Nature One, Germany's Burning Man Like Huge Camping Party with A Bonus 2 Day Festival At a Former Nuclear Ballistic Missile Base
Yes, the title is a mouthful, but Nature One is a lot all at once, so I had to capture that :)
Welcome to Pydna Former Ballistic Missile Base!
Pydna had Nuclear-equipped MGM-1 Matador, MGM-13 Mace, MIM-14 Nike Hercules and BGM-109G Ground Launched Cruise Missiles.
Nature One Part 1: Huge Campsite Burning Man-like Bring Your Own Party
The reason I mention Burning Man here and below, is because many parts of the Nature One huge Campsite reminded me of burning man. The amount of things people brought to build multiple thousand sound camps and fun little camps definitely brought back that feel for me.
Joining an existing campsite (in my case F12) on thursday, didn't really work well. There was no indication I could find on the map on which road to take to enter each side of the festival and campground. After starting from the wrong side, and being sent around, the other side sent us to a long not much moving line to the wrong campsite (F12 was full by then, and everyone was in line for another location). The main thing that was not ideal is that there was no one to direct traffic and help people get to the correct site.
camp ticket checking was efficient
people didn't really know what to do
As we got closer, one of the security guards told me we would not be allowed to drive towards F12 where it was located, because F12 was full, that was non negotiable and we had to drive back out. I didn't really take no for an answer and eventually they let us through. From there, we made it to United Nature One pretty quickly.
This is were I have to express my sincere gratitude to United Nature for being so kind as to invite us in their camp (which has been going to Nature One for almost 20 years in a row). Niko, aka DJ of Silence, was super nice and helped us out with a tent onsite, which really helped.
I did bring a few offerings which are legal currency at burning man ;)
My original plan was to stay at a hotel 30mn away (not counting driving in and out, no idea how long the daily lines were), but they rightfully convinced me to come a day early and camp, as the campsite was really a significant part of the party, and that sure was true.
United Nature had a very nice setup:
very useful camp kitchen during the storms especially
hiding from more rain :)
I did bring enough chargers to setup a couple of charging stations for everyone
private toilets
real generator to power the stage and the entire camp
and it was a big crew indeed
also well setup for food
big team :)
The United Nature one stage was actually really impressive:
the camp was filled with DJs, including some who played trance. Yeah!
smoke bubble machine
smoke machine
LEDs and lasers
lasers in the rain
but yeah, it was lots of rain at times
it was a real nice setup even if it got quite muddy later at night
What was unexpected is all the camps and parties at the campsite, that some people never even went to the festival. After setting up, went for a walk to see some of the other camps, of which there were many. Walking the entire campsite end to end would probably take 1h, although the central parts had all the sound camps and end to end was about 30mn:
as I mentioned, the area is big
lots of smaller camps, almost burning man-like. Bier Garten!
also lots of drinking going on ;)
Snow in July ;)
it does stretch out quite a bit :)
lots of games were centered around drinking somehow ;)
K@noc, was the only camp I found outside of Nature United, to have a nice selection of trance DJs. Much thanks to both :)
woohoo, a whole day of trance, but it was indeed rare
Many camps looked similar to what you'd see at burning man, but without the corrosive playa dust:
The one thing is despite the many many camps, most of them, played techno, techno, and also techno :)
The camps did keep going at night of course, some literally went 24/7, especially some next to where I slept :)
The campsites had toilets and water of course, and other things like:
for pay showers
vending machines
drink options if you didn't bring your own
water delivery for camps
the campsite had food vendors that thankfully accepted real money (although you could bring all the food you wanted to your site)
one great thing they had were 3 cell towers from the 3 major providers in Germany. Cell coverage was excellent despite an estimated 50K people
ample medical help, and they seemed busy :)
this was a pre-set camp for people coming by bus
lockers
While Parookaville was busy preventing use of gas and solar generators (which basically means solar panels and batteries), even preventing batteries that were the size of what I use for my outfit (and are allowed on planes), Nature One allowed all of these and even had a full bigger battery rental setup:
89E is not bad for power power stations and replacements all 4 days
Part of the time was spent hiding from the rain, which thankfully did not hit during Nature One festival hours themselves:
Since the whole place did become a muddy mess, they did cover some areas with hay to make it more bearable:
Since it did rain a fair amount on Thursday and Friday, so I was able to hide in camp, and used the time to fix broken bits of my outfit :)
did fix my LED shoe, but it was so muddy, I never actually used it
Somehow rain did not stop people from shooting personal fireworks from the camp :)
some were quite good
While it's clear that some people never left the campsite, but for those who went to Nature One, you could get your festival wristbands, as well as load up some of the fake but required festival money on said wristbands (more on that later)
you could top up from machines, or on your phone
adding money was easy, of course getting back the leftovers, a lot lot less. Shocker! :(
With all the fun happening at the campsite, it wouldn't be difficult to forget there is an actual festival (running from 20:00 to 06:00, or 18:00 to 08:00 if you go for extended hours):
let's go from here
to here :)
There was a fairly long walk from the campsite to the festival (or twice as long or more depending on how far you were camped):
it's unfortunate that they didn't find a way to open the festival on the side closer to the campsite
eventually made it
Right here, I need to state that just like campsites, 80-90% of the music was some kind of techno, hardcore, hardstyle, or acid. I realize that there are lots of kinds of techno, but given that I'm not a huge fan of techno, some of the nuances were lost on me ;)
Thankfully there was one psytrance stage, and a bunker that played some trance mostly on saturday:
Hi Talla 2XLC
And Alex Morph
Also got to meet Ed Lynam who closed saturday night
The festival had lots of food options, putting aside the fact that they didn't accept real money:
unfortunately way too many people still smoke in Germany and those lovely people were there pushing cigarettes as hard as they could ;(
extra needs were taken care of :)
Mainstage actually played various kinds of music that were other than techno:
The highlight cool factor-wise was of course all the former bunkers with huge concrete blast doors, where nuclear ballistic missiles were stored and could be taken out and fired within minutes in case of need:
how cool is this?
