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A Do-It-Yourself Embedded Linux Box

Posted by timothy on from the cool-hardware-ideas dept.

LennyDotCom points to this ZDNet story which should interest anyone with a hankering to build his own linux-based router, dedicated file server, MP3 jukebox, or whatever else you can fit in a 13" x 10" x 2.5" box pre-equipped with nearly everything but a hard drive. The author of this piece tells you how to get Linux booting on the optional disk-on-chip, too, so you can create one-off, totally silent machines. The price seems reasonable, too.

36 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. PCChips "BookPC" series by DataGrok · · Score: 3

    If you're not a "Name brand motherboard elitist"... PCChips makes some sweet looking "BookPCs". They're geared toward set-top DVD playback, and are certainly not applicable to "embedded linux." But they may be better for some than the water-cooled box with a 8MB disk-chip.

    These links are to a merchant site with good photos and info:

    I'm all about commodity hardware.

    1. Re:PCChips "BookPC" series by John+Whorfin · · Score: 2

      Unless you go with a USB NIC, these won't support a 2nd NIC.

      They wont work as a router,

  2. why not nlx? by neitzert · · Score: 3

    This box is great and all, but for $299 you hardly get anything.
    Why not get the $399 NLX special at http://www.booksizedpc.com and get 2 pci slots and a drive, cdrom, zip, floppy, IRDA, and the rest of the stuff they offer!?
    Check out This for photos of my linux router/firewall.
    chris

    --
    This communication is secured using Rot-26 Encryption Algorithm, Unauthorized decryption will be subject to laughter.
  3. Re:get this instead by psychosis · · Score: 3

    If you do a search on Pricewatch for "Book PC" (use the space!), they are for sale from Directron for $152 (with CD vice DVD tho). I have one, and have built about 3 or 4 others, and they are neat little machines. The S-Video output is great quality (even at 800x600), and adding a wireless kb/mouse makes it complete.... DVD models are around $90 more, but they say you can drop any DVD drive into it. A friend has had mixed luck on that front.
    Definitely something to check out!!!

  4. Re:Troll moderators (continued) by Christopher+B.+Brown · · Score: 4
    Alternatively, if Anonymous Coward is treated as a real but "shared" user, the low level of karma would naturally pull it down to defaulting to a negative score.

    This would discourage serious posters from using Anonymous Coward instead of their own.

    Back on topic somewhat, the pricing and configuration of these "set top" boxes are quite similar to the Think NIC ones. There seems to be a "price point" around $325-$350.

    By the way, a monitorless NIC is priced at $199, and while it includes no hard drive, it does have a CD-ROM, which certainly provides more space than a maybe-64MB flash card...

    --
    If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
  5. Anyone else hacked a Viewpoint TC? by Radix999 · · Score: 2

    I'm actually trying to turn a Boundless Technologies Viewpoint TC 200 (Thin Windows Network Client) into a dialup/router/gateway machine at the moment. It's 12" x 12.5" x 2.5" also!

    I picked it up for A$5 at a garage sale and it seems perfect for this purpose - no fan, standard IDE header inside for hard drive, standard floppy header (though I can't get that to work), built in ethernet, and 2 com ports and a parallel port. There's even a PCI and ISA slot inside, though you'd need a riser card to get it to work.

    It's a 133 AMD 5x86 chip, and is designed to run Windows using the ICA protocol. Only problem so far has been that it only has 4mb EDO ram, and Linux doesn't run on this little ram anymore. I'm currently trying to get more ram for it at the moment.

    If anyone else has played with one of these machines - do they have any kind of schematics or info about the motherboard and pins that could help. I've asked Boundless Technologies directly, but even though it's discontinued, they refuse to give me any info (but offered me support! for a fee of course! bleh)

    Pictures are available.

    Email me at Radix@juga.org if you have any ideas!

    --
    -- Wireless WaFreenet user since March 2002
    1. Re:Anyone else hacked a Viewpoint TC? by SEWilco · · Score: 2
      Haven't played with one of those -- but if the floppy drive is not working, were you able to get a BIOS config screen and see if it is enabled?

      Or else with the cover off plug in an ISA system I/O card with its own floppy interface and see if you can get that one to work -- of course, that probably also would require disabling internal floppy with a jumper or BIOS setting.

      Hmmm... I wonder how much diskless support it has -- maybe it will respond to a non-ICA Ethernet boot server and install a remote client in RAM? Or else if its built-in software supports a serial terminal or telnet and you can download stuff to a hard drive, you could download a DOS-filesystem Linux to the hard drive.

