Building Tiny, Ultra Low Power PCs

MAME?

Jukebox or Network Media Player? (stereo sound)

Surely you can’t say actual size without knowing the user’s dpi, not their screen size or aspect ratio.

I use a Netgear NSLU2 with Unslung firmware. You can then run pretty much anything you need to on it, like print server, basic webserver and DNS stuff. Not enough juice for an HTPC server though.

Can’t let a discussion of tiny computers go without mentioning the slug :
a href=http://www.nslu2-linux.org/http://www.nslu2-linux.org//a

Certainly not a desktop, though. Decent as a light home server.

http://www.fit-pc.com

Put a group of them together, and it looks like a pretty good fit for web crawling.

Have you seen the Debian based Bubba Two file and print server? It uses a 333 MHz PowerPC CPU and 256 MB ram and draw 7-12 Watts, depending on the number of hard disks, all in a compact and quiet box. (http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3110315320.html)

I built a small PC using an Artigo kit. I use it as a Lotus Domino/Sametime server.

http://www.iminstant.com/iminstant/iminstant.nsf/d6plinks/CTYR-7DD4EC

I did some load testing on it, and it works just fine.
http://www.iminstant.com/iminstant/iminstant.nsf/d6plinks/CTYR-7DTK3F

It plays Divxs great and also does Netflix streaming really well. The only processor issue I have found with it is playing BBC iPlayer content. The BBC(MS) DRM really slows things down.

Good to see more choices coming out from more vendors. I read the other day about one that fits into the wall socket, so you don’t even see it.

Not to mention all of this is just plain fun for the geekiness of it.

I guess I know what my next project will be. :slight_smile:

Do they make nice, small form factor enclosures for these types of boards? This would make a really nice file server for at home since you could just tuck it away somewhere and let it go.

It’s a bit difficult for me to wrap my head around the phrase 10 times smaller. I assume that you mean 1/10th the size. I do hear/read your terminology several places, but it just feels less clear to me than my stated interpretation. There, I feel better now.

I look forward to reading your articles every day.

Would be quite nice to have a small quick launching computer for doing minimal things, checking email, internet, MAME cabinet.

Also have you seen the Gumstix computer?

Gumstix website - http://www.gumstix.com/
Wikipedia on the Gumstix - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumstix

mini-itx.com has been around a long time, and I have bought from them in the past. However, their shipping charges are completely ludicrous: Shipping costs from the UK to the Netherlands is €27 for a €56 case I looked at recently.

Also, I tried asking them a question a couple of times and actually NEVER received a reply, which in my book is pretty disqualifying for a webshop.

As Tini said in the second comment, the ALIX series of boards may even be better than the Jetway board Jeff mentioned. They’re a little less expensive ($100-$130, depending on configuration) and have the memory soldered onto the board. They also sell nice custom compact cases for them, too. I plan on building a Linux-based firewall on the Alix 2c3 (3 LAN) board.

On my list of projects to start (which I never seem to finish) I have build a mini-itx car stereo. It will have a hard disk, SD card reader, USB port, dimable LEDs/display, display album art while player and a user interface that isn’t completely stupid. Oh and after renting a Cadillac last week I decided that the radio should stay on after the car is shut off until the door is opened.

My biggest concern is boot up time.

I always wanted to try getting a small, low power PC and installing it in the trunk of my car, then filling a harddrive with several hundred gigabytes of mp3’s for my listening pleasure. The only issue is the monitor, but I believe it’s possible to setup something like a Palm Pilot to control playing those.

With iPods these days, this idea is probably a bit dated. But I’d still like to try.

How much power does it use when 100% CPU loaded?

I don’t care about power usage when idle. I don’t own any idle computer.

The main downside of the Atom Jeff mentions in the first reply is that the chipset will draw an enormous amount of power compared to the CPU (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-cpu,1947-4.html). I was looking for an Atom to build a low power NTP server, but the only available Atom in the Netherlands at that time was the N270 mounted at that Intel 945 motherboard. I wanted to combine that motherboard with a CF2IDE adapter, a 1GB CompactFlash card and as less memory as possible, but after some searching I found out that combination would use 30w, which is not what I consider ‘low-power’.

I worked for a company that produced a webcam using the PC104 form factor. Unfortunately it was overpriced and we hardly sold any. However the possibilities looked great.

The only thing we really did well out of was selling it to a company that in turn was producing hardware for TrafficMaster - which does numberplate recognition on the UK’s roads.

You could pick up a laptop hard drive, but another clever thing about this board is that it allows you to use a cheap CompactFlash card as your storage medium – for the optimal low power, no moving parts install.

Unfortunately, CF isn’t very robust for this type of application. The commercial grade versions, which are used for cameras et al, can get corrupted during power failures. It used to be that you could get an industrial grade version that could handle this type of thing, but I think they did away with those some time ago.

I guess my assumption was that you’d run some form of Windows on it, XP Embedded (XPe), for instance. Normnal NTFS would wear out a CF or SD pretty quickly.