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Mini PC in an Actual Lunchbox
schnell29 writes "I am looking for a small case and such to house my next computer, and I have seen many mini, micro, flex ATX cases, but mini-itx.com has caught my atention. I like the lunchbox pc. With all the talk about quiet, small pc's this might be the ticket. And hey, they even report that VIA is now Microsoft CE .NET 4.1 certified."
Mmmmm this computer looks good enough to eat!
Pfft! I'll put mine in an Incredible Hulk lunchbox.
It will kick this guy's ass.
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
"Oh God, not Windows again! I told her I hate windows..."
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Now I can cook my lunch at work on my Athlon!
OLPC Australia
Beating up geeks to steal their lunch (money) will become much more profitable.
"Son, in a sporting event, it's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get" - Homer J. Simpson
Mini-ITX is a motherboard form factor, and doesn't really relate that much to what software runs on top of it.
It should run Linux.
.: Max Romantschuk
well...I almost feel obligated to ask
.sig there!
Are they serving the site of that lunchbox pc?
caino
Don't touch my
to get /.'ed
This is ridiculous and irresponsible, mothers will be sending kids to school without food by mistake.
This MUST carry a large warning label that clearly states "contents are not edible".
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
You can also eliminate all those pesky cooling fans ... just use those refreezable ice packs.
... should we really be trying to put a computer in a lunch box ... how about putting it in a keg. Not only can it serve up your DIVX movie collection, it can provide you an all your guests with your favorite frosty beverage. Again the need for the cooling fan is eliminated by the kegerator.
Honestly
Does anyone know where to get a kegerator with RJ45 and Composite/RCA connections?
Sig Nazi- "No Sig for you, come back 1 year."
a five course dinner of those!
How is it that anyone can possibly get then and than mixed up, when they mean such totaly different things, and sound so totaly different?
I don't think I can take much more......
Advanced users are users too!
is that the manufacturers still insist upon maintaining obsolete interfaces on their mobos. Seriously, how many of you are going to buy a printer tomorrow that is parellel-only? The echos resound through the hall. Similarly for the serial port. These ports are only there to support older hardware for those too uncreative to go find dongles if they're stuck with crufty old hardware. One serious advantage of, say, an iBook over a comparable PC laptop is that the designers were free to be more creative because they weren't stuck with a bunch of zillion-pin garbage sticking out the back of the computer.
Seems to me it's time to clean up the x86 motherboard. I've been happily not using parallel or serial for about two years now. YMMV.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
beside's the usual answer: "because i can do it !"
He still needs a backback to bring along his keyboard, mouse and monitor. Plus 500 meters of power cable so he can sit in the park and eat his lunch (from his other lunchbox) and type some letter.
and with these specs? get a laptop.
But i like the whole idea of very small but complete boards. Nice hack.
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
Of cause it run Linux, and *BSD. Via is even developing Linux drivers for the Eden platform. This enables you to use features like the TV-Out.
www.viaarena.com has a forum for Via Eden Linux users.
YHBT YHL HAND DS
:-p
unless, of course, that was a serious question about chipset support / compatibility and drivers for the on-board video and audio
There's a Linux section in the FAQ so it should run fine.
There are two ways to get a computer into a lunchbox:
1. Shrink the mobo
2. Get a HUGE lunchbox
He opted for #2.
And hey, they even report that VIA is now Microsoft CE .NET 4.1 certified.
?? Sorry, I mean no offense but I don't get it.. What has a "Microsoft CE .NET 4.1 certification" to do with this box ??
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
This is close.
they must not be hosting it on a beowulf cluster of these!
It's being used in-car. The easiest way of displaying info is still a VFD or LCD model interfaced to the serial or parallel port.
My car also has an OBDII connector, so I can play with the engine management computer. Which is nice. Serial at 1900-baud - very strange rate.
I have looked at building USB interfaces for the above, but it isn't worth the hassle. There's a PIC that'd do the job of looking after USB, but with low speed transmission, plus the hassle of writing a USB driver it's non-trivial. USB can't speak until it's spoken to, which is fun...
Also, forgive me for pointing out the bleedin' obvious, but there's 2 USB ports on there, plus 2 USB headers.
FYI, the EPIA-M will have USB 2.0 too...
