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Mini-Box M-100
Craig Mctavern submits this link to a blurb about the Mini-Box M-100 small form-factor computer. Looks tailor-made for a home audio/visual system.
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I'd love to add one of these m-100's to one of these personal robots and have my own autonomous drink caddy.
Of course, I'd prefer if the hardware was made by Jesus.
Tcd004
Looks like the Mini-Box online store is down even before the Slashdot Effect hits.
I always wanted a Falsh IDE Adapter!
http://www.mini-box.com/cfadapter.htm
Mini-box runs at only 12V
anyone got a spare battery lying around? seriously, though, 12V is some crazy low power consumption. you gotta admit, that's pretty cool.
This would be ideal. It has an LCD display, programmable keypad, and does floating point, so Ogg is possible.
Now all I need is a job and some $$$ :(
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
How is it different from the OpenBrick ? Mh this mini-box seems to run a 800 Mhz x86 processor (OpenBrick has a 300 Mhz Geode processor). I heard the OpenBrick could not play DivX smoothly, maybe this is the solution ?
Sounds interesting, has anyone gotten one already ?
theefer
The main lure for me is the size. I mean that thing is tiny! For some special project or around the house type things (i.e. an mp3 player for the front room) it could be useful. BUT, the $495.95 definately would make me thing twice about buying this over another (barebones-esque)system. Would the savings in my electric bill cause this to pay for itself over time?
-Valiss
A friend of mine has been researching small computers for his car. He wants to run an mp3 jukebox application as well as control a scrollbar in the back window (for when you would like to express yourself to those driving to close behind you).
This computer would seem to fir the bill perfectly, now we just need to find a nice cheap source for a 8x3 inch or so lcd display for the dash.
This would be great to play MP3's in your car.
"The ignorant fight to win, the wise win before they fight." -Sun Tzu
Don't forget, "Does it run Linux" and "Can I make a TiVo out of it?" and "Who could possibly want this thing when you can buy a [XBOX, Walmart cheapo computer, PS2 running Linux]?"
It does run LINUX kind sir. Please visit the product's website.
The online store must be using one of these as its server.
I think I smell something melting...
"The ignorant fight to win, the wise win before they fight." -Sun Tzu
a box this size, and silence and low power use would be great for home network storage. just what i've been looking for, for sometime now. now if it was just $300 cheaper. seriously, why isnt there a cheap HD in a box that oen can use for home netowrk storage, at these prices for $500 i can get a huge new HD setup and my problems would be solved, but for a small networked HD with like a web interface, i'd sell my soul. anyoen seen somethign liek that? for around $200 ? anybody?
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
The Mini-ITX boards were reviewed on Tom's Hardware not long ago here
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
For those who can't get to the online store, its priced at $495.
--clambert
If I recall the last Slashdot discussion of small form computers for A/V systems, they were all powerful enough as MP-3 players but not really up to the task of being a general video player/recorder.
Looks tailor-made for a home audio/visual system.
Unfortunately it lacks an optical drive, so its use in that context is limited (but only by money of course, buy an external drive!)
There's the solar pc (which build these units) and a host of others.
As for me, next week the birthday elf is gonna bring me a Shuttle SN41G2 and a Athlon 2800+ Barton core CPU -- or I'm going to hunt that little shit down and kick his ass. Santa didn't bring me a tiny PC and it nearly cost him his life. He got to walk away with only having lost two reindeer. The elf ain't going to be so lucky. So pony up with the SFF computer or watch your back...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
If they could drop the price down below $300, maybe by getting rid of the keypad and flash card reader, I would be damn tempted to try to make a couple of X terminals here at the office.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
The power for the computer is apparently about 10 watts, which is impressive. 6 of those watts are used by the EPIA-M motherboard + Eden 600 Mhz processor. The faster processor uses quite a bit more energy. Interestingly, a desktop harddrive consumes about 17 watts in typical operation. So the 10 Watt figure is likely optimistic and/or when no peripheral devices are being used.
Just did some checking, the other really small case is from casetronic which is 5.1cmx17.8cmx25.4cm is about 400 mL larger than the 20cmx4.4cmx22cm mini-box case. They both take a 12 volt input. Form factor wise, the casetronic case is actually exactly the same size as most car stereos, guess what market it is aimed at.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
It isn't that much smaller than the iDot mini-ITX machines (I'm just a customer, I've bought a bunch for various embedded applications), which, by the time you stuff in some RAM you had lying around anyway are under $200. If you're going to spend an extra $295 for a display and a few buttons, going super small and super low power with one of the gazillion PC104 vendors seems smarter.
