Oleg Tsarev¶
I work on infrastructure, and in my own time on hardware that was not meant to be programmable by its owner.
Turing Pi 2 BMC firmware¶
The Turing Pi 2 carries four compute modules; a small SoC powers them and serves a web interface. Upstream's firmware is dormant — its mirror stops at v2.0.5 — so this fork picked it up.
What it adds, briefly: a health-gated A/B update that undoes a bad image by itself, a temperature sensor the board never had, a kernel-driven fan, Prometheus metrics behind a credential that cannot touch the control API, and a serial console per module in the browser.
Homelab¶
A ten-node Kubernetes cluster: eight of those compute modules across two boards, a Raspberry Pi 5, and an x86 builder. Talos Linux, so there is no SSH and no package manager; Cilium in native routing; Argo CD reconciling everything. The control plane is spread across three failure domains, so an entire board can go away without taking the cluster with it.
Alongside it, the tooling that keeps it honest — MCP servers for NetBox and for the household inventory, Helm charts for things that ship without any, and a Talos installer for a board the Image Factory cannot build for.