  6. Don't be so sure... by cduffy · · Score: 2

    Ainimal *BSD install, maybe... QNX or BeIA certainly, but BeOS on an 8MB DiskOnChip?

    Don't even get me started 'bout trying to fit a Windows install on one of those things...

    1. Re:Don't be so sure... by cduffy · · Score: 2

      If you're running Windows off a DOC, you have to worry 'bout the thing writing to the disk more frequently than necessary and thus causing the flash to go bad.

      Unlike the *nices, it's pretty friggin' hard (read: impossible) to get Windows to boot happily off a read-only partition, and those flash-based devices only take so many writes... plus writing to them (which, IIRC, generally requires clearing a whole block) isn't 'zactly fast.

      BeOS I don't know 'bout, but it wouldn't surprise me if it weren't a problem. The BSDs should be fine... but didn't I say something to that effect? :)

    2. Re:Don't be so sure... by cduffy · · Score: 2

      Yah, but then it's much less of an embedded system. You've actually got moving parts... eww! :)

  7. Not if you ask the RIAA by Booker · · Score: 2
    I thought the argument they were making is that every time you buy a blank tape or a mini-disk, you pay a tax to The Man which goes back to the RIAA, since of course you're infrigining their copyright with the blank media.

    They further argued that since you had paid no such tax on your hard drive, that it was clearly illegal to put copies of music on THAT.

    Silly logic, but that's what they said:

    When digital recording devices such as the DAT and Minidisc became available to the public, consumers had for the first time the means to make very high quality recordings of the music in their collections, and to make copies of those copies with virtually no decrease in sound quality. To compensate for the fact that some level of piracy would result, and to provide the manufacturers and consumers immunity from a contributory copyright infringement liability suit, the AHRA required manufacturers of digital recording devices and media (such as DAT tapes) to: (1) register with the Copyright Office; (2) pay a statutory royalty (to the copyright holder or artist) on each device and piece of media sold; and (3) implement serial copy management technology which prevents the copying of copies. To learn more about the royalty system of the AHRA, see the section on AARC.

    I can't find the argument that "therefore, copying your own CDs to your hard drive is illegal." Maybe they dropped that...

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  8. NeoWare by Sleeping+Dog · · Score: 2

    Actually this box looks really familiar to the one I have on my desktop ..

    http://www.neoware.com/neolinux/index.html

    --
    Kris Buytaert
  9. Amptron by thing12 · · Score: 4

    Amptron sells a couple of 'pre-systems' that are without cpu/ram/hd based mostly on i810 boards. You can pick one up that's about that size with video / audio / lan / modem / cd-rom for around $130. They've got one with a DVD-ROM and a wireless keyboard for under 300. Slick little systems.

    1. Re:Amptron by thing12 · · Score: 2

      ACNT for one.

      here's another selling prebuilts

      and yet more :-)

      Enjoy! These are great little boxes.

  10. Re:One problem... by Tom_N · · Score: 3
    you may NOT make MP3s out of your CDs ... It's against the law and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent.

    This is flat-out wrong. (Although I'm not too surprised you would believe this given the source of your information.)

    Go to RIAA.ORG for more information. If you're going to do this make sure you obey the law.

    Funny, I don't remember the Constititution giving the RIAA the power to make the law. May I suggest the Copyright Office site instead?

    The RIAA also seems to like to distort history to their own ends:

    Before free speech, before freedom of assembly, before freedom of religion, there was copyright protection in our Constitution. The founding fathers knew copyright protection could improve society by preserving the economic incentive for people to come up with brilliant ideas and inventions. They also realized the fundamental fairness of granting control of the creative work to the author.

    It's extremely disingenous of the RIAA to say that copyright came before freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. The people who wrote the Constitution considered these latter freedoms to be fundamental freedoms that no human government had the right to take away. There was a debate between those who felt a Bill of Rights was not necessary (because it was implicit -- and including one might cause the Government to take away every right not enumerated), and those who felt that the basic rights must be guaranteed in writing. The people who wanted the guarantee in writing won. RIAA's assertion that copyrights came before First Amendment freedoms is wrong. But even if it were not, amendments override the parts of the Constitution that came before. So however you look at it, the First Amendment trumps copyrights, not the other way around.

    As for "realiz[ing] the fundamental fairness of granting control of the creative work to the author," copyright under the Constitution is a recognition of natural property rights (see the references in the Betamax ruling), but merely an artificial incentive to be granted if and when it serves public ends. On a different level, given how the major RIAA members routinely take copyrights away from artists, I would hardly think of the RIAA as an organization concerned with "granting control of the creative work to the author."

