Some six months ago, in the middle of a somewhat troubled summer, I decided to stock up on IP KVMs and ordered a pair of Sipeed NanoKVMs–a full kit and a barebones one. The price was simply irresistible, and I wanted something that could eventually replace my homegrown PiKVMs.
Update: There’s an interesting video up on YouTube that goes into a surprising amount of detail about the internals and some of the firmware weirdness, including a bunch of security issues that seem like they shouldn’t have made it to production (Some of them seem like hard-coded shortcuts that can be fixed, others are a little sketchier, like firmware for the CSI bridge being dynamically downloaded). I would have expected apalrd.net to have a full write-up by now, but they seem to have been busy with other things and have only updated the video description with more details. I’ve updated my post regardless and will be keeping an eye on this.
The devices arrived in October, and by that time I had too much on my mind to test them properly, although I used the full one to set up the TerraMaster F4-424 Max, and a couple of other machines.

Note: even though I purchased these with my own money, I’m going to follow my usual review structure and link to my policy for consistency.
Hardware
The NanoKVM is built directly on top of a LicheeRV Nano with a RISC-V SoC, which has been lauded as part of its charm–it’s essentially “just” that with an HDMI to CSI bridge and a tiny 128x64 OLED display, both of which are relatively common parts (I have a few of either from personal projects), making it a very clever design in terms of both sourcing and integration.

The 3D printed enclosure is serviceable (it’s a decently tough resin), but I would be wary of putting too much stress on any of the connectors, since here is a little bit of play with the internal scaffolding. But the design is pretty clever (namely the way it stands on its heatsink, which hardly gets warm).
You also get a motherboard cable (that plugs into one of the USB-C connectors in the boxed version) to get at the power and reset pins, but I have not yet had the opportunity to hook one of these internally. I plan to do so soon since I have a “spare” mini-ITX with an i7 that used to be rogueone
and have been pondering getting a cheaper, larger case to pair it with a second-hand discrete GPU, so I’ll write about that when it happens.
Sipeed also has a PCI-E version and a USB version that I find intriguing (and that share the same core configuration), so there’s clearly an opportunity to use the same solution across different form factors
Power Consumption
I almost didn’t bother, but in the end I plugged in my USB power monitor and confirmed that the NanoKVM Cube consumes consumes barely above half a watt even under load (like streaming during an install off its internal storage)–in the large scale of things it barely registers, which is as it should be as it is designed to be powered of a USB port, but I had to check.
Software
There was a bit of controversy regarding the software a few months ago, but the GitHub repository has evolved at a fair pace, so most of the visible issues have been ironed out (but, as my update above points out, the security ones haven’t).
The web UI is simple but effective:
My devices shipped with firmware 2.1.1 and are currently running 2.1.5. I have had no issues updating either, although given the security issues I’m going to focus on figuring out how to update them manually from now on.
Feature Set
One feature I miss from the PiKVM (and that also, strangely, doesn’t seem to be available in any of the KVMs I’ve tried since) is the ability to simply take a screenshot and download it directly via the browser–which should be a trivial thing to implement. There is also no VNC support (which I’ve found very handy), although I’m very happy that the Sipeed (unlike the AURGA Viewer) doesn’t require any sort of mobile or desktop application whatsoever (which is as it should be).
Everything else I need works–I’ve been able to upload ISO images, reboot the remote host with Ctrl+Alt+Del
, go into the BIOS, boot off the ISO image via USB, etc. – I actually used this to install Proxmox on the TerraMaster F4-424 Max, and now have it as my current go-to for plugging into SBCs because it has a full-size HDMI port and takes up pretty much zero desk space.
Tailscale
But two of the key reasons I got these are that the firmware is Open Source (which should ensure I can tweak if if I want to–and yes, I want to… although the GitHub repository has build instructions, they are somewhat contrived, though) and includes Tailscale support, which allows you to get at your console from anywhere in the world with minimal hassle. Tailscale also has a bit of additional filtering and access control baked in, so I can restrict which members of my tailnet access what and keep the KVM itself from “reaching out” to other machines, which is just perfect.
The only feature I really miss is a hardware one–I wish the Cube had Wi-Fi (or came in a Wi-Fi version), since (for my use case at least) dedicating a 2.5GbE port to something that requires relatively low bandwidth and is not used constantly makes very little sense. This actually why I am still using my custom PiKVMs, and I think would be a very appealing feature for home users in general.
Conclusion
Security issues aside, the Sipeed KVMs actually worked pretty well and I really like the hardware. So right now I’m going to keep track of development to see how quickly they will be fixing the issues spotted by apalrd.net and others.
The thing is, from a user perspective, the software is “just right” feature wise–perhaps too simple, even if it’s missing things like screenshots and other “comfort” features, so they are at least on the right track. The build quality is also decent (even considering it’s mostly 3D printed), and the Tailscale integration is a huge plus.
As far as KVM functionality goes, both models have been reliable, with minimal latency and clear video output.
All things considered, I’d still likely get a standalone Wi-Fi one to play around with–but I’m going to wait a bit to see how the security issues are addressed, try to build the firmware myself, and set up a separate VLAN for them in the meantime…