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Geek Culture / Atom Projects

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The Wilderbeast
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Posted: 4th Jun 2011 21:36 Edited at: 4th Jun 2011 21:42
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I recently purchased a mini-ITX Intel Atom mobo to play around with, and it struck me that the number of uses for this thing is endless! There are always those that complain how god-awful the performance is, but I don't think they realize this is a chip designed for embedded low-power use, not power computing.

Anywho, I currently have two of these things now, one is being used as an audio server / torrent box and the other is part of my bass rig and handles a load of digital amp and effects modeling. Both are fanless and thus completely silent, and the 5,400 RPM discs in the server make virtually no noise at all. Power consumption is about 50W for the server and 42W for the amp - not bad eh.



Home server / torrent box


I'd love to hear what other kind of innovative projects people have got on the go. It's a shame I'm saving up to go traveling, otherwise I'd buy another ten of these!

And for anyone who's tempted I'd really recommend it. You can pick up a board + dual core Atom for less than 50 pounds brand new - and it's not that hard to get hold of an old hard disk and some ram - GIVE IT A TRY


Blitzwerks | Indie Development Team
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Indicium
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Posted: 4th Jun 2011 22:31
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interesting indeed. Do you reckon one of those things could host a small minecraft server?

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The Wilderbeast
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Posted: 4th Jun 2011 22:58
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Very easily. From what I remember eBuyer's official MC server was run off an Atom at some point. The limiting factor would be the RAM, and in that respect the board I have would be crap because it only has one DDR2 slot. This board:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/242781
has two slots, and RAM is dirt cheap - so it would be pretty easy to bung 4GB in.

I'd also check out the case I got here:
http://linitx.com/product/11288
It has a 20x4 character LCD front panel which can be interfaced with really easily. So you could display server loads etc. meaning you could run it headless and know straight away if there are any problems. It's all really easy because it'll work with this program called LCD4Linux, which allows you to specify what info is displayed.



Blitzwerks | Indie Development Team
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Indicium
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Posted: 4th Jun 2011 23:00 Edited at: 4th Jun 2011 23:03
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That is pretty awesome, that's the exact board I was looking at. I may invest in one of these, I've always wanted to run my own minecraft server.

Those LCD screens look amazing too.

Edit: What sort of PSU do you need for these? I can't see normal psus fitting into those cases.

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The Wilderbeast
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Posted: 5th Jun 2011 00:45
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Search for a picoITX PSU - same 20/24 pin connector head, but much much smaller and completely solid state. eBuyer is probably the best place to get common components cheaply, but for the specialized components (case, PSU) take a look at LinITX.com.

You will need a AC - DC power adapter, and the picoITX PSU. It's quite possible you could use a laptop power adapter off eBay or somewhere rather than splashing thirty quid or so on the one of LinITX.

Also it's worth taking into consideration the CF card slot in the case I listed. I have OS installed on a 2GB flash card and all the server data on the hard drives - good practice to get into because you can keep the two separate so you don't get the OS using up HDD bandwidth during critical times.


Blitzwerks | Indie Development Team
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PAGAN_old
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Posted: 5th Jun 2011 01:14
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cool stuff yo.

dont hate people who rip you off,cheat and get away with it, learn from them
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