Also each bunker hill had stages on top:
Sunset was late, a bit past 21:30, but Nature One went all night:
definitely took work getting up and down
All in all, many stages to get around:
Thanks Talla for the trance
Day 2 had fireworks, but those were sadly a huge waste of time, barely managed to stay on a steep hill and wait patiently for fireworks that were shot behind the hill, so I was barely able to see them. Sad :-
So after wasting all this time for a fireworks show that was mostly not visible, went to see the rest of Alex Mprph who played great trance:
Soon after that is when Paul Van Dyk played mainstage. A nice mix of trance and some techno to make the Germans happy :)
Hi Mom :)
PvD's set where I'm visible a few times :)
And after PvD, finished in the Heaven's Gate bunker for more trance (well, a mix of trance and techno):
Videos Summary:
Instagram Videos Summary:
How did this compare with other German Festivals, i.e. Parookaville?
Getting in and out of Parookaville was bad, even if you biked, there was a required shuttle with huge lines
I never went to the Parookaville campsite, but I know it's nowhere close to N1 in terms of fun and party. They have a long list of not allowed stuff, including generators and even solar generators that are as safe as can be. They even restrict USB battery packs to what can fit in your pocket (mine barely do, but I have very big pockets)
Parookaville festival was 3 days vs 2 for N1 but of course N1 wins by far on all the campsite parties
Both festivals require unnecessary fake money with cumbersome refund procedures
N1 did not require privacy invasive personalization and denying entry on perfectly valid 500E tickets like parookaville did
Parookaville had so many silly rules like disallowing camelbacks or any water container except their 0.5l pouches that failed and leaked, but they did provide free water inside while N1 did not.
Parookaville had fewer stages but they were of better quality
N1 wins by 1000x due to the coolness factor of the venue :)
N1 wins by plenty on the burning man-like campsite atmosphere and all the parties, that was unique and very enjoyable
So there you go, hope this helps and clearly for me N1 was a winner.
Thoughts/Conclusions
Oh yeah, I almost forgot, it was August in Germany, but it was quite cold. Thankfully it didn't rain during the actual Nature One Festival Hours:
So, what were my thoughts? I'll start with what wasn't ideal:
Weather was poor, everyone was prepared for rain and mud, but doesn't mean those were fun. I didn't even bother using my LED shoes in all that mud, and my LED pants are covered with mud I'll have to carefully clean at home. Thankfully that was the last festival of that trip. Yeah, call me sheltered and afraid of rain, that's fine :)
The required fake money BS. Sure, it's not parookaville joke plastic money, but it's still a completely unnecessary system that I am convinced is geared against the festival goer more than help. "Cashless" they call it? It's too bad that I don't have cashless plastic cards in my wallet already or a phone that can pay to tap for almost 10 years. This really has to go, but it won't unless enough festival goers complain loudly.
Unsurprisingly, just like virtually every festival that does this, getting your unused money back is somehow manual and designed so that enough people don't bother and lose their leftover money. As I write this, no one can get their money back, they have to wait long enough that some amount will forget. Sigh....
On the upside, security at the festival entrance was pretty lax, so it was easy to bring your own food and drinks but that was definitely against their rules. I'm totally fine with having to buy food and drinks onsite, but allow pay by card and phone.
I unfortunately have to add that they did not make drinkable water available inside unless you bought some. Ironically there were huge containers of water to wash your hands next to the toilets, but it was marked as non potable. Of course, now you have people drinking it anyway and taking their chances. That's probably the most disappointing thing on a festival that got so many things right. Come on, this is not Lumi, you are better than that Nature One...
no drinkwater it says, and since they didn't provide another source, people drunk that
They had a pretty useful app, but it was all in german. It's Germany, so it's not like I should complain, but mentioning that thankfully Google Pixel can translate graphical apps by scanning them and translating their output. That helped a lot.
Sadly one of the messages I translated was the one who said to go climb the hills to better see the fireworks, not saying that the fireworks would be half not viewable if you were on the left hills and not at the top of them. I guess I know for next time now, but it sucks to have mostly missed the fireworks after patiently waiting 40mn for them :(
but back to positives, the festival was super permissive on what they allowed. In the campsite you could bring anything you wanted, even fireworks in the campsite, hence the burning man feel I mentioned
festival entrance was also quick and painless, no huge lines and security was pragmatic and looking for real threats. Good for them.
it's obviously not a trance focussed festival, I guess Germany is mostly about techno nowadays, but if you knew where to look, there were other kinds of music, although that was a lot of walking to go find them, almost as much as EDC Vegas :)
More generally there were around 15 stages at the festival (even if 1/3rd of them were small in bunker holes), plus probably over 30 in the campsites, so even if a lot of is was techno, you cannot complain that you can't find music you like, although you have lots of places to check out :)
I said it before, but I'll say it again, cell phones worked remarkably well. That was impressive.
N1 forwent a fair amount of unnecessary stuff that Parookaville felt the need to do, liked forced personalization of tickets required for entry, while N1 was just happy to just scan your barcode and you were in. Nice, thank you.
While most things were in German, most relevant staff spoke English well enough to help. I was actually surprised to find out that many German speakers spoke fairly limited English. I didn't expect them to speak English like the Dutch do, but being French myself and the French are not known to be great English speakers, turns out the Germans aren't much better than us :)
The crowds were all super nice and happy to have extra lights and cheers brought to the event :) but it's true that only a small percentage wore cool outfits, although this is typical for European festivals. Still, I'd say people had more outfits than average for Europe, so that was nice.
Music was loud but not overly loud, which was nice
I mentioned it above, but I'll say it again, the venue itself was amazing and definitely unique. It has a cool and slightly eerie factor that I haven't experience anywhere else
I was worried about huge lines driving in and out (like parookaville saying it could be up to 6h wait getting in the campsite), but despite the lack of proper routing issues getting in, it took less than 1h to make it to camp, and about 45mn to drive out dealing with all the roads they had closed and the big detours to get back to Koblenz. Not bad, considering.