In my house we have two laptops with 802.11b that are almost always close at hand, so running the whole thing headless and just using one of those laptops with a web browser to control the media center seems like the obvious choice.
I need to finish up with code for the web server and media play control, but I've got some instructions on building one of these to boot off CompactFlash into stripped down Linux if anyone cares.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
I did. It would have about the same power as a single new 3.0ghz box...and take up more room. Oh, and cost more.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
That REALLY doesn't look like much of anything...just some ascii...yeesh. The days of ascii crapflooding are long, long gone, aren't they? :~~(
--
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From the site:
VIA EPIA V, 800MHz Motherboard
Regular price: $115.00
Sale price: $112.00
At savings like that, buy two, or four. Start that beowulf cluster NOW!
http://www.acscontrol.com/
Works fine.
If they only made one with a good video card it'd be perfect for lan parties. Not the best computer you can buy, but my and 2 other friends are going to Quakecon in Texas, our main issue is size. The trunk in a '69 chevelle is large but we need a months worth of clothes, 3 computers and 3 monitors. It looks like you can easily fit 3 of these on your lap or in the glove compartment or anywhere besides the trunk while leaving tons of space in the seating area of the car so you don't need to sacrifice comfort to get space.
Also, imagine not having to carry a huge case onto an airplane hoping it'll fit under the seat, you could easily put this into a bag with other stuff you want to carry on. And if the 60W of power doesn't seem like enough -
Tested configurations. The PW-60 has been tested on a EPIA -800Mhz, 512Mb RAM, two IBM 120Gb hard drives while decoding a MPEG movie. Recommended configs: C3 processor, 1 regular size hard drive, any amount of RAM.
Seems like it can handle the power consumption required to be a gaming PC. And you'd only need one 40GB hard drive (won't have MP3s or movies or anything, just games.)
Don't forget the ever popular "Imagine a beowolf cluster..." Hey, that might not be such a bad idea. At a rough guess, eighteen of these fit in the same space as a mid sized tower.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Sorry I can't be more specific, I'll be installing RedHat 9.0 this weekend on an EPIA M9000, but I've only been doing research so far.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
I wonder why no-ones talked about using this as a router? My biggest problem with a regular pc is size noise, and power consumtion. price would be the limiting factor no?
"think of it as evolution in action"
Is there any way to force your networking (browser, ftp, etc.) to reject any IP packets that have touched any connected machines in France?
The reason is that I don't want to get pussy juice all over the innards of my computer. The reason for THAT is that I don't want it shaking like a leaf in the wind every time I look at it mean or shout at it 'cause I just fumbled a make menuconfig or something.
From the blurb:
"Also, by using the PW-60 high efficiency 12V DC-DC converter (also available at mini-box.com), the M-100 can run for about 12 hours from a single 12V/7ah battery."
If you look I think you'll find that quite a few of the "super-small" computers are running on the EPIA-something motherboards and you can check those out independantly.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
hmmmmmm.....will i either buy
1. a limited machine to toy with for $500
or
2. a replacement for my old desktop
It's been my plan for a while now to build up one of these boxes for use as an uber-emulator. Stuff every console and arcade emulator software you can find on it, buy four USB controllers, and carry it around to your friends houses. The VIA board even has TV-out, which makes it perfect for this. It's a gaming, movie, and music-playing machine the size of a DIN radio!
Also, the checker cube boxes (www.checkercube.com) are slightly more affordably priced.
$10+$7 shipping, but there are multipacks of 5 for $50 or so...
Cost wise, the EPIA-M MB's are actually pretty good since they can do the boot-off network thing so you only need one harddrive. You will need to buy a lot of RAM though. The total cost would probably end up pretty close to 4000$, much less efficent than a single processor/motherboard computer.
You'ld also be able to drive about 20 monitors off of the cluster of EPIA's. Try building that into a single board computer, I bet it costs more. Really though, who needs to drive 20 monitors?
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
The parent post was listing known obigatory statements in order to make a whimsical statement about Slashdot trolls. You, on the other hand, are unable to comprehend such simple concepts as humor and, therefore, I must conclude are severly retarded.
