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Hardware

Mini Board PC 66

Posted by CmdrTaco from the aint-that-nifty dept.
Ellis-D writes "There's a product out called the 'Mighty Might'. It's a SBC (Single Board Computer) that is the size of a hard drive. It has IDE, FDE,IR, VGA, USB, Parallel, Serial, Keyboard, Mouse, Network and LCD controllers on board. The models range from a 486-16 to a 200 mhz Pentium. The 133 w/ 64 meg of ram costs about $850." Bit pricey, but super cute.. maybe if it had wireless ethernet.
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Mini Board PC

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  • Link on over to Industrial Control Links' PC-On-A-Stick [iclinks.com]. Now if only this were a P-III ;-)
  • Just think of it, you could put together a car that had more processing power than, well.. I guess I can't think of anything right now.

    OO!

    Hook it up to side-mounted display panels of some sort -- do all sorts of fun things with graphics ;-)
  • Those things have 10BaseT ports on them, don't they? What do you need monitors/keyboards/mice for?

  • Would be perfect for those do it yourself Car MP3 Players. Either that or you brag about how small your computer is (that whole "mine's smaller than yours" thing).

  • But perfect for car pc or wearable pc applications. But $850 for a p133? geez.

    asinus sum et eo superbio

  • Do some poking around the net. I can't remember the company, but there's a place that sells webcams that simply plug right into the ethernet. They're essentially a SBC PC, camera, and embedded OS (Linux maybe?). I seem to remember they were $700 or something like that.

  • Hard to come by? What makes you think that? Twenty seconds on yahoo and I can find dozens of them...

  • There are probably a hundred companies that make these, and most are a *LOT* cheaper than this. I've seen systems that size at that power for $400, not $800.

    Just do a search in yahoo for embedded PC. You'll find lots of them. Or you can look at some of the links on my autoLinux site at http://www.bangsplat.org/autolinux [bangsplat.org].

    I seem to remember I linked to some there...

  • I hate to complain.... ok. I love to complain, but that's not the point.

    I sent in a link to this company twice! Both times I saw hide nor hair of this being posted.

  • PCM-5820-E0A1 [advantech-usa.com] - This one looks damn cool. 3.5" SBC with audio, vga, 10/100 ethernet, IDE controller, single +5V power requirement, up to 140F so it can work without CPU fan... This sounds like the perfect board to make a portable MP3 player out of, except you need to write a Linux driver for the Cyrix CX 5530 PCI sound interface (I don't think Linux has one yet).

    You might also need some power supply circuitry to get the proper power off of batteries and for your hard drive. Anybody know of any laptop sized IDE hard drives that use only 5V instead of 12V? Also, anybody got schematics for a 6V (four 1.5 AA batteries) -> 5V power regulation circuit?

    I dunno about the rest of you, but I'm really tired of having to sit at home with my desktop to listen to all my favorite music. And I'm tired of waiting for Diamond/Creative Labs to get their act together and produce a serious portable MP3 player (and no, the Rio is not serious IMHO).

  • Too bad it doesn't have built in sound or you could convert old boom boxes to MP-3 jukeboxes.
  • What a subtle plug for your website. :P
  • There's always the Advantech biscuit pc [advantech-usa.com] that the original Empeg was based on. The PCM-586E/L accepts any pentium, k5, k6, or cyrix 6x86 up to 300 mhz and has vga lcd and crt, 10/100mb ethernet, 16 bit sound, serial, parallel, keyboard, IrDA, usb interfaces, 1 pci slot, 1 pc/104 connector, eide, and two 72 pin simm sockets. It's cheaper too, but you still have to buy a cpu, ram, etc..

  • It's great that equipment like this is still available.

    I remember using a similar product back in the mid-80s made by a company called AMPRO (I think). They had a low-power PC-on-a-card system that we used. It had 1MB of RAM, a built-in video controller (sort of a super CGA - whoopee!!), a pair of serial ports, parallel port, and SCSI controller. The card was the same size as a 5-1/4 inch disc drive controller board. With a small case, a 1.2 MB floppy drive, small SCSI drive, the whole thing couldn't have weighed even 10 pounds.

    Since it weighed so little and didn't draw much power, I used to use one for data collection onboard small aircraft. The most expensive thing in the whole setup, in terms of cost as well as power consumption, was the SCSI drive (most PCs that used SCSI drives were Macs and the prices were pretty high; I think we spent $600 for a 20MB drive). Still it was pretty cheap compared to the custom data collection equipment we had been using and having nearly 20MB available for data collection was great. (No... while we did have Windows installed (2.11), we did not use it during flight operations -- DOS+assembler all the way!)

  • Okay, you can have it, but I'm cuttin me own throat!
  • For those who care, the $180 figure comes from this page [versalogic.com].

    But, I think you're misreading their site: it says, "Price reduced up to", not "Price reduced to".

    i.e., they've knocked some amount less than or equal to $180 off the regular price of the board. I still want to build my own car MP3 player with something similar, though.

  • And it's only twice the size.
  • There is already a site that has what you need. goto http://www.kinetic.org/cd3.html The mp3 player is based on the advantech board, however the site also has the software you need freely available, including a custom version of redhat ( I will attempt to create a custom debian, not a redhat fan), the touch screen drivers for linux, and the sound drivers for the ess sound card builtin to the advantech board. No schematics though, but it does tell you all the hardware you need.
  • I was wondering when someone was going to mention the 5682. That is nifty. And it's not $650. My brother's using one of those as the base of the MP3 player soon to be in his car. Now, we have to hunt down the 4 or 6 inch LCD.

