The JetKVM

I have now officially reached the point where I have more KVM devices than I actually need (at least for now), and I think this one will be the last for a while–so this is my attempt to finish the series on a high note.

The JetKVM has been popping up a bit all over the place in the homelab scene, and I was very curious to try it given its unique Apple Watch-like look and form factor.

Disclaimer: JetKVM sent me a free sample unit (for which I thank them), and this article follows my review policy.

The device is very compact, and its all-metal construction feels very sturdy, an impression that is compounded by its small size and considerable weight:

As you can see above, all the connectors are on the back of the device:

• An RJ-45 Ethernet port (sadly, this doesn’t support Wi-Fi)
• An RJ-11 port extension port (for ATX power control, serial console, etc.)
• Mini-HDMI for video in
• USB-C for power and controlling your PC.

One thing I noticed almost immediately is that the spacing between the mini-HDMI port and the Ethernet jack is too tight. This means that if, like me, you have RJ-45 plugs with a reinforced plastic guard; they might actually not fit–I had to fish out another patch cable with a slim RJ-45 plug:

Despite the space constraints at the back of the device, I actually wish the JetKVM had a full HDMI port, as it would simplify things a bit even if we do get a nice mini-HDMI cable in the box.

I suppose it’s marginally better than micro HDMI, but you still need a specific kind of cable, which might be annoying to find if you need to replace it with something of a specific length.

But you do get three cables in the box:

• A mini-HDMI to HDMI cable
• A USB A-C cable for power
• A nice 7-8cm USB-C Y splitter (which lets you use separate power and data connections in case your PC does not provide standby USB power)

The build quality is excellent, and of course the front display steals all the attention. But, somewhat to my dismay, there is actually very little you can do with it–you can switch to a second screen listing the firmware version, and that’s about it:

Also, in my experience, the display sometimes turns off after a while–which means you have to touch it to read the IP address if you forget.

However, the remote experience is much more sophisticated. Compared to most KVMs I’ve been using, the JetKVM’s WebUI borders on the luxurious, with a very nicely designed web interface featuring multiple panes:

In terms of making it easy to discover and access all of the features, the UI is excellent–and I’ve used it as my preferred device for testing new mini-PCs and single-board computers for a couple of months now.

Although I am very happy that I need zero proprietary software to access the JetKVM and am quite impressed at the feature set (including, for instance, switching between several EDIDs to account for monitor recognition vagaries) I do think that a “simple” mode that used less screen real estate would be useful–perhaps collapsing things into a simple unobtrusive bar like in full screen mode.

I would also love to have it announce itself over Rendezvous (my PiKVMs do so as pikvmX.local, which means I never have to remember their IP addresses). Apparently that was a feature in the past, but it was removed for some reason.

Like the NanoKVM I looked at a few weeks back, the JetKVM’s software is also open-source on GitHub–but unlike it, the JetKVM hasn’t had a lot of controversy around it, and the cloud services behind it are actually open source and can be self-hosted.

That is perhaps a step too far for me for a single device, but there is an open issue mentioning a Tailscale plugin, so support might not be too far off–and of course I can still access it remotely via Tailscale by routing though my home exit node.

Regarding JetKVM’s cloud service, I ended up not trying it because their only OpenID Connect method supported is Google, and I’m actively trying to remove that kind of dependency from my life.

Feature-wise, I only have two software complaints: The first is that there isn’t a screenshot feature (neither in the 0.1.18 version it shipped with nor in the latest 0.2.3, which would be very useful for quick sharing and documentation (and no, taking a screenshot of the browser or using extensions doesn’t replace having this as a built-in feature).

So I just hacked my own and created this JavaScript bookmarklet, which works great:

javascript:"use strict";!function(window,document){var canvas=document.createElement("canvas"),video=document.querySelector("video"),ctx=canvas.getContext("2d");canvas.width=parseInt(video.offsetWidth);canvas.height=parseInt(video.offsetHeight);ctx.drawImage(video,0,0,canvas.width,canvas.height);var currentDateTime=new Date().toISOString().replace('T',' at ').replaceAll(':','.').substring(0,22);var a=document.createElement("a");a.download=`Screenshot ${canvas.width}x${canvas.height} ${currentDateTime}.png`;a.href=canvas.toDataURL("image/png");document.body.appendChild(a).click();a.remove()}(window,document)

The second is a bit stranger, and I suspect it is a video encoding setting–I have been unable to get the video to show truly white images.

The video stream and screenshots I get are all off-white, which is hardly relevant when using this to fix something but very noticeable when I need to take screenshots of remote machines with the-actually I swapped back and forth with the NanoKVM, and the image quality was quite different:

To me the JetKVM’s “High” video quality is arguably worse than the NanoKVM’s default but feels slightly snappier, which is why I think this is an encoding compromise that I hope can be fixed in a later firmware version.

I’ve been using the JetKVM on a daily basis to set up development boards and a couple of mini-PCs, and it’s been rock solid other than occasional (likely browser related) input glitches and the slight video encoding issue I point out above.

Software-wise, I’m just a bit hung up on the display.

Although vastly more readable than other devices I’ve looked at lately, it’s nevertheless stupendously luxurious for what it can actually do, and It’s a bit strange to have a touchscreen device that I can interact with so little.

Either way, I think all the above can be fixed in firmware upgrades–except for the lack of Wi-Fi, which is a particular preference of mine for temporary setups.