Its_All.Lost
Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

Samsung 980 Pro Not Recognized

Samsung 980 Pro

For the past couple months I have been collecting parts to build a new PC. I have not built a PC in about 10-12 years now since I jumped over to the Apple ecosystem. I have been trying to get my hands on a PlayStation 5 in what feels like forever. I have gotten close a few times but no dice. My son has a PlayStation 4 and I wanted the new console so I could play games with him as he is in another state. Well I finally gave up on trying for a PlayStation, even the PS4s are impossible to find right now. So I decided to build for gaming instead. Most of the games these days are cross-play compatible so no need to have a console it just would have been nice. I transitioned from PC gaming to consoles a long time ago, when I got kids. It was just easier but I do miss it. So back at it I go #PCMasterRace!

I landed a fantastic deal on a Asus Tuf Z690-Plus Wireless D4 Motherboard which I paired with an Intel i5-12600K processor. I tossed in some Corsair Vengeance Pro 3600 memory (32GB, and the RGB enhancement kit) and topped it all off with an Asus Tuf AiO water cooler. I decided since I was building a pretty recent machine (hardware wise) I wanted to kind of go all out as, much as my wallet would let me anyway so I bought a Samsung 980 Pro 1TB M2 SSD and OMFG is this thing fast, and this SSD is why I am making this post…

My brand new motherboard would not see the M2 drive. I tried every setting I could possibly find in the BIOS and yes I did update the BIOS, it was quite old for how new the board is actually. Still no dice. It would not show up as a detected drive but I could see it listed as a physical device that was connected to the board so it was working, right? Just nothing would see it, the board nor the Windows installer. I searched for like 10hours and found a lot of others that have also had issues with this drive in particular, some of them ended up have to exchange the drive and the replacement worked. Some replaced it with another brand. As it was nearing 4am I was about to give up for the day (I had even posted to Reddit asking for help with real no luck) and I found a post stating that Samsung doesn’t even have an official driver for the drive, they used the Intel driver. So I went over to Intel and downloaded the driver for (current at this time) 12th generation processors, slapped it on a thumbdrive and loaded the Windows installer, loaded the driver and it saw my SSD immediately and Windows installed without a hitch. On reboot the drive also now shows up normally in my motherboards BIOS. Ran some speed tests in Windows 10 and I am hitting the numbers quoted by everyone else and seen in those fantastic screenshots. This thing is fast! Game loading times are damn near non-existent. Its beautiful! And whats better, is that my board supports four of these bastards! This rig will never see mechanical drives.

 

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology Driver Installation Software with Intel® Optane™ Memory (11th and 12th Gen Platforms)

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/720755/intel-rapid-storage-technology-driver-installation-software-with-intel-optane-memory-11th-and-12th-gen-platforms.html

I downloaded and used the driver named “df6vmdflpy-x64.zip” and it worked for me.

 

XMP Memory Issues

Since I’m talking about my new build and the issues I came across I have another one for ya. I purchased 32gb (2×16) of Corsair Vengeance Pro 3600 RGB memory that supports XMP. But I could not get XMP to work properly. If I enabled XMP the system would consistently hang on boot in safe mode with an error stating that the memory has issues with its current settings. After some Redditing I found out some people had to manually set the voltage for the sticks but I also saw someone mention to simply switch RAM slots. That the modules needed to be in the other RAM banks on the motherboard (A2B2 banks – slots  2 & 4, on my board they’re the grey slots not the black slots). Once I moved the sticks to those slots and enabled XMP everything worked just fine and I am getting the proper speeds out of my memory now.

So if you are having issues with enabling XMP on your (Asus Tuf z690-Plus?) motherboard you can try swapping memory banks and see if that clears up the issue.

Ombi v4 and HAProxy

Ombi

Just a quick one. If you happen to run HAProxy for well, proxying, and you run Ombi (which is a frontend request app for Plex, if you don’t know google it) then you are aware of the recent update to v4. While v4 looks very nice I feel like they took away some vital features or at least moved em to where I cannot find them. But anyhow, the recent v4 update seems to have broken HAProxy and it will not display properly anymore. If you run the 503 maintenance code message for when issues poop up then you will see that message.

The fix seems to very simple. Just change the health check to basic instead of HTTP and add a huge timer and all will be well. Not exactly sure what changed here but that change got my system back to functioning.

