EDID – Extended Display Identification Data – Is how a monitor tells a computer what visual properties it supports – such as resolution and refresh rate. Sometimes when running hardware Headless, you can run into issues. EDID Emulators can help with those issues.
Why use a Monitor Emulator?
When running a computer headless, they sometimes will not boot properly (typical with desktops) or if you try to remote into them with anything other than SSH, you may get an error because there is nothing to rasterize graphics against – even a basic 2-dimensional desktop image, much less any 3D graphics or computations. This typically comes up when trying to VNC into a Raspberry Pi or using X11 Forwarding over SSH on a RasPi or Jetson.
The simple fix for this is to use an EDID Monitor Emulator. By plugging one of these into the display output, the computer will think a monitor is attached – thus allowing full and proper Remote Desktop display and visualization characteristics.
In the SD Lab supplies, we have three HDMI and three DisplayPort EDID Emulators available for checkout to your project.
