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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.
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.
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]?"
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
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!
The Mini-ITX boards were reviewed on Tom's Hardware not long ago here
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
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!)
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.
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!
From the site:
VIA EPIA V, 800MHz Motherboard
Regular price: $115.00
Sale price: $112.00
At savings like that, buy two, or four. Start that beowulf cluster NOW!
http://www.acscontrol.com/
Works fine.
Totally. This would fit nicely into my Camaro's DIN slot. If anyone would like to buy it for me, I'll be happy to pay you back with a harrowing thrill ride, accompanied by any music you'd like.
Hmm.. sounds tempting, but do I need a mullet first?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Don't forget the ever popular "Imagine a beowolf cluster..." Hey, that might not be such a bad idea. At a rough guess, eighteen of these fit in the same space as a mid sized tower.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Run, don't walk, to your nearest computer store and ask them to get Mni-ITX style motherboards for you. Via makes a few of them. Check out viavpsd.com, its whats in this little box.
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
I wonder why no-ones talked about using this as a router? My biggest problem with a regular pc is size noise, and power consumtion. price would be the limiting factor no?
"think of it as evolution in action"
Mullet and moustache.
Cost wise, the EPIA-M MB's are actually pretty good since they can do the boot-off network thing so you only need one harddrive. You will need to buy a lot of RAM though. The total cost would probably end up pretty close to 4000$, 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.
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"?
Dude, you're going to a lan party. Skip the extra clothes and the hygiene supplies. You'll fit right in.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
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!
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
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!!