It is also fairly cheap. Honestly just raise the price a little, provide drinkable water and stop the fake money and profits from keeping the leftovers that people end up abandoning. The festival is really good and worth extra ticket money.
Definitely they are doing plenty of things right, because 30 years! The communities that have made Nature One their home, is an impressive sight.
And it's probably the only music festival I know of that you can go to, not even go to the festival, and have a great time at all the campsite clubs, multiple dozens of them.
Here, I need to make sure to express deep gratitude to United Nature One for the invitation to their great camp, it made the whole experience much more enjoyable and complete.
I happened to be close enough to the Nurburgring two years in a row, right around my birthday, so after giving it one shot a long time ago in 2016 in a Track Renault Clio (clickme), I decided to come back. My notes said that back then I was able to do a 9:22 in that car after 6 laps, so obviously the point was to do better this time around :)
The first time I came back in July 2024, I did some research on which company to rent cars from, and was lucky enough to find and end up with Rent4Ring. They are one of multiple companies providing cars for rent and instructors, but they stood out for their good selection of higher end cars, knowlegeable and passionate staff that truly cares, and in my case excellent communication and help from Taylor Espinoza who helped me with my reservations, both times. One other plus is that they have a fair amount of cars, giving more leeway for last minute date changes for weather reasons if needed, or for them to have a spare car if someone happens to bend the car you were going to use a few days before you arrive.
Rent4Ring July 2024, Track Prepared Supra
Arriving in Nurburgring
entrance to the track, before it was opened
Arriving at Rent4Ring, big thumbs up for the paint jobs and wraps:
happy day :)
fair warning for beginners
I wonder how many cars, they lost
and now it's time for me to go ;)
OMG, I managed to do sub 9mn at the end, which is not easy given how many laps were voided by accidents and yellow flags:
Rent4Ring was so awesome that I came back the next year when in the area for Nature One. This time around, I booked 2 even nicer cars, although while the Porsches were definitely expensive, I found out later that I was not faster in them than the Supra. The cars were faster, but I was not :)
These cars came with a required coach, which worked great ror me since I was not about to drive the Ring without a coach with me for every lap, and another big bonus is they came with a full Vbox video recording system, which was much better than the gopro recordings I had done last time.
I was there a bit early, so I went to check out other things in town:
amusement park
nice ring taxis
There was a cafe and nice car display:
Then it was time to go back to Rent4ring:
nice decals again
Back for a briefing:
a reminder of 'please don't do that'
Nice car to start, Porsche 718 Spyder RS:
My fastest lap: 9:34, even if it's not that fast:
For the 2nd half of the laps, 911 GT3RS 992:
laps are not cheap, but all inclusive
My best lap, 9:02, faster but nowhere close to how fast you can go:
Strangely, I only got down to 9:02 that day, despite the fast cars. It's true that half the laps had yellow flag and were ruined, so I'll hae to come back and try again.
The rent4ring crew was great like last time, and the coaches I got this time around did a great job telling me what was ahead.
While it's true that 699E per lap is not cheap, the cars wre not cheap again and were really well taken care of. and that included good suspension, good brakes and good tires without which a fast car is kind of useless. Both cars felt very stable and forgiving enough, which is definitely useful on that kind of track. Big thanks to the rent4ring crew:
Well, that was a first for me, literally my first festival in France and even really my first music event in France, ever (and yes, I was born there and lived almost half my life there, but France has no idea what Trance means, and I never really heard of a festival that sounded exciting for me, until this one. I'll be honest that I wouldn't have flown all the way from California for it, but it fit nicely between Timescape, UK, and Nature One, Germany, so there was little excuse not to go.
And yes, it meant I already had my heavy LED outfit and batteries, so I dragged them there. People loved it :)
You could take a local RER or uber to a nearby town, and from there, you could pre-reserve shuttles to get you directly to the festival and be dropped off a litlte bit closer to the entrance. Turns out driving there took you to a far away parking lot from which you had to drag your luggage a long long way, so I was happy I had a shuttle slot (they sold out)
nice little castle
sadly once I arrived it was raining and muddy, totally not fun for regular wheeled luggage
it was probably only 1km, but with the weight I was carrying and dragging small wheels in the mud, that was hell
the line to get in and search were actually quite pretty fast
the search was very reasonable and also efficient, but the light rain was no fun
Because of my gear (weight and recharging needs, including solar panels I brought just in case), I'm not a huge fan of camping (never mind bringing all my camping gear from the US and back in plane luggage, which could cost $200 of extra luggage fees each way), but in this case I was thankfully able to sign up early and get a tipi setup onsite, which definitely helped.
another longish walk with luggage to get to the pre-set tipis
very nice inside
plenty of space, indeed
my poor luggage wasn't happy :)
Overall the entire area was well setup;
cute map :)
bathrooms were basic but decent
One thing I need to note that it's not really setup for people who don't speak french, which is also why I had never really heard of this festival outside of france. It is by design I assume :)
they had cool workshops (although very long line to sign up), but french was required
the one issue with workshops was the long inefficient line to sign up (potentially 2h+)
drinks were reasonably priced, with recycling for the cups. Of course you could pay with credit card/phone
toilets were compost style and clean enough. Free water was plentiful
they were also setup for sorted trash, definitely eco conscious
For power, I was able to find some free plugs inside the festival here and there (none in camping unfortunately), and some company had a service to charge your phones:
The decors were truly wonderful
alice in wonderland-like corners in the woods
projection mapping on the castle
Food options were good, although just like drinks, you could just bring your own anywhere from the camping site to the festival site. The only thing security cared about, was no glass:
My surprise, though, was how decked out people were at night with lights, that was almost burning man level costumes and lighting:
a bit boom-like
The 8 or so dancefloors were scattered around the venue, and actually sometimes hard to find in the dark and the middle of the woods ;)
The days were pretty warm, but there were chill out spaces
went to rest here the last day as the sleep nights were short :)
Every night had a theme, but night 3 was "red", so I improvised ;)
There were all kinds of music. 0 trance indeed, but DnB, Psytrance, Dark Psy, downtempo, 80's french music, and more:
psy on vinyl
even better: f2f psy on vinyl ;)
I arrived thursday, and after 3 nights of fun (and mostly quiet days to recover), it was sunday morning and time to go back. I barely made it to my 14:00 shuttle to the nearest town from where there was a train, or uber as needed:
the shuttles were well organized and on time
got dropped off at a quiet nearby town on a sunday afternoon and headed back to Paris
Conclusion
This is obviously not an internationally focussed festival, and that's likely the point. It's for french people by french people, centered around french culture. It does not mean you couldn't attend if you only speak english, especially if you're happy to skip the workshops, but you'll jump into the deep pool a little bit :)
Do I recommend it? Hell yes! It was definitely another kind of unique:
I loved the people's party mood, costumes and lights.