    The principle that the work you created belongs to you and should be controlled by you is as timeless as it is global. For centuries, new inventions, from the printing press to the Internet, have threatened that principle. For centuries, advocates have resolutely defended it. The RIAA is just such an advocate today.

    Amazing. Here the RIAA portrays themselves as being aligned with the type of "advocates" who opposed the printing press. Can you imagine where human technology and living standards would be if we still relied exclusively on hand-copied books? Need I say more?

  11. Fix typo: copyright is NOT a recognition of ... by Tom_N · · Score: 2
    As for "realiz[ing] the fundamental fairness of granting control of the creative work to the author," copyright under the Constitution is a recognition of natural property rights (see the references in the Betamax ruling), but merely an artificial incentive to be granted if and when it serves public ends.

    That should have been "... is not a recognition of natural property rights ...". Somehow I missed this typo in the preview.

  12. ThinkNIC Alternative... by Christopher+B.+Brown · · Score: 2
    You make a bunch of good comments; I guess it stands as a pretty big unknown now as to how difficult it is to create your own bootable CD as an alternative to the built-in one.

    As for the "lack of storage," I don't see that as a huge problem:

    • If your plan is to use your own customized flash card, you're going down a road towards substantial configuration complexity whereby you'll have to get quite intimate with how it works...
    • The other major way to use it is to mount writable storage from somewhere else, say via NFS, in which case what bits of storage sit locally are quite irrelevant.
    I prefer the latter option, personally; combine having writable storage elsewhere with a customized CD and this might work pretty well. All it is forcibly missing is the space for extra NIC.
    --
    If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
  13. Re:What a press release! by drix · · Score: 2

    Every press release is an advertisment. If you haven't learned that, I would implore you to actually read a few.

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    --

    I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
  14. Alternative by XNormal · · Score: 2

    The CPU on this box is marginal for software-based decoding of MPEG video and, as you mentioned, there is no slot for a DVD drive.

    This box, made by the same company has a DVD drive and a DVD decoder chipset. No need for DeCSS - the chipset already has a licensed CSS decoder.

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    --
    Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
  15. Not only linux by jjr · · Score: 2

    Let us not forget the BSD,QNX,BEOS, and even windows 9.x,NT,2000.

  16. That box is familiar by Jenova · · Score: 3

    I've got that box. The manufacturer is a company called AllWell

    http://www.allwell.com.tw

    The box is pretty ok. The only problem I have is trying to get the CyberPro 2010 chipset working with 16bit colour under X( anyone has better luck).

    The box runs hot though. Best to get a CPU fan.

  17. info... by pirodude · · Score: 3

    This is quite a cool device. The company also sells stuff like this for hotel internet access. More information about the actual device can be found here

  18. Same problem - but in Germany by Hanno · · Score: 2

    I have the same problem, but to make things worse, I am in Germany. It is virtually impossible to buy a single item on the embedded devices / settop devices market as an end user for a *reasonable* price.

    Sure, I could get a few thousands of these boxes, but all I want is one. If anyone out there can recommend me a German distributor of this or similar devices where I can buy a single box, please let me know.

    ------------------

    --

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    You may like my a cappella music
  19. Re:get this instead by thing12 · · Score: 4

    this one's better and it's available right now - just add cpu/ram/hdd. (these people sell the base system for $260... pretty good deal)

  20. There's a cheaper way to do this. by Mark_Hopkins · · Score: 2

    Okay, so it's not as sexy and it's not water-cooled, but Egghead has a Fujitsu-Siemens network terminal called the Scovery.

    It comes with an integrated 10/100 NIC, Rage IIC video card, 64 megs of ram, a 200 mHZ processor and a 16meg Sandisk with Linux, Netscape, and terminal emulators already installed. I have two of these. I took the Sandisk out of one and put in a hard drive, floppy, and CDROM, and use it as my portable Linux box that I can take to work in my backpack. (I'm too cheap to just buy a laptop.) The other one will eventually be a router for my network at home.

  21. Re:Troll moderators (continued) by DigitalDreg · · Score: 2

    I just read the description of the Think NIC, and it looks interesting, but it has a few gotchas to it that would keep me from recommending it to neophytes:

    - 800x600 max video resolution
    - No hardware storage alternatives (ie: floppy, hard disk, etc.) Maybe a Zip will be supported via USB some year. Please .. at least something simple should be available.
    - One choice of printer (Epson 740?) at the moment.
    - If you don't want the vendor's OS upgrade, it's hard to do one yourself. For example, are you going to be able to create a bootable linux CD with no swap support and the FLASH device drivers that will actually work?

