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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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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
go back to high school, do not pass go, do not collect £200 :-)
Voltage is just the 'speed' the current 'flows' at - power consumption is measured in Watts, or voltage multiplied by amperage (the 'amount' of current)
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.
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.
http://www.acscontrol.com/
Works fine.
The Minibox seems to run the EPIA-M motherboards from VIA with either their 600Mhz Eden or faster C3 processors. The EPIA-M motherboards support direct MPEG-2 playback so DVD playback should be no problem. For more info on Mini-Itx stuff check out mini-itx's website.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
"...and does floating point, so Ogg is possible."
If you will recall, the XIPH team re-wrote the Ogg decoder so that it can run on systems that can only do integer math. "Several optimizations were made that resulted in the decoder being twice as fast. We've also tuned the code to be tolerant for those who implement Vorbis using integer-only math. This allows hardware and embedded devices to more easily support Ogg Vorbis playback." http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4416.
I have an 800 MHz Mini-ITX computer and it does not have the juice for a consistent smooth DivX/MPEG-4 or MPEG-2 playback. It is very acceptable as a hobby computer, but not yet there for true home A/V. Someday this form factor of a computer will be the solution, but not yet. It is great for audio, though, and basic game playing!
Run, don't walk, to your nearest computer store and ask them to get Mni-ITX style motherboards for you. Via makes a few of them. Check out viavpsd.com, its whats in this little box.
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
EPIA-M with 600Mhz processor - $150
Ugly but quiet case - $50
Harddisk - $80
128Mhz RAM - $30
total - 310$. Note that I left out the CDROM/DVDROM drive. This is because the EPIA-M supports boot from network. If you really want one you could spend another 20$ for a generic.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
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"?
Maybe because routers cost $50 to $100, and come with easy configuration tools? This thing costs five to ten times more, so it doesn't make much sense to use it solely as a router.
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!
I assume we're talking about Vorbis, the audio codec of the Ogg family. AFAIK, the integer-only codec is separate from the main Vorbis code and called Tremor (I hope the name has nothing to do with sound quality). There are good reasons why these codecs are mainly developed for FP math; for example modern processors are faster with FP as they are optimized for modern software (a kind of reverse chicken and ogg problem :-).
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
There's a castlerock driver in xfree 86. Now. Finally.
:)
We're talking five days ago, mind. So don't feel so bad
Two things of interest:
1, The driver is a result of via and Alan Cox working together.
2, Alan has been using an epia as his main box, and I quote:
"I have two boxes with the relevant hardware. One of them is my desktop box and I've been running the driver as my main desktop for a couple of weeks now."
Seal of approval, if ever I saw one.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Wrong, wrong, horribly wrong. An interesting analogy, but fatally flawed. Even if you start from the premise that the "speed" at which current flows varies with variations in voltage, that's still not the definition of voltage.
Voltage is the expression in units (Volts) of electromotive force (the E in E=IR, Ohm's law). It's how much difference in electrical potential exists between 2 points. If a conductive path is established between those 2 points then the E will cause the flow of current (I, expressed in Amperes).
How much current flows depends on the voltage difference between those 2 points and the conductance of that path. The conductance is usually expressed as its mathmatical inverse, resistance (R, expressed in Ohms). The higher the resistance, the lower the current.
How fast that current flows will be somewhere just a little shy of the speed of light and will be pretty much independant of voltage level.
To get a certain amount of current to flow through a given resistance a certain voltage must be applied across that resistance. The amount of power, measured in Watts, is the voltage times the amperage. 10 Volts will drive 1 Ampere through 10 Ohms for a dissipation of 10 Watts, or 10 Amperes through 1 Ohm for a dissipation of 100 Watts.
If one is talking about AC (alternating current), then the power equation (P=EI) has to be modified to take into account the continuous change of voltage and amperage over time, as well as another kind of opposition to the flow of current, known as reactance, which changes as the frequency of alternation changes (and whether it increases or decreases in response to an increase or decrease in frequency depends upon the presence or absence in the conductive path of a couple of other electrical characteristics), but for household stuff the DC equation can still give you a rough idea of power consumption, or a way to figure average current by starting with the Watts and doing the math backwards.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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!!