Security was just the very basic, you were allowed to bring food and drinks anywhere even if they had some for sale
That said, there was some security inside to make sure everything went ok, but I really didn't see any work for them to do (which is good)
No "cashless wristband" bullshit, you could pay with real money (i.e. credit cards and phones), as it should be
There were 8 stages, which was plenty, but interestingly they didn't play the same kind of music each night. So first night, I really liked a state with deep dark psy, but the next day they played downtempo, oh well.
Despite the map, in the dark woods at nights with random pretty lights everywhere, it was quite easy to get lost. One night, I was unable to find a stage I wanted to get back to and that was in a corner I never found again :)
it did have a burning man feel of exploring the deep playa and looking for surprises, that was fun
while walking around in the dark, you had to avoid falling in some creeks :)
price was pretty reasonable considering (a bit over 200E for 4 days/3 nights)
transport in and out was good if you took the shuttles, no ridiculous waits like boom the last day
But I do have to state, 0.0% trance (some psytrance though). It's not that Trance died in France, it mostly never existed, and one of the reasons I fled the country :) However given how much trance I listen to, I guess it's not absolutely terrible to go to a festival with other kinds of EDM :)
Links
Rick Weekender and his crew is probably powered by triple expressos and buckets of red bull, because they're at it again. He has been putting quality mid sized events in the UK, featuring trance. Since I'm not local, I sure can't attend them all, but I already went to Anomaly Summer of Trance as well as Euphoria Festival Malta just 2 months prior and both of them were quality smaller scale events. Unsurprisingly this was another of similar quality.
It was of course different, which is both good but also requires more work since the entire setup is different. This time around it was by a farm, mostly in the woods, 30mn from Cambridge. Apparently the literally filled the perimeter with huge container-size hay that was stacked up around the perimeter. Just that was impressive. Inside, they planned for bad weather (and we had some, it is the UK afterall) and filled the entire area with wood chips to limit the amount of muddy mess, and it indeed helped. I'm just noting that it was non trivial amounts of work before any of the rest was installed: sound systems, lights, lasers, and everything was water proofed as nothing died in the rain. Well done!
seriously, how much work was this!
Most people camped, but with my gear to carry and recharge, it's not a reasonable proposition for me. Thankfully there were some hotels 10mn drive away and while I was worried about lack of ubers/bolt, this turned out not to be a problem. The most I had to wait was 15mn or so, and they were never unavailable.
So, let's start:
basic map, but to the point ;)
very nice for campers
food was sufficient but often only one option was open/available
Entrance to the woods:
The wellness tent was a nice addition, familiar to people who go to Insomniac festivals: a place to chill out, hide to regroup, and/or lay down and get help if having a bad trip or otherwise. Nice addition:
The usual troublemakers
Birthday Boy!
Mr Erection Supervisor, He's famous!
congrats on the many outfits and costumes
so much win in this shirt ;)
Our lovely DJs
Of course, the great things about these events is that you can mingle with the DJs:
Unkonscious team!
Lange!
Incedent Noise
Space brothers
my dearest Alessandra <3
Timescape Day 1, Friday
Friday started a bit later since many locals were travelling from all over the UK, and I'm sure some amount came straight after work. Thankfully the weather was good on the first day:
After a good day of fun, we retired to the silent disco tent
we were missing chocolate and marshmallows on a stick :)
Video Summary:
Timescape Day 2, Saturday
Saturday had rain, sometimes hard rain, for half a day. But the brits were prepared of course, it's not like it's the first time they see rain ;)
but it kind of rained seriously for a few hours, so I did hide there for quite a while
this is what happened when you didn't have rain protection :)
you could hide in this saloon :)
I did come back early to see my friend Lonskii of unkonscious fame
the chill out tent was also a good place to hide and very waterproof
more rain :)
rain finally stopped around when Rinaly started. Sweet!
the forest was dark enough to allow for lights and lasers way before sunset
it did get fully dark eventually
The festival was also an opportunity for me to test new hardware. I had just finished making new hats, but the cutest one with the smallest LEDs barely lasted the 3 days before the LEDs started breaking, oh well.. As for my LED panels, given how wet things were and my sweating on top of it, I found out that it caused water to condense directly on the panel electronics and mess up the display. The last 2 nights it started glitching as a result. Thankfully it was fine after it dried out and I figured out that I can just duck tape the back to protect it from moisture.
wee!
end of day2 around campfire
Video Summary:
Timescape Day 3, Sunday
Day 3 had more rain, and hard rain, until 15:00 or so, so I showed up a few hours after opening. Not trying to be a sugar cookie, but while people were hoking about me being electrocuted, which indeed wasn't going to happen, once my electronics get too wet, they will fail, and potentially get damanged, so given the cost in time and money to replace them, not worth it. Apologies to the DJs I missed earlier on those 2 days.
it got fairly muddy by day 3, though
Unfortunately, although it wasn't raining, by then there was thunder and lightening nearby, which caused the festival to be shutdown for 30-40mn. That was a bummer for Ferry Tayle, whose set I was very much looking forward to, but got cut by more than 2/3rd.
