I decided to upgrade my Pi-Hole installation. It was running on a RPI3b, with the boot partition on an SD card, and the file system on an SSD. It also used a PoE (power over ethernet) HAT, and apart from the fan on the HAT getting very squeaky and dusty, it was running rather warm.

Time to upgrade to an RPI4b booting direct from a 256Gb SSD. For heat management I embraced the Pi in a purple armour case. While I was doing this, it seemed like a good time to test my Raspberry Pi docking station.

I have a number of KVM switches, one is an 8-port switch, another is a 2-port. I set my main desk with the 8-port switch (there are 5 computers attached to it), and my development rig with a 4-port switch. I only needed 3 ports on the 4-port switch: one for my development rig, one for my RPI5 and one to be used as the 'docking station'.

The third port already has cables for network, keyboard/mouse, HDMI and power. The power cable can be switched out depending on which model of Raspberry Pi I'm using at that moment, and is the only cable subject to change.

This is all on my development rig (which includes an 8-core x86 machine running Linux/Mint and a Raspberry Pi 5 running Raspberry OS and Cinnamon desktop), so it is very handy to have this all together.