Soekris makes a much better choice for low-power networking hardware. I run an IPSec secured wireless access point/router/firewall/QoS manager/etc on the net4521 and a 200mw 802.11b adapter. This one isn't mine, but pretty, isn't it. As soon as a HostAP driver supports 802.11a/g I'll be set to add another PCMCIA card, what a cheap ugprade.
Is there room for an HDTV tuner card and a DVD drive? Didn't think so.
But then again, who cares what your HTPC looks like? You're watching the TV/projector screen, not the PC. Stick the whole thing in your equipment closet and run cables. And with a big enough case, you can add extra cooling fans, prolong the life of your equipment, and not worry about noise at all.
Why did they waste their time with crappy C3 and C2 processors? The performance on those cpus is awful. You'd almost be better off building a small form-factor PC using notebook parts. It might cost more, but damn, who wouldn't rather have a Centrino in there or something along those lines? Or maybe Transmeta cpus should be used. Whatever. Anything aside from these Cyrix holdovers.
Which you can check out here.
It comes with a hard drive, and uses the 933Mhz Epia solution without needing a fan. Granted, the case gets a little warm (as the whole thing effectively acts as a heatsink), but that doesn't stop it from being very cool :)
For a review of the gold version, click here.
Don't get me wrong, this is a nice application for VIA's mini-itx boards. Of course, it suffers all the problems of any mini-itx based solution: too slow for video (see Tom's Hardware review) and no DVI or LVDS output. That's something that's been lamented on mini-itx.com. VIA keeps teasing us by putting an LVDS header on the board without any socket. I suspect it's the laptop keiritsu or some other industry mafia that is preventing us from getting a good cheap board with digital video interface, but of course I can't prove it.
When they have fanless MoBos that can drive digital displays directly and play DVDs properly, then we'll start to see some really cool low power media boxes. Until then, what you've got is early adapter technology, with all the attendant shortcomings.
What's really sad is that this is something that Transmeta could have done pretty well, but the management has its head too far up you-know-where to realize it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
(oh the comedy!)
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
You'ld also be able to drive about 20 monitors off of the cluster of EPIA's. Try building that into a single board computer, I bet it costs more. Really though, who needs to drive 20 monitors?
:)
Its friday and we are debating a beowolf of mini computers. Im married, whats your excuse?
The point is this isnt a good beowolf. Get a blade server if space is a concern. 20 of them, with NO hard drive is $5000. (they sell for $495 w/o HD and a 533 cpu) Not counting single monitor, switchbox, etc. I can get two 3ghz, or more importantly I can buy 1.3ghz athlons with 40gb drives for $279 each, shipping and all, close to half the price, so I could get 10 of them, having more power, for half the money if space isnt the concern.
In a nutshell, these are great one and a time, but not a cluster. Now get out of the house dammit!
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
This thing looks like just what I've been looking for. I run a home server which serves up my personal web site, email and MP3s. I want to replace my current server because my home office runs off of solar power, but at 90 Watts while idle, my current server draws too much power to allow me to run the solar during the winter months (the filter for my garden pond also runs off of the system 24 hours a day). Reducing the server to 10 watts when idle would be great. The idea of leaving the solar on all year is really exciting to me (it's hard to explain why this would be such a thrill, it's just one of those geeky things :-)
Are there any other very-low-power boxes I should consider as well?
I have been looking for a very low cost x86 microcontroller or board for developing simple thin clients for education in poorer countries. So far all offerings are more expensive than traditional desktops including all the incarnations of PC-104 that Ive come across.
This thing is $500+ and openbricks link is broken. I wish elan-486 was still around, I cant even find a distributor to send me a single sample of any elans. And I really have to check out geode, wish someone would offer a complete system on a board with flash and bios etc.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Really though, who needs to drive 20 monitors?
c'on, this is slashdot. of course, the obvious is to fullscreen pr0n across the 20 monitors, and the processing power of the bewolf cluster results in smooth 200FPS 1 million+ pixel detail.
$cat
Get one of these
http://www.casetronic.com/Product/PCcase/2699/
[Very very small case for about $90]
and one of these
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/kmexpress/mb-epia-
[Same type of the product as in the mini-box but
faster processor]
You'll have a better computer at about half
the cost.
I hope this isn't too offtopic...
