doing either a terrible job or a very advanced one.

It is similar to NanoKVM-Pro, and indeed one may also install PiKVM on that commercial hardware.

Given that very distinctive "JetKVM" shape, I am now 99% sure I've seen this gadget someplace last year, If I recall the Mandarin Chinese name (difficult for me), I will post the hardware URI.

One may be surprised how much hardware includes unsigned firmware OTA updates. And someone will need to audit the stack to check if it has that common problem, and predict if it also has SoM specific Linux kernel requirements.

The Raspberry Pi foundation isn't just hardware, but comes with a proven 10 year OS lifecycle. =3

It's been on KickStarter for about a year at this point - could that be where you'd seen it?

The item was promoted on a China e-store site for awhile, and caught my eye given a video encoded streaming kvm at that price point seemed like "optimistic" marketing. I spend a lot of time sourcing electrical parts, optical components, and metric 304 steel fasteners on these sites.

It might be possible something popped up that looked very similar to the Kickstarter ad. Could also just have been a 4th container product run common with China CM exports. =3

That's why it took off with hobbyists - $79 for an IP KVM is insanely good value. I picked up two which have been in my rack for a few months at this point and I've got nothing but praise for them.

Sipeed nano also launched around the same time, but they were cagey at first with open sourcing the firmware, requiring a certain number of github stars before they'd do that.

> similarity to a rebranded Sipeed NanoKVM

That NanoKVM is RISC-V, the JetKVM is ARM Cortex-A7. Unlikely to be a rebrand.

That said the UI looks somewhat similar so Sipeed might have aped the JetKVM software part (which is FOSS)

The NanoKVM-Pro uses a AX631 2xA53 1.5G, which can apparently also support the PiKVM software.

The JetKVM uses RockChip RV1106G3. =3