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Constructing A Low-Power 2U Wireless Rack-Box

Posted by timothy on from the every-household-needs-one dept.

adelayde writes "Recently we decided to build ourselves a custom rack-mountable box that we could use as a web and DNS caching proxy and which would offer flexible wireless networking facilities and have an uniterruptible power supply. The result was a 2U rack-box with dual wireless networks built upon a low-power Via EPIA MiniITX motherboard. The box has two wireless networks built in with external antenna connectors, locking switches on the front to avoid tampering, a battery to give at least 20 mins of autonomous operation, a low wattage power supply and most importantly lots of blue LEDs :)"

6 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Re:ooh, impressive =) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    how the hell is this offopic?
    stupid mods. PAY MORE ATTENTION. thank you.

  2. Re:insufficient! by mvdw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The regulator looks like it's there to power the "6V yellow led". Obviously these guys know nothing about electronics - the wireless bridge is powered from a "DC-DC converter" made from an LM317(!) - that's a linear supply, not a DC-DC converter. This supply is probably superfluous anyway - the wireless bridge it powers runs off a 7V supply, telling me it most likely has an internal regulator. They should have checked - might have saved themselves some work...

  3. Soekris by N4DMX · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Soekris has an interesting board that is said to be optimized for use as a wireless router(Model net4526)
    I imagine it would fit in to a project such as this quite easily, and it has pretty low power consumption.
    But, at 133 Mhz and 128 Mbytes of RAM, it's not as powerful.

    Link: Soekris
    --
    42
  4. Re:2u = 2 much by jjshoe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I agree. He should have purchased this single mini itx 1u or this dual mini itx 1u

    --
    -- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount} /dev/girl -t {wet;fsck;fsck;yes;yes;yes;umount} {/de
  5. Smaller is not necessarily better by gorim · · Score: 4, Insightful


    He may have built this for remote locations
    or heat filled rooms/closets. In those cases
    you want decent space and decent airflow INSIDE
    the box.

    Laptops have neither, and tend to suffer heat
    related problems easily enough.

    Its good already that he went low power and
    low thermal, and put it in a good solid spacious
    chassis.

    If dollars were a concern, going down to 1U
    isn't bad, but no further for real applications.

  6. Re:Hrmmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    There has to be something special or unusual about this post, but damn it all I can't see it.

    Sure, he integrated a comment about "News For Nerds" into it, but for such a short post, it doesn't look like anything special... So where's the nifty part that makes this thing "(Score:4, Interesting)"?