    On the plus side, it's going to be hard for a user to screw anything up. And it does have ethernet, which is very forward thinking. There are going to be more and more broadband connections.

    They shouldn't call these things computers. They are terminals, in the classical sense. Back 15 or 20 years ago, you could by a VT220, hook it to a modem, and be able to dial PSI Net, your local campus computer, or whatever. You then sent email, worked on your programs (via shell access), or did whatever. 20 years later, we've come back to that. Except now we have graphics. ;-)

  22. Look familiar? by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 3

    Is it just me, or does that look EXACTLY like the Innovator WebSurfer Pro? (Remember, the one that you could get for $50 for a few days because CompUSA screwed up in their advertising?)

    Innovator probably licensed one of AllWell's designs and added their own software.

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
    1. Re:Look familiar? by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 2

      Yeah. I have one too, just haven't had time to hack it yet... my iOpener has priority, just need to make a cable...

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  23. I'm getting the DVD version by d-ude · · Score: 2

    They have a box on the way that has pretty much the same insides, but will add a DVD drive and vacuum display on the front. I'm going to wait for that one to build my dvd/cd/mp3/mpeg player, with web server to control playback, and the X-10 powerline interface to control all my house lights and appliances.

    Shawn

  24. So many features, but a little expensive by cbrodeur · · Score: 2

    This would make a sweet MP3 player. I wish you could cram a bigger( 3.5in )hard drive in it. How fast does it boot off the disk-on-chip? It would make a really good appliance if it can turn on as fast as my stereo or TV. If it had RCA inputs and room for a bigger hard drive we would have a sweet alternative to Tivo. The only problem is the price. It's got lots of features, probably too many. If you could get half the features for half the price it would be perfect.

    That was the way it was! And we liked it!!
    -"Grumpy Old Man"

  25. Better idea by CMiYC · · Score: 2

    www.advantech.com has some SBCs w/ built in Audio for $325 ... Get a IDE FlashDrive from www.sandisk.com for around $100... The SBC is the size of a 3.5" hard drive and has everything on board (even LCD controller) and the FlashDrive is perfectly quiet... the amount of mp3s you have depends on how much money you want to spend. Or you buy two of them..one to boot and one for data...plug it into your computer and copy your mp3s to that..

    Or get the SBC with ethernet, and get a sound module for the pc/104 connector... even better actually (or get a ethernet connector for the pc/104, which is easier than finding a sound module)

    Its pretty much what my senior design project is...

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  26. Re:No serial port! by SEWilco · · Score: 2

    So plug in some USB serial interfaces. I've seen some Belkin ones on retail shelves, and I'm sure others make them.

  27. Revised RIAA by _Sprocket_ · · Score: 2
    I can't find the argument that "therefore, copying your own CDs to your hard drive is illegal." Maybe they dropped that...
    I noticed that myself. Awhile back the subject of the RIAA's view on fair use came up and I was going to use this particular tidbit as an example. But its gone now. The RIAA has aparently been revising its stance. Or at least how it presents it.
  28. standalone router... by EricTheFish · · Score: 2

    Although I don't deny the coolness factor of these boxes, and the high level of flexibility that they allow, it would seem that the author could have solved his problem much more simply- with a 1 port router from someone like linksys or D-link at 1/3 of the price (I know those are dirty words for some)....

    The latest firmware revision allows IPSEC packets to pass through, in addition to providing standard NAT functionality. Unless he wanted to do more, like link up two nets via IPSEC, which is beyond the capability of a $100 router. Netopia routers can, but those are about at the same price as his homemade router. That would be a much simpler setup though- plug it in, set up a few IP's, and go.

    --
    -ETF EOM
  29. beware the almighty 'code-man' by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 2
    yeah, well, be careful of what you say on mr. 'codeman's website. if he thinks you're in competition with him (you try to sell items that aid in hardware hacking on a box that he considers his pet project) he'll ban your ass from his board.

    sure, webmasters do get to say what goes on on their site. they pay the b/w (usually) and its their box you're running on. but don't expect 'free speech' on someone else's web-board.

    and don't even try to suggest you move the discussion or technical content to a Neutral Zone [sic] - ie, usenet. the kiddies on that board don't seem to understand such novel concepts as usenet.

    (yeah, moderate me down; I have enough points... sorry, but I needed to vent a bit about that whole 'codeman' thing...)

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    --
    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  30. Good location of info by d-ude · · Score: 4

    If you want to explore the hack value further, go to Linux-Hacker where Ken Segler (a.k.a. codeman) has some modification info on the original Websurfer Pro, which is made by the same company. He has a BBS there too with alot of good technical info amassed by people using these things.

    Shawn