This unit would be a terrific centerpiece for my home theater / audio system, but since I already own a laptop, I don't really want to purchase another piece of equipment (more money+space). I'm considering using my laptop (1.5Ghz, ATI Radeon Mobility 16MB, S-Video out and VGA-out to get HDTV: nothing incredibly special, but it works well) as the centerpiece, but I'm just wondering if anyone else is doing this. I'm going to need a decent sized LCD or plasma panel display (ideally around 22"-30") that has a built-in HDTV tuner, since I haven't found out any kind of TV tuner that would work with my laptop (no, the USB ones don't work with HDTV, and the picture quality is quite bad anyway). I will also need some kind of remote control (RF would be the best). I will plug it into my sound system, and simply use the computer's remote control to adjust volume/change tracks/etc. Also, would it be wise to purchase a higher quality external sound card? Any feedback at all would be very helpful (this pertains to the Mini-Box and like devices as well!).
Hardly. At $500 for a tiny box that can't even hold a CD or DVD drive, and extremely restricts what else you can do with it, it seem a very expensive tiny toy.
For not much more you can get a decent laptop, which would include a DVD drive/cd writer, an LCD display, hard drive, TV out and all the rest and take up about the same amount of space while the laptop is closed. Or just get a much less expensive small desktop system or put together your own.
There might be some valid use for this little thing at that price, but only in very specific dedicated applications, and certainly not for a home audio/visual system.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
But it's got Macro-Vision built in!
/Mouse ports
Standardized Embedded Solutions for Total Mainboard Connectivity
Form Factor
- Mini-ITX
- 170mm x 170mm
- Micro ATX Chassis Compliant
Processor
- VIA Eden(TM) 800Mhz processor (533 versions also avail)
- 100/133MHz Front Side Bus
- low power consumption
- Optional Fanless
- VIA C3(TM) E-Series processor (EBGA package)
- 100/133MHz Front Side Bus
- 128K L1 and 64K L2 cache
Chipset
- VIA Apollo PLE133
- VT8601A North Bridge
- Featuring integrated AGP 2X graphics
- VIA VT8231 South Bridge
TV-Out
- Integrated Macro Vision 7.01
- High quality scaling and filtering
- S-Video or Composite video output
- Supports NTSC/PAL TV formats
Main Memory
- Two 168-pin DIMM memory sockets
- PC100/133 SDRAM support
LAN
- VIA 10/100 Ethernet LAN onboard
Graphics
- Integrated AGP2X with 2D/3D Graphics Acceleration
- Motion Compensation for DVD playback
- VIP port for video overlay function
Audio
- VIA VT1612A AC'97 onboard
- 3 Audio Jacks - Line-Out, Line-In and Microphone-In
- Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro Compatible
- Digital I/O compatible with consumer mode S/PDIF
Expansion Slots
- ATA/100/66/33 Support
- 1 PCI slots
Onboard IDE
- ATA/100/66
Front I/O ports
- 2 USB jacks
- RCA line in
- Front loading, bootable Compact Flash (any size)
Back I/O Ports
- 3 Audio Jacks - Line-out, Mic-in and Line-in
- Four USB ports (two USB ports located at rear side)
- 1 EPP/ECP parallel port
- 1 16C550 compatible serial port
- 2 External PS/2 Compatible Keyboard
- 2 TV output ports (S-Video or optional RCA TV out)
- 1 S/PDIF out (optional and multiplex with RCA TV out)
- 1 RJ-45 LAN port
- 1 PCI slot (Note: support for two PCI devices
- 4 GPIO, software controllable
Power Supply - 60 watt DC-DC converter
or... you could always grasp the fact that a 2.4GHz PIV tower isn't always the best solution. C3s suck for normal desktop apps, unless you *really* want something small/hidden. But then, I'm feeding the trolls. stupid me.
mrg
For a home-entertainment system, this MSI system looks a LOT nicer.
It has a lot of audio stuff built in, and you can even power it on separately from the PC. And it has a remote.
I think this is going to give the shuttle systems a run for the money.
Why not just get an optical PC-CARD or USB adapter and go digital out straight into your receiver? Those are pretty cheap, and since it's digital there theoretically shouldn't be any loss. Since you're thinking of springing for an HDTV plasma display, I'm assuming your receiver can do Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1 already and should have decent D-A converter on it.
Yes you are
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
This is for a robot vision system, so we need both the MIPS and the ruggedness. Right now, we have some Shuttle boxes, but they're a bit big and not ruggedized enough. The PC/104 and mini-ITX people are mostly stuck below 1GHz; the fastest PC/104 machines out are 1.3GHz mobile Celerons. (I went to the Embedded Systems show yesterday to check this out. Disappointing.)