Eventually we got back in, and it was impressive that all the gear survived:
Rinaly came back as her evil sister who plays techno :)
By some miracle a kind soul invited me to the DJ booth meet Dave Pearce and get this great shot with Marcella Woods
kudos buddy with the POV flow toys
honestly impressive lighting and lasers for a little festival in the woods
And just like that, day 3 was over, so we spent a bit of time at the chill out tent to finish the night (with silent disco):
Video Summary:
Conclusion
Originally I was planning on going to Summer Sound Festival in Helsinki which was the same weekend, but given that they failed to post any real lineup or update their website until a few weeks before the date (too late for me), I got too pessimistic about it, and figured the 3 days of Timescape would be a better bet. I didn't get to visit Helskinki, and we did get wet, but Timescape was still loads of fun and so glad I went. Namely:
yeah, the rain and mud were not fun, but the event still had incredible vibes
after many of huge festivals that have lost the friends and family feel, it's really nice and refreshing to have nice smaller festivals where you get to experience that
which includes mingling with the DJs
it was a different location, but ultimately had a similar feel to ASOL and Euphoria Weekender, which is not surprising since all events were by Rick Weekender, who clearly has a track record of doing an excellent job
Is it worth travelling across the world for? Well, it depends how much vacation time you have, how far you live and how much money you have :) If you must pick, I would recommend Euphoria Malta first, but this honestly was a very good second if you happen not to live too far (in my case I do, but it was the first one of 3 festivals in a row :)
Just like Euphoria and ASOL, it featured some great Trance DJs that do not get to play bigger festivals as often. I see it as a great thing, but if you prefer the more popular "big name" artists, then go to those bigger more expensive festivals where everything is also more distant :)
Also, I hope the UK people realize how lucky they are to have these trance events, few countries have that many. And those who actually make them happen, and are the rockstars!
Huge thanks to all the DJs who came play for us and party with us, and of course Rick Weekender and all his team for all the work!
On the way to Timescape, did a stop in Cambridge, great to see colleges that were half closed during covid, the last time I was there.
This time around, I made the good call of visit Cambridge's Center for Computing History (click me)
π
2025-07-17 01:01
in Computers, Museums, Sciencemuseums, Uk
This was a surprise in Cambridge, but maybe shouldn't have been given that Acorn/ARM was founded there and responsible for a sizeable portion of computer history.
One huge highlight was the wall computer chip that a single engineer built and that was running, showing all its insides:
Tried British Airways to fly to the UK. Legally speaking their business is lay flat but it's the lowest tier of business I've ever flown. Lounge and food were nice, though:
and that was before going [to see Starlight Express!| (clickme)|/perso/uk/post_2025-07-16_Starlight-Express-Revival_-30-Years-Later_-in-London.html]
At the end of that quick UK trip, had a day in London. Went to see:
I think I was 23 last and first time I saw Starlight Express from Andrew Lloyd Webber, so it was a little while ago, back somewhere in the center of London (the revival is by wembley stadium, somewhat outside). It was a fun and engaging musical, which I already knew by heart thanks to my dad who had the official recording had played it at home many times.
Just like most everything from Andrew Lloyd Webber, the music is very engaging and although the storyline is really just about a race between trains of different propulsion, it's done wonderfully :)
I didn't know it was an updated version of the musical, but overall it kept enough of the original, and the added bits about hydrogen were entertaining.
They nicely allowed us to take pictures and videos at the end of the show:
sizing up batteries, the P5 do indded use 2x as much power for 2x more pixels
Added some switches and potentiometers to reduce voltage and current to improve runtime
they don't look great when not lit up
better now :)
lot of crap inside ;)
end result
and I can stack them to transport them
will try to carry them that way so I don't smash them and damage the strips that don't love to bend
Demo time:
Or same on youtube:
Of course, as luck would have it, on my very first flight, TSA was "interested" with my hats on their first flight:
And here is the behind the scenes you don't usually get to see. I do not often point out how unreliable LED gear can be, and how easily it can break. Sure enough, the P5 LED strip failed in 3 different places after just 3 days of use. Super disappointing. Thankfully the P10 strip seems to be holding up so far:
I was looking at replacing some ancient servers with lower power rPi5s after figuring out that they could finally work with proper NVME andSata drives so you can have a real server setup on reliable storage, including raid1, btrfs backups and all that good stuff.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9D2W8MF very cool 4x M2 M-key slot expansion board, compatible with the M2 NGFF Sata Cards mentioned above. The one thing to note is that it does not provide 5V power anywhere, which is unfortunate if you want to then plug SATA drives (flash 2.5" sata recommended for power reasons).
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D3LP9KBH is a more compact 2 M2 NVME expansion board. It also could support SATA drives if you use the Sata M-key PMP mentioned above
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQV74TDJ GeeekPi S021 SATA 3.0x2 for Raspberry Pi 5, with Active Cooler and 12V 6A Power Supply is probably the best if you only need to plug 1 or 2 SATA drives that require actual power. This board does provide power for actual spinning rust drives should you want that.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D2VTL9G5 GeeekPi Dual FPC PCIe HAT for Raspberry Pi 5, B12 HAT 1 to 2 PCIe Interface allows you to use 2 of the boards above should you wish although routing cables is going to be a bit rough
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D5CRSC64 GeeekPi Quad FPC PCIe HAT for Raspberry Pi 5, B14 HAT 1 to 4 PCIe Interface is the same but with 4 outputs. The seller shows how to use this for single NVME boards, and honestly you probably don't want to do this when you can buy the dual or quad NVME board all in one.
While the PCIe expander cards are cool, and I have successfully managed to make a quad NVME board work at the same time as the SATA board listed below, in real life you'd likely want to use the dual or quad NVME board and find 5V power for your SATA drive. This is fine as long as you have a lower power drive (laptop flash) as you can steal 5V from the GPIO pins, but if you need more amps for a real drive or multiple flash sata drives, then you want to look into a real external 5V power supply like the one provided in the GeeekPi S021 SATA 3.0x2 for Raspberry Pi 5, with Active Cooler and 12V 6A Power Supply mentioned above.
