I keep getting this comment so to head it off: The fact that the internal bosses are not full-depth doesn't really suggest that this chassis is die cast - that would be an _immense_ amount of extra effort and cost for the return you'd get. Die casting is much more expensive upfront, it produces weaker parts, costs more, takes longer, and the surface finish and tolerances straight out of the mold are not terrific (pock marks, ripple, etc.) It's great for parts with highly complex shapes, where flatness and surface finish don't matter, or for rotationally symmetric parts that can be quickly turned in a lathe, but for anything that requires reliable dimensions or clean-looking flat surfaces, you have to machine them all in afterwards; casting gets you the bulk of your volume, but every flat surface has to be added after the fact. So to get the straight walls on every side of this case you'd have to run a tool over every surface, inside and out, including all those radii, and by the time you're done you've spent the same amount of time it would take to mill it out of solid billet. Since this has a straightforward two dimensional cross section, it's an ideal shape for extrusion. It would come out of the press pretty much ready to sell, just bandsaw it to length. Yeah, you have to put it on the mill, but you're talking about very little time just to knock off those internal bosses, add the locating grooves for the lids, drill the LED hole, and drill and press in the screw inserts, most of which you'd have to do after casting anyway. That tool mark above the internal boss is also definitely not a gate mark; it's far too deep and too wide. Besides any of that though, the company sells other machines in chassis' that are identical except for their height. "The same thing except for height" is pretty much what the extrusion process was invented for, so companies that make parts like this one tend to take advantage of it. Will accept disputes if you have firsthand experience getting things like this made. :p
I'm pretty sure I saw that exact enclosure advertised for audio amplifiers and set top boxes a few years ago, but I can't find it. That kind of modification to an enclosure is the kind of thing that enclosure manufacturers offer as a standard service, even in extremely small batches. I love the little _Tunic_ sticker on your TV by the way.
was watching this during a midwest thunderstorm and at 19:15 my viewing experience went something like "but, what happens when this device loses power?" followed by my entire house going completely dark. now I know!
One of the most interesting things to me about industrial SBCs is the almost pathological dedication to silkscreening reference designators for every component.
i worked for a board manufacturing company for a short time in the early 1980s Circuits Engineering (they were shut down when the government found out they were dumping spent toxic chemicals into a large hole behind the building) ..we would take a copper clad board, etch it and silk screen it.... silk screening every component at that time was so that whatever company populated the board the line could simply say put component C1 into C1 silkscreen position..the line people did not need to know what C1 was or what it did..so they could hire very unskilled people to do the populating ... As an example in the late 1970s i worked for SDC (Sundstrand Data Control) which was manufacturing FDC (Flight Data/Voice Recorders) at fantastic rate they could barely keep up with demand..anyway the entire assembly line were people (oddly 90% of them were divorced women) that did not have any electronic experience they were just assembling widgets..albeit VERY important widgets! of course board manufacturing has changed by lightyears in the last 50+ years..
nothing says "industrial" more than industrial quantities of aluminum or iron in the case only to find the same kind of PCB we find anywhere else. sometimes its not even conformal coated, nor have ceramic components or anything, its just a computer, but with lots of pathological silkscreen as you said... somehow industrial quantities of silkscreen makes it industrial its almost like no one knows what they are doing and everything is pure cargo-cult.
This is entirely personal but thank you for uploading a lil guy on april fool's day. I get incredibly exhausted by poorly executed lies disguised as goofs and it's really nice to be able to enjoy a genuine exploration of a tiny computer instead of seeing yet another prank. thanks for the wonderful expeditions!
Trying to view the BIOS screen, I tilted my own display back to catch a better angle. My brain has completely forgotten he's staring at a video on an OLED, not a magic window to a TN panel
The reason of two Ethernet RP-45 ports are shorter is passive pass-thru function. These ports have external Ethernet transformers on bottom side of the board. It allows relays to be connected in between RJ45 and Ethernet transformer. Other two RJ45 port have embedded transformers and need power to operate anyway.
American Healthcare IT worker here - you brought a cynical smile to my face at your description of "put it on a vlan and let it do its thing". I love the dream that plugging in an UNKNOWN DEVICE could be done in any less than 7 months, 6 RFCs and 2 weekly meetings for the duration of the testing phase, and then again for a few weeks after go-live.
@@CathodeRayDude Ah, meant it more as a jest... Fully getting into the weeds regarding corporate IT policy is far outside the necessary scope of the video. Mostly just musing myself with imagining how much simpler IT could be without all the institutional checks & balances. Sorry if it came off as dismissive! Huge fan of the series btw! It blew my mind upon starting to do IT how many of these little guys are out there... Spotting new ones in the wild has become one of my new favorite pasttimes.
@@mistaecco yeah, I figured I'd just jab you back. :p I worked with a number of hospitals and other fairly high sensitivity businesses and I remember the misery of it all. They would contact me, ask to set something up, we would do a proof of concept, and then they just tell me that they'd get back in touch once they were ready to actually execute on it, and then four months would go by without a word while they went through their committees and got sign off from everyone under the sun, and then we finally do it, and then once it was done it was so locked down that diagnostics were impossible short of having somebody on site walk over to the device and look at the lights on front. I will never miss that job.