I'm currently running RedHat 7.3 on one of these. It works like a charm. My only problem was that the DIMM module made it hard to fit the CD reader in the chassis, but as long as you're into case modding that's not a problem.
I usually use telnet to configure my Cisco Router. I've never tried using a serial port and cable.
You forgot:
3. Profit!
You can use the serial for hartbeat.. (see http://www.procolix.com/ha_cluster for Mini ITX used in a High Availability cluster)
---
Seriously, how many of you are going to buy a printer tomorrow that is parellel-only?
Actually the problem (for me) isn't that I intend to get new devices with parallel or RS-232 interfaces. I agree with you completely that we should migrate to USB and/or Firewire with all due haste.
The problem is that I have an old printer at home which works great (Lexmark 4039-10R) and I'm not about to dump anytime soon. The USB-parallel adapters I've tried simply haven't worked very well and I'm not willing to spend more on them until I'm sure they will work. They're fairly pricey after all. Plus the one's I've tried so far required special drivers (Windows only) which is a big no-no as far as I'm concerned.
I also have the problem that my Palm dock with the USB interface, for reasons I cannot fathom, does not work. So I'm stuck for the moment using RS-232 as well. Plus my linux install (Mandrake 7.2-yes it's old but I haven't had time to upgrade) can't seem to deal with USB for anything except my mouse. So more legacy ports I'm stuck with.
Annoying? You betcha. Will I go "legacy free" asap? Yup. Soon as I can get everything to work. Until then, it's like the floppy. I hate it but I need it once in a blue moon because the hardware and system makers can't seem to provide proper migration paths.
Another example. I'd love to get a Type 3 (the full two slot size) Cardbus firewire & USB 2.0 card for my laptop which only has USB 1.1 right now. Not only does no one make *any* USB/Firewire Cardbus combo card, they all make the interface cards type 2 (one slot) cards which stick out the side of the laptop or use a proprietary interface cable. I'd buy this card in a heartbeat but no one makes it. Sigh. Someday maybe...
Yeah, I get it.. The VIA eden platform is small. Real small. 7x7. And it produces very little heat.
It's also virtually useless for anything but light desktop duties. It hasn't the juice (the next version should) to even playback a DVD without lots of skipping.
So it's getting less and less impressive everytime someone sticks it into a [whatever].
Stick in a Shuttle FS50 (same size, but accepts a 478 pin P4), or it's Athlon XP cousin, add real video powers (VIVO, 3D), figure a way to fit in the PSU, find a way to keep it cool and reasonably quiet w/o looking like crap, then I'd be impressed. I'd like to see a powerful gaming/pvr/dvd/divx/ogg media box crammed into a [whatever].
But the VIA eden thing.. So what? It doesn't even require a real power supply, since it uses DC-DC converters, you can juice it up off a wallbox.
It's just too easy, and the end result is too useless. Up the ante.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
from the webserver? Surely they're not serving the site from a lunchbox, but it apparently can't handle a slashdotting, so maybe it is ...
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
The cool kids buy their processing cycles from the school server farm.
And god forbid they catch anyone with a PLAID lunchbox computer.
My 7-year-old Brother personal laser printer is parallel-only. I'll keep it as long as it continues to work and toner refills are available -- I print so infrequently that I have no reason to upgrade the printer.
If I upgrade my PC, and the new mobo doesn't have an onboard parallel port, no problem. I'll just buy a $10 I/O card and plug that in.
Someone else mentioned serial ports for connecting to LCDs like these. If you want a graphical LCD with a fast update rate parallel may be the way to go.
Note that I'm talking about small LCDs and VFDs which might be monochrome & only have a resolution of 240x64 or 240x128. While the case modders tend to use them for displaying temperatures, mp3 song titles and spectrum bargraphs, think about the embedded possibilities. Not only are these LCDs smaller, but they draw less power than VGA and better color TFTs.
You could boot from a CompactFlash card and have a really teeny hot tub controller that uses fingerd to report current temperature & power consumption, using the parallel port to talk to the sensor/control board.
Consider a box with a 200GB 3.5" hard drive and a "universal" 12V power supply that'll run from a car, a big battery or a lump-in-the-line (power consumption a bit high for a wall-wart). Not a 1.7" or 2.5" drive, but enough room to hold every CD you own maybe even in FLAC instead of OGG as well as every digiphoto you've ever taken.
