[time-nuts] single board PCs

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Mon Jan 7 14:11:59 UTC 2013


On 1/6/13 9:26 PM, Hal Murray wrote:
>
> jimlux at earthlink.net said:
>> Precisely.. but I'd just as soon not be in the PC integration business,
>> finding boards to plug into a mobo, etc. I was wondering what folks have
>> used (or seen used) in this sort of usage model.
>
> Google for embedded PC and/or mini-ITX.  There are lots of them out there.
>

Oh yeah.. That's the route I went 10 years ago with some very low power 
VIA based mobos. it took months to get the audio interfaces working 
right under (Debian) Linux, but other than that, they worked pretty 
well. (ALSA, OSS, etc. , pre Jack days)

> All you need is ethernet and USB.  Right?  They all have them so you don't
> need to worry about finding boards.

Yes.  But I figured that folks on this list might have found something 
that works particularly well. Or, particularly badly: that's the real 
value of asking the list.. someone says, yeah, the XYZ board looks good, 
but it's unstable as all get out or it has weird peripherals so you 
can't boot vanilla distros on it without DLL/Driver/apt-get/yum misery.

>
> The mini-ITX boards come with lots of connectors on the back.  You will need
> to plug in a keyboard and display to install the OS and/or talk to the BIOS.
> Once you get things setup, it will autoboot on power-up.
> Your initial message said "Eventually, it will  be packaged "inside the box"
> which
> is about 10x10x3".  Is that just the PC or do you expect to get lots of other
> stuff in there?
>
> Their M350 box is 7.5 in wide, 8.5 deep, and 2.5 in high with vent slots on
> top.  The M300 is 9x9.5x3.

Yeah, we'd probably repackage.  Things like power dissipation and fans 
are also an issue.  The application I'm thinking of right now is one 
which has low duty cycle, but moderately compute intensive, say,  1 
minute out of 30.  But I have some others (remote monitoring of some GPS 
receivers, for instance) which are more like fancy data loggers.  I'd 
like to just put a 12x12 NEMA 4 box out there, with batteries, small PC 
mobo, and wireless network connection.


It's sort of the upscale version of the Arduino, PIC, MSP430 thing. I'm 
looking for a building block that I can just drop in, hook up, and not 
worry too much about.

>
>




More information about the time-nuts mailing list