 

From Reddit:

Comment from discussion -Chemist-‘s comment from discussion "V4 docker not working with HAproxy".

 

So I jumped into Mechanical Keyboards

Mechanical Keyboards

I wanted to upgrade a few of the things I use in my daily life. I decided that my 10 year old full size corded Apple Mac keyboard and my 15 year old corded Logitech G3 gaming mouse needed to be retired. While they have performed greatly in their years of faithful service I think it is time to move on.

I started looking around. I wanted a keyboard with RGB LEDs, that was one of my requirements and what I landed on was mechanical keyboards. There are a ton of mechanical keyboards out there. I’ve been reading on them for a few days now and I still know nothing about them. It is a huge rabbit hole of tech. There are a ton of brands and manufacturers as well as DIY kits so you can build your own from scratch. I don’t know much so I decided to go with a premade keyboard versus building my own. Out of all the brands out there I landed with Keychron, and for one major reason alone – they are the only RGB mechanical keyboard that I could find that was Mac friendly. As far as I can tell Corsair and Logitech are the only two brands with software for their mice and keyboards that support Apple Macs. That is quite limiting for one using said machines, like me. The common answer I found regarding Macs and keyboards was “plug it into a PC to change the settings then move it back”…yeah a big fuck no to that. The Keychron keyboards not only have Mac keys installed out of the box they also do not have any software. While this means I don’t get to map the RGBs and keys and make fancy color combos, which kinda sucks, I do get a mechanical keyboard that supports my OS and has RGB modes. Thats good enough for me.

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Adventures in Klipper

Klipper

Let me start off by saying by no means am I an expert with Klipper, or 3D printing. I don’t really know wtf I am doing half the time, I just manage to get it working – hah! I few days ago I decided to take the plunge into Klipper with my printer, a Monoprice Maker Select v2.1 with an SKR 1.3. I had been running Marlin 2.x on my printer and it was all setup and configured and working perfectly. I decided apparently that “working perfectly” wasn’t good enough, and I needed to break it. Enter Klipper. From what I gather now that that I have a 32 bit board I wont really gain much in the way of performance with Klipper vs if I still had the 8 bit Melzi. What you do gain is a much easier way to configure the firmware over compiling and flashing the board after every change. You just save a file and reboot.

Now I wanted to document the process for others in case it helps, and I figured this would be a quick build process and a quick write up. Heheh, I was wrong. I has now been a solid week of tweaking and configuring Klipper as well as a few days of writing this post and attempting to get it finished. Every time I do something else comes along that I feel I need to add to the process. Well, I finally got it all done – I think. Now what started off as a nice clean post turned into a ton of sections that didn’t jive. I’ve done my best to make it all flow and make sense, if I missed something let me know.

 

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Node-Red, UIBuilder and Buttons!!

Node-Red, UIBuilder and Buttons!!

If you’ve been here before then you know I use Node-Red, if not and you don’t know what Node-Red is, you should check it out. To get a frontend UI out of Node-Red there has always been the Dashboard node for us to use and a set of Dashboard nodes to go with it. I have never been a huge fan of the Dashboard, but it was what we had and it did the job. The Dashboard nodes allowed you place UI nodes and connect them to your data and it would do the rest, no HTML code required on your behalf. But that was one of the limitations, was that you did not have control over the code. Enter UIBuilder.

The UIBuilder node is amazing. It is a Node-Red interface builder that gives you complete control, over everything. The downside (if it is one) is that you must know how to code HTML and JavaScript. UIBuilder lets you use any frontend framework you want to build your interface to Node-Red. JQuery, VueJS, MoonJS, Angular, etc.. So far I have dropped in a Bootstrap-Vue admin template and I have been going to work on that. It has taken me a minute to get used to how UIB all works, and I am not really all that great with JavaScript but I seem to be figuring things out. Hey, I have shit working.

The UIBuilder Wiki and the Github for the author have a ton of information and examples of how to get a few basic things done. Just expect most of them to be done with VueJS. It appears (at least to me, I could be wrong) that UIBuilder was originally VueJS heavy/dependent and as it matures it is more open to other frameworks. As of v3.1.3 it no longer installs Bootstrap-Vue and VueJS by default, as it had done it all prior versions. So just be aware that you can use any framework you want, but all of the examples (so far) are all written in VueJS. There is also the Node-Red forums if you get stuck, the author also happens to frequent the group.

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