I have exactly this motherboard (EPIA-M series), and have been trying to run linux on it as a home a/v pc. It runs really well under Win2k, but for linux there's no X DRI driver, and the mpeg2 decoder hardware is inaccessible (and VIA won't release specs to OSS devs).
VIA's linux support for this thing sucks *seriously*. They have binary only drivers that don't work, and don't respond to open-source developers (even VIA's own forums are filled with people who complain about not receiving any reply to linux requests).
Alan Cox has made comments in the past referring to the strangeness of VIA: (paraphrase from memory) "any vendor that doesn't push chip specs at O/S developers is strange in my book". This doesn't stop with the O/S.
They're protecting the internals of this thing hard, and they're isolating the free O/S userbase in the process.
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
Your cost figuring is all wet. 70W/cpu * 20cpus is a lot of power. I sure as hell would'nt want to pay the utillity bill! 3W/cpu definatly looks more attractive.
Maybe I'm nitpicking but I think 17 watts is a bit high. A Seagate Barracuda V (typical harddrive for a homebox/mediabox setup; high capacity, low price and low noice) has these power requirements:
+12 VDC +/-10% (amps typ operating) 2.8
+5 VDC +/-5% (amps typ operating) 0.844
Power Management (watts)
Seek 13
Read/Write 12
Idle 9.5
Standby 0.7
If I remember right Fujitsu have a series of harddrives with even lower power requirements; down towards 10 watts as max power consumtion.
Or you can get a hard-drive made for mobile computers; they have power consumption below 6 watts (lower capacity though).
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
One caveat, here- as you can plainly see, these have no supporting chipset between the card and the mainboard. This means no (safe) hotplugging, kids.
*Good* adapters have a chipset that hangs between the IDE bus and the CF slot, which basically just ensures the signals are buffered properly, and only linked through to the bus when the card is seated properly. I gather they also appear as some sort of ATAPI-style device (allowing the system to handle/manage hotplug media presence appropriately), which means that Linux and *BSD may not (always) support them properly.
What this means is that adapters like these are fine for 'embedded' use- where you just want to replace a hard drive with moving parts (love the 'snap-on' idea!), and bury it inside the case- but poor for use as a reader for cards from your camera/palmtop/mp3 player. People have blown out their onboard IDE controllers trying to hotplug with 'straight-through' adapters like these; they've also done it with poorly-designed IDE 'hot'-swap trays. It might work in software- free *NIXes are quite resilient, and give you tools to rescan/reset the IDE bus while running- but that doesn't mean your hardware was designed to tolerate it.
So, that said, anyone know of a cheap, properly buffered adapter that's known to work with FreeBSD?
Why don't we use CF cards as a replacement for floppy disks?
I would have, but al CF-IDE adapters I have found don't support "hot" insert of CF cards.
And so, now that the chips have them their float enignes are even fast. On intel chips, integer multiplication actualy uses the floating point hardware, IIRC.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There was a more recent review on Tom's Hardware. Your link from last July. The new M series boards play DVD and MPEG4 smoothly. I think this M-100 box is using an older model.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
This window of opportunity closes when the first useful, cheap mass-market Ogg player -- comparable to Muvo, say -- hits the market.
Sorry, benchmarks be damned. I've got a 500MHz PIII and an 800 MHz C3 sitting right next to each other. The PIII kicks the C3's ass in EVERY application. I'd rather run an underclocked PIII (which might be able to go fanless if clocked low enough) than deal with the C3 anymore.
The C3/EPIA seems cool, but you can find similar solutions from Intel, built with higher quality and easier to service and support. I used to be a C3 fan but I can't even play a Nintendo emulator on an 800MHz C3 without it choking up, Microsoft Office is laggy on it, and the integrated components all seem second-rate.
I think VIA would be much better off scrapping the C3 and integrating Intel Ultra Low-Volt PIII chips on their boards. It's either that or implement a HUGE 'backside cache' like Apple did with the G3 series, an 8MB L3 memory cache sitting under the CPU would probably help things out a lot.
Also, for linux applications, the C3 has no GCC target so ALL code runs unoptimized on it, the PIII (i686 +mmx +sse) has much more mature compiler support and GCC produces much better results on the Intel chip, this will only get more apparent when GCC 3.3 debuts with a VERY well thought-out PIII scheduler, and the C3 will still be using "-march=i486 -mmmx -m3dnow -msse".
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails