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Atom-Based Mini-ITX Motherboard Available
LWATCDR writes "A company out of the UK is selling an Intel Atom-based Mini-ITX motherboard. It has a riser for two PCI cards, two SATA ports, and an IDE ports so it could make a great little NAS, firewall, MAME box, or low-power workstation. To add to the fun it has a real parallel port 'perfect for hardware hacking,' a real RS-232 port 'perfect for data acquisition,' and two USB ports. The price is around $100, give or take, and hopefully it will come down over time. All in all a nice system to run Linux, WindowsXP, BSD, or maybe even OpenSolaris on."
I thought it would make a great mini NAS nut it only has a 10/100 nic. That was a bummer
Sheldon
I have a via PC2500E board (same as what's in the GPC sold over there in the US), it's a low power cpu but they ship it with a tiny heatsink + fan as that's cheaper than a moderate sized heatsink with no fan. Simply remove puny heatsink, add on moderate sized heatsink and you're good to go.
Personally I find the bucket of old Socket 370 heatsinks I have laying about are great for this purpose, simply drill four mounting holes in them and you're good to go sans fan.
Two Parts Swash, One Part Buckle
My Nokia charger was rated for 1.5 watts. My current Motorola Razr comes with a charger that's rated for ~2.8 watts. Obviously, the wattage of a charger has to be higher than the battery output in order to charge the phone.
Make of it what you will.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
RS-232 is still a popular communications protocol in industrial/control applications, along with test equipment (i.e. data acquisition as stated in the summary). You can still buy exorbitantly priced RS-232 PCI expansion boards for these applications. The manufacturers of this board are probably looking to get some of that market, hence its inclusion.
Give up on arguing with those idiots. It's the same kind that compares netbooks/subnotebooks to draggable notebooks.
Shipping from UK to the USA costs more than the device: they want 52.90GBP for the system, and 59.99GBP for shipping!
Unless you want to pay 219.75 USD for this device, I highly suggest you find a supplier in the United States.
Intel has a much better board than this, erm, intel motherboard: the Intel D201GLY2A Little Valley Mainboard, 79$ in bulk packaging. And yes, that's a mini-ITX with a serial and parallel port and yes that includes the CPU too, an Intel Celeron 220 1.2 GHz, Conroe-L (65 nm) based on Intel Core microarchitecture.
Its an Intel board and they have that in (most of) their server boards : s3000ahlx. I have 3 of those. I use the boards to control my server room temperature (amongst other things) and nothing beats the easy programming of a RS232 port. Additionally I bought some Kouwell ParPort cards to do some other jobs.
to code or not to code, that is the question.
Something like this:
http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm-e.asp
or this:
http://www.sataport.com/
http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D945GCLF-Mini-ITX-Motherboard
$80
I think this box would be an ideal computing appliance for the average user. Of course, I would recommend CentOS and a carefully configured set of applications and GUI.
Think, like, your mom and dad checking their email and looking for bargains on Craigslist. At 4 watts.
technical writing / development
The ACP-12U appears to be a Travel Charger, meaning that it charges a phone much faster than a regular charger by supplying a higher current (perhaps at the cost of battery life).
This charger's maximum output rating is not a reasonable measure of the phone's usage.
If you want a truly low-power board, check out the EFIKA with Freescale MPC5200B processor. It has lower specs that the board in TFA, but consumes less than 10 watts with hard drive, and has RS-232 serial port, USB and NIC. Systems with Freescale MPC5121 and MPC5123 dual-core CPUs are also in the make (see news section). :)
:)
I'm running an EFIKA 5200B board with ATI 9250 graphics card, hard drive and CD burner with Debian Linux. Installation was via USB stick and serial port.
I spent a few minutes googling and came up with a US supplier with various mini-itx logic boards. One has gigabit ethernet. Others have HDMI, DVI and more:
... but if they want to thank me for the plug, I could put some of these to use...
:-)
http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.100/.f
And no... I have no connection with them
Seems like I also hit another page that had mini-itx boards with a Duo 2 processor. Now, I just need to find one with a Duo 1 processor, put it in a tiny metal case and use to cook breakfast.