Realistically you may also be perfectly happy with a USB 3 to 2.5" SATA adapter since it can still give you 3GB/s for flash drives
This is what it looks like:
you can easily have 24 sata drives with the 4X NVME board and 6 sata port NVME M2 cards
yes, I got excited when I got both SATA and NVME on a Raspberry Pi 5 ;)
this PCIe doubler can be used to chain other cards (not needed for me)
if you want, you can use the dedicated SATA card plugged directly into the Pi or PCIe doubler
be careful not to get a SATA PMP M2 (B+M with too notches) as those won't work. The other is a PCI sata card
when using M2 Sata cards, you can steal 5V power from GPIO
For my 2nd server, I just used a dual NVME HAT and SATA card with 6 ports
different vendors of SATA cards of either 5 or 6 ports
the PCIe 2 or 4 port expanders allow lots of stacking, but the example they give with single NVME M2 adapters, are useless since I bought a 4 slot NVME HAT
I've been looking at using a Pi5s to replace some old power hungry intel servers I have that are ultimately close to 20 years old. I know there are plenty of random small SBC servers out there, but I didn't want to get locked in some vendor solution, and I figured if I could avoid spending $500+ for custom servers from a company that may not be around in 10 years, I should.
The big thing I wanted was a very low power, high efficiency server with a BMC, which doesn't quite define the Rasberry Pi 5, but since I had been working with rPi3 and rPi4 for my LED Outfit, I was curious to see if I could reasonably use a rPi5 as a headless server.
>>> Go Here for How to Setup NVME and Sata on a Pi5 <<<
I figured I would give rPi5s a try, especially as they now natively supported PCIe cards including M2 NVME storage, and with the right adapter card, PCIe SATA (bypassing USB). Most importantly, they now have some reasonably capable flashable firmware that allows booting from NVME (or USB storage), bypassing the sdcard entirely, which we all know is not a great proposition for a reliable server since sdcards are very much known to die, even if you buy the more fancy ones.
My other requirements were to be able to:
use raid1 (or raid5) for the root filesystem
use btrfs, I rely on snapshots and btrfs send/receive backups too much to want ext4
serial console for debugging if networking fails
serial console for debugging if boot fails (sadly they are not the same)
remote power reboot of some kind
Serial and Sysrq
All of these, I had without issues in the current servers I use, either with a BMC which effectively is its own computer with its own IP to monitor and power cycle the main computer, or a bios with serial support, which thankfully they've had for 25 years or more, and some remote power cycle via PDU.
I quickly found out that rPi5 would more or less do all of these, except the boot time serial support. The boot firmware does support outputting to the built in debug serial port on the board, ttyAMA10, if you forgive the somewhat unobtanium 3 pin plug they felt compelled to use and that was honestly hard to procure until I found USB serial adapters that included that wretched 3 pin plug. I mean, was it so bad to re-use the GPIO spaced pins used for GPIO?
As I found out later, it deos not seem that rPi5 really meant for users to be using the serial port like you would on a real server, which is disappointing (developers told me that really everyone uses HDMI or HDMI KVMs, never mind that KVMs cost more per port than the rPi itself, sigh...). I was also pretty annoyed because I have lots of similar looking 3 pin plugs from my RC planes used for I2C on ardupilot and they are literally off by a portion of 1mm. The lack of standardization and pointless spread of incompatible connectors is utterly ridiculous.
this adapter works, offers ttyUSB0 and the right Rpi5 compatible plug
this other adapter kind of works, but offers ttyACM0 instead which is not compatible with break/sysrq
see the small UART plug between HDMI0 and HDMI1, sad they didn't just use normal pins with the same spacing as GPIO ones
In summary: /dev/ttyACM USB adapters do not support sending BREAK (ALT+F in minicom) and therefore are not suitable since you will not be able to send sysrq commands for reboot. Make sure you adapter provides /dev/ttyUSB0 and that BREAK works.
So, once you have serial working, you make sure sysrq works and you're set, correct? Well, not really:
I didn't find any good way to remotely power cycle the Pi via a GPIO without using an externally controllable relay and splicing a USB-C power cable. So make sure to have panic=15 or equivalent in your /boot/cmdline.txt to make sure the kernel will never just hang.
never use halt -p since you will not be able to recover (I don't know if you can wire power switch to other pi to actuate it without a relay). Similarly, if you send sysrq-o, it will power down the rPi, and you'll be out of luck after that.
sysrq is absolutely required for reboots if things are bad, even a mere systemd shutdown bug, which of course I encountered while installing watchdog, but it only works over serial with your USB-serial adapter supports it. FTDI compatible ones do, the ttyACM0 did not.
setup hardware watchdog while you're at it (the watchdog package)
rPi5 Early Boot Configuration and rescue booting over serial
Rpi5 doesn't have a PC style bios that boots an MBR (thankfully), or EFI which honestly is way too complex and unnecessary, so they made their own boot firmware that is a able to enumerate devices somewhat (at least the first one of each type, sdcard, USB storage, NVME, SATA), and can be told to boot that.
How do you tell it to boot a specific device? The answer is it depends, the boot menu is only available on HDMI (not serial) and only if the eeprom cannot boot the default device, or takes too long to do so. Think of it as lilo like if you remember those days: you configure it from an already working system, and if your system does not boot, you cannot select another boot option unless it was already pre-configured (if you get really hosed, there is some rescue way to reflash a firmware from an sdcard).
The limitations are:
your boot options can only have a single linux kernel per device
you cannot change the linux boot command line without rebooting from another OS to edit cmddline.txt
you cannot change which device to boot from, over serial, same as previous
Those were all pretty serious limitations for me: how can I fix a non booting linux system if I can't do any of the above over serial (doing it over HDMI is a non starter for me since it's for remote use in a colo or a closet, and I have 0 interest in using an IP KVM to digitize and send HDMI output over the internet when clearly this should just work over serial on a slow connection and displayed in any terminal including one on my phone.
Now, the above bug mentions doing network booting. It's true that if you set that up, you can simply change the filesystem that is being seen remotely, but I'm not a fan of network filesystems as far as root filesystem is involved, and now you need a 2nd server to be the network filesystem for the first one, so if you use a Pi for that 2nd server, how do you remotely manage that one?
