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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.
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.
Totally. This would fit nicely into my Camaro's DIN slot. If anyone would like to buy it for me, I'll be happy to pay you back with a harrowing thrill ride, accompanied by any music you'd like.
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 $200 ? anybody?
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
If they only made one with a good video card it'd be perfect for lan parties. Not the best computer you can buy, but my and 2 other friends are going to Quakecon in Texas, our main issue is size. The trunk in a '69 chevelle is large but we need a months worth of clothes, 3 computers and 3 monitors. It looks like you can easily fit 3 of these on your lap or in the glove compartment or anywhere besides the trunk while leaving tons of space in the seating area of the car so you don't need to sacrifice comfort to get space.
Also, imagine not having to carry a huge case onto an airplane hoping it'll fit under the seat, you could easily put this into a bag with other stuff you want to carry on. And if the 60W of power doesn't seem like enough -
Tested configurations. The PW-60 has been tested on a EPIA -800Mhz, 512Mb RAM, two IBM 120Gb hard drives while decoding a MPEG movie. Recommended configs: C3 processor, 1 regular size hard drive, any amount of RAM.
Seems like it can handle the power consumption required to be a gaming PC. And you'd only need one 40GB hard drive (won't have MP3s or movies or anything, just games.)
Don't forget the ever popular "Imagine a beowolf cluster..." Hey, that might not be such a bad idea. At a rough guess, eighteen of these fit in the same space as a mid sized tower.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I wonder why no-ones talked about using this as a router? My biggest problem with a regular pc is size noise, and power consumtion. price would be the limiting factor no?
"think of it as evolution in action"
Cost wise, the EPIA-M MB's are actually pretty good since they can do the boot-off network thing so you only need one harddrive. You will need to buy a lot of RAM though. The total cost would probably end up pretty close to 4000$, 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.
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.
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.
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
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?