    Mike
    --

  • You could conceivably call Advantech's Cincinnati or Boston office for a catalog or price check, right?

    Mike
    --

  • I believe the Cyrix CX 5530 PCI sound interface
    is 100% sound blaster compatible.

    I don't know if it's exactly the same chip, but Alan Cox uses the MediaGX sound chip on his desktop and that he uses it to test his sb16 driver.

    If that's right, I'm buying!!!!
  • Actually, it comes without WinCE. You have to specify the right product code.

    PCM-5820-E0A1: Cyrix GXM SBC with Processor, Audio, VGA/LCD and Ethernet

    PCM-5820CE-10C: Same as PCM-5820-E0A1, but with a 10 MB Compact Flash card with Windows® CE Ver. 2.1

    And then buy a FlashCard and mke2fs it! ;)
  • Just a few minutes ago I found this product..
    http://www.versalogic.com/Ds/vsbc6.htm
    It has a $180 price tag
  • It's all about small systems.. Like MP3 home/car systems.. These style of computers are hard to come by.. You don't have to worry about back plains and all that.. They also look cooler than the sbcpci cards (doesn't have the egde connector on them).....
  • That's cool!!! But the 3.5" and stuff is faster and has more onboard items.. But the 386 is still cool none-the-less.
  • One word "Servers".
    Host games, pages, ect... Save alot of space and if you look at my $180 post, it would be cheap too.. Just get a moniter/key/mouse switcher for it and you could fit all your servers on the corner of a desktop!
  • I went there.. No price on there.. Most likely in the $600+ range... The only advantage they have is that there is one pci slot on board and sound...
  • It's linux compatable!!! (Cept the use, ir and one other thing (wasn't important)) But everything else is linux compatable...
  • USE is suppossed to be USB... The other thing was Analog out put..
  • I didn't see any discounts on it.. I think it on flash ram.. The $180 board can be customized by the dealer so you can get discounts.. =>
  • One hell of a game boy!!!!
  • http://www.ampro.com/
    They have alot of diffrent configurations of sbc's.. There's have one addition, scsi.. No prices thou.
  • What? The have on their website, $180.. You can buy the CPU and memory cheaper than what they are going to sell those to you.. You can also take off feautures to lower the price...
  • Never mind, it's just that they make it out to seem that cheap.. They just cut $180 off..
  • Yes you can do that.. USB is wonerful and National SC from what I have heard is trying to embedded systems and use usb for devices, also know as modual computers (If I remember correctly). But the downfall for right now is that LiNUX has no support for USB at the moment.. But they might have it in the next couple of months..
  • We need to find all the companies that make biscut computer, from what I take it that is the correct name for these board, and put them up on a page so that we don't have to search all over for our DIY computer projects.. Hmm.. Maybe I should start selling for diffrent companies off my webpage.. Hmm That's a good idea..
  • Woo Hoo.. Now I can't make my gremlin worth something!!!
    Hmm I think i'm going to name one of my machnes that.. =>
  • You can attach 2 HD's if I remeber correctly.. So 28 gig isn't big enough?
  • You just have to write it up just write.. Trust me..
  • Oh like weapontry computers need much processing to run.. 8088...... All I have to say on that subject..
  • So, what I'd really like to do is buy something like this (something that can be the guts of a PC in the size of a 3.5" slot), buy maybe 10 of them and put them into a RAID rack-mount enclosure, and then plug all 10 into a set of SCSI disks and have myself a kick-ass parallel web server.

    What I'm wondering is to what degree these units could share devices, for example, could I have a single PCI chain that all these units had ID's on? Of course, I could have just one unit act as the "file server" and have the others mount the disks through it via NFS or something, but that's a lot of overhead, if instead all the units could treat the disk as something "local", and get the speed advantage of that.

    I'm thinking something like sharing a PCI chain is probably a hell of a lot easier to support than sharing RAM. But that's OK - I'm happy dealing with this administratively like 10 separate machines, because I'm sure I could write scripts to manage that (e.g. restart the web servers on all 10 simultaneously). All I want is something that looks and acts like 10 rack-mount servers in the space of 1 - if we it can share a PCI chain, so much the better.

    Anyone remember Sequent? :)

    Brian

  • This could work and I would buy one if they were cheaper, but when you can buy a high end laptop for around $1500, why would I pay almost $900 for a low end pentium without the drives, monitor, etc. If you want a machine for a car dash or something similar it is still just cheaper to slice and dice a laptop.

  • It is one impressively dense connector farm. Its 512k Flash just won't run enough of Linux to give us a solid state car computer though.

    One can buy an Alton M598 MB with K62-300 for about $150 and get 4 channel Sound. Then one can add the PCMCIA adapter. It's just a question of whether you computer is dash mounted or trunk mounted, $700 for the dash mount option makes it a bit less than fun.

    "Value" aside, if it had a PCMCIA slot, I might add it to my toys-to-acquire list. Would anyone else?

  • I've seen those. I'm afraid I'm fixated on the PCMCIA idea though. For instance one could hook a 2.5" HD to the IDE connector and use the PCMCIA hold a 100Mb/s ethercard, and thus load one's MP3s at 3 songs a second.

    Oh, what dreams may come.
  • check this out....

    http://www.eg3.com/ulc/indcxsbu.htm

    happy hunting....

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