This is where I filed this bug: RFE rPi5: Need Boot Media Selection Menu On Build in Serial (ttyAMA10) and found out that I was the first person asking for this/needing this. This confirmed that rPi5 isn't yet being used in datacenters or remote servers for deployments that need high reliability, including:
editing/fixing the linux boot command line of a non bootable system
reverting to an older kernel if the new one doesn't boot, including its initramfs
booting from another device if the boot device fails to boot (drive/device that went bad)
While I hope the above RFE will be addressed at some point, rescue booting without a KVM was a 100% requirement for me, so I found an acceptable workaround which is to basically use a 2nd Pi to monitor the first one and be a backup server if the first Pi dies or becomes entirely unbootable, and use a GPIO trick that the bootloader does allow to boot from a different device.
The booting firmware is configured with rpi-eeprom-config --edit, which saves your settings into a file that is read at the next boot, updates the firmware, causes a 2nd reboot and then boots with your new settings. This is what I used for my setup (please note you should not trust ChatGPT or Gemini to give you correct values for this as they will literally invent some that do not exist):
aragorn:~# rpi-eeprom-config
[all]
# These two are needed for early boot and bootloader over serial
CONSOLE=UART
BOOT_UART=1
# Avoid this:
# 0.96 RPi: BOOTSYS release VERSION:69471177 DATE: 2025/05/08 TIME: 15:13:17
# 0.96 BOOTMODE: 0x06 partition 63 build-ts BUILD_TIMESTAMP=1746713597 serial 2aef62b3 boardrev e04171 stc 965833
# 0.97 AON_RESET: 00000003 PM_RSTS 00001575
# 0.97 POWER_OFF_ON_HALT: 1 WAIT_FOR_POWER_BUTTON 0 power-on-reset 0
# 0.98 RP1_BOOT chip ID: 0x20001927
# 0.99 Halt: power_off: 1
POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=0
# tries other non bootable before nvme to bring menu on HDMI
# read right to left, 4: USB, 6: NVME, 1: sdcard, f: restatt
#BOOT_ORDER=0xf164
# boot nvme first and if not, sdcard
BOOT_ORDER=0xf16
# Sometimes needed by NVME drives to show up in time for boot
PCIE_PROBE=1
# You should only use GPIO 22 to 27 as they are pull down
# by default
[gpio26=1]
# this would boot sdcard directly:
#BOOT_ORDER=0xf1
# boot other absent devices first force menu before choosing sdcard
# read right to left, 4: USB, 1: sdcard, 6: NVME, f: restart
BOOT_ORDER=0xf614
What does this mean? If GPIO26 is taken high (and it is pulled down by default), it will use the 2nd BOOT_ORDER to boot. That 2nd one is designed to boot from a non existent usb storage, which because of timeout will cause the boot menu to show up on HDMI should you at a local console. Then this times out, and continues with sdcard boot which will have a default rescue linux install I can use to fix the main NVME install that isn't booting anymore.
Just like lilo as opposed to grub, you cannot edit the linux boot command line if it is bad (it's saved in /boot/cmdline.txt which is really /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt, which is saved on the vfat partition that the firmware is able to open and read from a bit like a poor man's EFI partition.
config.txt similarly includes lots of options used by the booting firmware, including which initramfs, if any, to give to the booting kernel. Note that only one booting kernel is allowed by boot device, so you have no way to rollback kernels or fix anything without some rescue media, which in my case is the sdcard boot if my NVME boot stops working. I'll show my relevant config below.
aragorn:~# cat /boot/cmdline.txt
root=/dev/md0 rootflags=subvol=root rootwait net.ifnames=0 logo.nologo console=tty1 console=ttyAMA10,115200 panic=15 rd.shell
aragorn:~# grep -1 -i initramfs /boot/config.txt
# >>> kernel and initramfs come from from /boot/firmware/, not /boot/ <<<
# initramfs must be copied manually
# -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 22792837 Jul 5 06:08 initramfs_2712
# -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9962173 Jul 11 05:46 kernel_2712.img
initramfs initramfs_2712 followkernel
# This should help if you have multiple kernels
auto_initramfs=1
aragorn:~# tail -5 /boot/config.txt
dtparam=watchdog=on
# This is suggested by PCI expander, but seems unncessary
#dtparam=picex1
#dtparam=picex1_gen=3
Ok, so let's recap. The above allows booting on NVME by default (I made the NVME bootable device by copying a working bootable sdcard onto an NVME after plugging it in a working rPi), but if you toggle the correct GPIO, it will boot from sdcard instead of NVME allowing a rescue boot over serial. The only thing to be careful of is you cannot shut down the device (halt or otherwise) as you have no way to power it back up that I know about (without an external relay to toggle power or the power switch).
This is what it looks like. Only pay attention to the black/white/red servo cable with red and white swapped, just like you would for RX/TX on a serial connection:
Now, you're going to ask me about the blue and yellow probes, and that was because I found out a vexing bug I was not able to explain: when reading the GPIO output on pin 19, if it's set to 1 (asking for rescue boot from the other pi), the voltage dips from 3.3V to 1.5V which is an invalid value and causes the other pi not to detect that you want it to boot in rescue mode.
You will want to use rpi-boot-rescue (excerpt below) or write your own, but basically I found out that gpioget damages the output bit when you read it, despite the correct push/pull values. I'll give the meat of the script here:
export GPIOSND=19
export GPIORCV=26
if [ "$1" "cycle" || "$1" "--cycle" ]]; then
$0 --set
sleep 45
$0 --unset
elif [ "$1" "get" || "$1" "--get" ]]; then
echo "Boot rescue bit $GPIOSND: $(gpioget gpiochip0 $GPIOSND) (received by boot pin $GPIORCV)"
# I do not understand why readin gthe value messes up the output votlage if output it 1, but it does
echo "Please reset pin value as reading it can change the output voltage from 3.3V to 1.5V"
elif [ "$1" "set" || "$1" "--set" || "$1" "rescue" || "$1" "-y" || "$1" = "--yes" ]]; then
echo "Enable GPIO $GPIOSND to enable >>>RESCUE<<< boot on connected device (received on $GPIORCV)"
rescue=1
gpioset -B pull-up -D push-pull gpiochip0 $GPIOSND=$rescue || echo "apt install gpiod"
echo "Don't forget to reset to normal after your debug boot"
else
echo "Ground GPIO $GPIOSND to enable normal boot on connected device (received on $GPIORCV)"
rescue=0
gpioset -B pull-down -D push-pull gpiochip0 $GPIOSND=$rescue || echo "apt install gpiod"
fi
good 'rescue' output
becomes bad voltage when you use gpioget
this is what gpioget does
After figuring out this issue with bad voltages that prevented my rescue boot from working, now it does and I can use Pi #2 to tell Pi #1 to boot into sdcard for rescue purposes.