With no CD-ROM or AGP slot, it would be considerably smaller than a Shuttle XPC or even a Cubid. The new VIA EPIA M will have USB 2.0, FireWire and 100Mb/s ethernet for getting stuff in & out of your "All Box."
For controlling playback on the go add a few buttons and a rotary encoder scanned by the parallel port and a serial LCD (or a PIC to handle user input & a parallel LCD).
You can build smaller systems for ip to real-world, but this thing runs Linux and BSD, a real 32 bit processor with an MMU and plenty of memory. None of that mucking about with 8-bit assembly or (horrors) BASIC Stamps. Write your nuclear-bomb-tipped earth-boring machine control code in Java if you like!
Hardware for the embedded market is usually more expensive for equivalent capability as PC stuff. You can get an EPIA board for a lot less than an ARM development kit. [I know about power consumption, cost in volume, etc. etc., but for fun small projects, off-the-shelf wins.]
By the way, this guy has solve the problem of how to get 802.11b in a teeny box. The mini-ITX boards don't have PCMCIA and a PCI Wi-Fi card is going to take up a lot of room. Solution: gut a USB Wi-Fi box. The Orinoco one has a teensy USB to PCMCIA interface & a regular Wi-Fi card. Dunno 'bout Linux drivers for it, tho.
All that said, I would like to see a "legacy free" mini-ITX board for building regular-old personal computers.
http://catalog.us.dell.com/CS1/cs1page2.aspx?cs= 04&keycode=6W463&br=2&fm=10266
I just ordered five of these critters for my office. They're so small and cute. I wish I could take one home and install *nix on it.
I remember the Sun desktops being called Pizza Boxes. For /. geeks, that's OK, but I don't know about Lunch Boxes.
Somebody in my area LUG is very creative!
They have stuffed a Mini-PC into a VW New Beetle model car...
This user account is inactive account replaced by the PDA
Yeah that's cheap, and yes, that's correct. At the store they cost what you said.
When you have something that is easy to store, easy to transport, easy to make, and easy to advertise (via the web), the price of ordering it goes WAY down.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I guess now that you can burn your penis with a computer you could heat your lunch up with a lunch box pc. Damn the microwaves we have lunchbox pc's!
J Moll - PC Load Letter - I know what it means!-
...or thanks to the Slashdot effect, it's all go up in smoke ;-)
Some of these boards are used for embedded tasks. USB and firewire are simple too complicated to code for and the timing isn't always accurate enough.
The lunchbox computer box idea maybe cute, but for not much bigger physical size you can get a REAL computer powerful enough to handle even the most demanding desktop computing tasks. Remember the Shuttle SB-51G case mentioned on /. a few days ago with Intel i845 chipset motherboard that supports even the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz CPU? The one that has USB 2.0, IEEE-1394, and SPDIF connections? With onboard video (which can be disabled so you can install your own graphics card) and excellent onboard audio that supports Dolby Digital 5.1 audio?
I am looking for a PC - in a lunch-box or in an other box - which has the same, lower energy consumption as notebooks. Ideally less or no more than 60 Watt, as opposed to the standard 150-250 Watt PC power supplies.
Any recommendations about power-saving PCs?
Nick
Even random is random. My nick, too.
People with kids already have to fish cookies and peanut butter sandwiches out of their drive slots... this "clever" case enclosure can only invite more of the same.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I really wanted the FireWire. Gigaherz, gigaram, duel boots between Red Hat and Age of Kings. Mine is a standard issue American size lunchbox (7x9x4) and it's a Yellow Submarine lunchbox. Thaks to some fancy stickers that come with Red Hat, all The Beatles are wearing Red Hats! Default boot is monitorless, right into mpg123 for the car. Normal IDE Disk too. Next version will have SlimDVD as well. Love those Shuttle boards!
Can you get peanut butter flavored thermal paste?
That should blow people's minds at LAN parties when I show up with a Soldam case, plug it in, and start pulling cooked food out of it!
"Multiply in your head" (ordered the compassionate Dr. Adams) "365,365,365,
365,365,365 by 365,365,365,365,365,365". He [ten-year-old Truman Henry
Safford] flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the
tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes
smiling and talking, and then seeming to be in an agony, until, in not more
than one minute, said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,225!"
An electronic computer might do the job a little faster but it wouldn't be
as much fun to watch.
-- James R. Newman, "The World of Mathematics"
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