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
In cell phone industry they have "3 watt limit" that is the maximum power consumption that a mobile phone can have. It is not about batteries but heat: you do not want burn your hands on mobile.
Yeah, the 10/100 ain't so great, but you can always put a GigE NIC in one of the PCI slots.If you compare ethernet power consumption at 10, 100, or 1000 Mbit/s, you can see that it rises quite rapidly. For most of time home server is perfectly ok with 10 Mbit/s, when you stream video you may like to have 100 Mbit/s and when transfereing files gigabit is nice. But it is waste to keep 24/7 running server at gigabit.
I've had VIA Epia-based board as home dsl gateway, automation server, video server and dvb vdr box. It is some difference when you have system running 24/7 if it consumes 30W (my epia system with disk powersave) or 150+W (old athlon based computer that has about same cpu power).
For canadians check out ncix.com they dont have stock but will ship when they do.
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=30092&vpn=BOXD945GCLF&manufacture=Intel
http://www.minitechnet.de/761.html?&cHash=1&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=4619 Features: * Intel® Atom(TM) processor 1.1 GHz BGA CPU * Intel® US15 Embedded Chipset * FSB 400/533 * 1x DDR2 240 pins DIMM * 2x PCI-Express 1x * 2x SDIO * Flat Panel Display Support by on board LVDS * 1x PCI slot * Up to256MB on board graphics memory * CRT, DVI (optional) * 1x 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet * 8x USB 2.0, 3x RS232C * 1x ATA100 and 2x SATA150/300 IDE Controller * Compact Flash socket on board * High definition audio * TPM (Trusted Platform Module) Onboard * Size: 170 x 170 mm (6.7" x 6.7")
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
For general purposes, it's 10 bits to the byte. 8 for data and 2 for overhead.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
As long as we're at it, let's point out a 99% efficient PSU to go with it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Your cell-phone runs on a lot less than that. Have a look at the battery sometime.
My cellphone has a battery that is 3.6V, 600mah, which works out to 2.16Wh (2.16 W over a period of one hour).
It can stay in standby for aproximately 72 hours before needing recharging, so actual power-consumption should be on the order of 2.16/72 = 0.03W.
Your mileage may vary, there are certainly monster-cellphones that use a lot more power than this. But seeing as my fairly typical cellphone uses on the order of 1% of 4 watts it's probably a fair bet that most cellphones use under 4W.
That's in standby. When talking it uses a lot more, perhaps on the order of a watt or so (which would mean it's empty after 2 hours of talking)
That is the northbridge heatsink and fan, from the page,
"Note the maximum height component is the fan cooled north bridge chip (45mm above the main board)"
The cpu's is the small tiny heatsink next to it.
doc Don't get me wrong, I think the atom is very impressive but I'm pretty sure that no cellphone requires 4 watts on standby.
I've just taken the battery out of my nokia 6300 (fairly generic phone in the UK at the moment) and the label says 3.7V and 860mAh. This means the battery stores 3.7 x 0.86 = 3.2 Wh.
Even with light usage I rarely charge the phone more than once every two days. Let's assume it can do 50 hours of standby. This means that standby power requirements are 3.2 / 50 = 0.06 W. I think we can all agree that this is quite a lot less than 4 W.
Speaking from an electronics hobbyist's point of view, the standard RS-232 serial port is just so much simpler to use and interface than USB. No drivers required, real plug and play. All I need to interface a microcontoller is a simple level converter chip and some lines of code.
A USB dongle is not the same as a genuine RS-232 port. It might be good enough for consumer grade gadgets but it's just an imitation.
Plus, you lose USB ports that way. That PS/2 adapter looks like it'll block at least one adjacent port, maybe all four. Again, it's just an imitation for the real thing. A dedicated port for a dedicated function is going to be better.
=Smidge=
Thing is, RS-232 supports a larger current than USB will, so it can drive more high-powered attachments where USB will fail to supply the needed current.
Some EEPROM burners have this problem when used with USB-to-RS232 converters.
Get over yourself. Some gear is fussy and doesn't work with USB adapters but does work with real serial ports.
It might sound silly, but it's true.
Looks like it is $80 (including CPU?!) in the US:
945GC Mobo + Atom 230