TODO: try pinctrl instead of gpiod (I'm told it may not have that issue where reading the pin affects the voltage).
If you think this is unnecessary or overkill, keep in mind that the first dietpi upgrade I did failed to make a new initramfs (which isn't supported by them), I stupidly rebooted, and then the initramfs did not match the new kernel so the kernel modules in the initramfs refused to load. As a result, the root filesystem could not mount and the system was completely unusable and indeed impossible to rescue without the rescue sdcard boot I had just made.
Now, you're going to tell me you're not going to use raid1 or btrfs and you don't need initramfs. Sure, but you're still one mistake away from an unbootable system, be it fstab, kernel command line, bad kernel or kernel module, or simply your boot device going bad, or your root filesystem getting damaged and becoming unbootable. I will agree that none of those happen often on an average day, so for your little home project, you could decide not to care, but if you're actually wanting to use a rPi5 as a real server, serving real users, and without always having local access to it, what I did above will make a lot more sense to you.
As a bonus the 2nd pi that monitors the first one can be used as a backup server to take over (or both can run at the same time if you have some service that can work with load balancing). In my case, both Pis can monitor one another.
Boot Configuration
I'll just share what mine looks like if that helps, yours will be different
If you don't care about having raid1 for reliability, and don't care about btrfs and its snapshots that can be used to go back in time and erase mistakes, as well as make frequent and lightweight backups using btrfs send, then you don't care about initramfs and you can skip this section.
But if you do, read on... The first thing to know about initramfs is that it works, but it's not supported by dietpi and may not fully by supported by some other rPi distros, by that I mean that installing new kernels would automatically make an initramfs, copy it in the right place, and make sure it gets loaded along with that new kernel. This means if any kernel is updated, you must make a new initramfs, make sure it ends up in /boot/firmware and that it is correctly referenced in /boot/firmware/config.txt . If you are lucky it might all happen automatically when you install a new kernel (as it normally does on regular linux distributions), but on dietpi it did not and gave me an unbootable system due to mismatch of modules version in initrd. Feedback I got after writing this page is that it's supposed to "just work" on the stock RPI OS, which is good news.
aragorn:~# grep -1 -i initramfs /boot/config.txt
# >>> kernel and initramfs come from from /boot/firmware/, not /boot/ <<<
# initramfs must be copied manually
# -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 22792837 Jul 5 06:08 initramfs_2712
# -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9962173 Jul 11 05:46 kernel_2712.img
initramfs initramfs_2712 followkernel
# This should help if you have multiple kernels
auto_initramfs=1
Now, because you need panic=15 or equivalent so that your kernel does not just hang and never reboot if something goes bad, this unfortunately also tells initramfs to reboot if it can't mount the root filesystem instead of giving you a debug shell. You can tell it to give you one with break=premount, but you cannot add kernel command line options at boot time on a pi, so I thought I would switch to dracut instead which with "rd.shell" as a boot option will indeed give you a shell to debug and fix things if needed, without paying attention to panic=15
Bad, initramfs will not give you a shell if it can't mount, unless you give it break=premount but you cannot edit the command line at runtime
Gave up waiting for root file system device. Common problems:
- Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
- Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
- Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/md0 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!
Halting automatically due to panic= boot argument
root=/dev/md0 rootflags=subvol=root rootwait net.ifnames=0 logo.nologo console=tty1 console=ttyAMA10,115200 rd.shell panic=15
[ 34.842920] reboot: System halted
Good (use dracut instead of initramfs):
[ 197.820143] dracut-initqueue[337]: Warning: /lib/dracut/hooks/initqueue/finished/devexists-\x2fdev\x2fmd0.sh: "
if ! grep -q After=remote-fs-pre.target /run/systemd/generator/systemd-cryptsetup@*.service 2>/dev/null; then
Starting dracut-emergency.�ce - Dracut Emergency Shell...
[ 197.848080] dracut-initqueue[337]: [ -e "/dev/md0" ]
[ 197.848136] dracut-initqueue[337]: fi"
[ 197.848171] dracut-initqueue[337]: Warning: dracut-initqueue: starting timeout scripts
[ 197.848205] dracut-initqueue[337]: Warning: Could not boot.
Warning: "/dev/md0" does not exist
Generating "/run/initramfs/rdsosreport.txt"
Entering emerPress Enter for maintenance
(or press Control-D to continue):
# <-- here you can debug and fix your system
This is what I do to generate my dracut initramfs, but note that dietpi dracut does not know to copy the initramfs to /boot/firmware, so you will have to do so, or nothing will work:
aragorn:~# cat /var/local/scr/rpi-dracut
#!/bin/bash
#dracut --install "bash find ls" --regenerate-all -p --force
dracut --install "bash find ls grep more vi vim vim.nox" --regenerate-all -p --force --no-hostonly
cat <<EOF
Add rd.break=premount to force a debug shell (which must be done via rpi-boot-rescue
and the rescue partition).
man dracut.kernel and dracut for more details
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
You must copy generated initrd to /boot/firmware and check path in /boot/config.txt
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
EOF
There you go, hope this helps. Again, the initrd bit is not needed for most users unless you use a raid root filesystem, btrfs, or other more exotic configurations like this.
>>> Go Here for How to Setup NVME and Sata on a Pi5 <<<