@@mistaecco oh, and I'm glad you like the series, it's actually something that had been in the back of my mind for years and I was just never sure how to execute on it, because again, back in that job, I saw stuff like this all the time and I always wondered what it looked like inside, and there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of these little computers with names you've never heard of on them. I figured it would be a rich source of material and it really has paid off, I think a lot of people have always wondered what was going on in these things.
The fact that it was hooked to a gamma knife to me makes it 1000% cooler. I used to work in healthcare in a facility with a gamma knife, and yeah you're right. It uses extremely accurate high doses of radiation to do surgery (mostly on tumors) without having to actually cut someone open. It was also the highest security part of the hospital. Im talking rooms made entirely of reinforced concrete and multiple layers of solid steel doors. If an alarm went off in there every emergency responder from the nuclear guys to firefighters to security guards would drop what they were doing and rush over there..
Well yeah, the capsules in radiotherapy machines have been stolen before and broken open, causing deaths and massive cleanup bills. The last thing you want is somebody purposely stealing the capsule. Whereas here in Australia we lost a tiny radioactive capsule. It jigged loose inside the equipment it was being transported in, and fell out onto the road. Took several days to find it, haha
@@3rdalbum I suppose the famous one is the Goiânia incident, but I'll mention it here for the 5-10% of viewership of this channel that doesn't know about it yet.
I would love to see a collab between you and technology connections. Uou both have an incredible ability to mame something that is boring at first glance be absolutely amazing for almost an hour.
I work in HVAC controls and we see more and more equipment that have that fail-bypass relay option. This allows the HVAC controllers to be daisy-chained via integrated ethernet switches, but also bypass if one piece of equipment is offline to avoid cutting comms of the rest of the run.
In regards to that PowerBook G4 Titaniums super proprietary battery, I have an interesting (though admittedly quite silly) idea. On older PC motherboards (around the time of the 286, 386, and 486/ 1980s though to the mid 1990s), there was commonly a Varta branded (or equivalent) 3.6 volt NiCd/NiMH rechargeable battery, and they are known to corrode and destroy the motherboards traces. Since they are known to corrode, it's quite common nowadays to remove the battery completely and install a cr2032. But like you said in your segment about that PowerBook G4 Titanium, the motherboard trys to... well... recharge it. Because of that, those people replacing the battery with a cr2032 will use a diode between (and my memory could be failing me here) the positive lead on the motherboard and the battery holder. That keeps the battery from being charged, as all cr2032s are non-rechargable (if we are to ignore LIR2032s and ML2032 which have their own issues). Now, I've never done this before on a PowerBook G4 Titanium, so there could be issues that I am not aware of. Just throwing out ideas
XP Pro for Embedded means you can use RDP to remote into it as well as remote WMI but it's cheaper because it doesn't comes with a CAL for AD since it's designed to be used as a standalone computer. Windows XP home didn't had support for remote management, and Windows XP embedded was a completely different thing since you could cut out entire parts of the OS via the OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK), you could literally strip it down to the kernel. XP Pro for Embedded is just normal XP Pro but with a much lower licensing cost.
When I was in high school my parents newsagency had electronic signage put in by a vendor, basically a 17" LCD on an arm screwed into the ceiling, with a small pc VESA mounted on the back. The company eventually went bust so I claimed the gear. I ended up with a tiny embedded Celeron(?) machine, held in the most austere metal box. It looked like those radiation cans they screw into machines. I think it had power equivalent to a Pentium 3, so it could run Windows XP, a program that showed JPEGs downloaded over the network. and not much else. That was the only time I've had any real contact with industrial computers, and I was fascinated by all the random connectors it had.
@@jonobst Then it had a huge, very heavy bracket that mounted the machine and monitor to the arm, via the vesa mount. I don't know if there's a term for it, but it was like a vesa extender.
@@jonobst Yeah, the VESA mounting holes reminded me of the thin clients they had attached to the backs of monitors when I spent a few months after university doing data entry at a hospital.
29:25 The northbridge is indeed responsible for the memory interface; the fact that the CPU specifies an FSB (Front Side Bus) speed is a dead giveaway. The FSB is how the CPU communicates with the northbridge in order to access the memory and PCIe interfaces.
When is intel going to finally have unified memory , when ? its almost 30 years now since the 386 maybe when their market share is 2% and no one uses intel anymore...
@@monad_tcp I believe they're working on it, actually. We're never going to see it on desktops and gaming laptops where discrete graphics chips are a thing, but laptops that run solely on integrated graphics should be UMA in the near future.
So nice to see someone else that is able to fully navigate Windows with just a keyboard. Especially in industrial applications, this option is a godsend, as many machines are in places where you can't find any surfaces you could half decently use a mouse on. A keyboard is easily hand-held in almost all wonky stances you need to be in to reach some of the deeply burrowed devices!
Oh yes, it's such an important skill. I wish Microsoft had focused more on it, there's some things that are just unreasonably tedious this way, but everything can be done without a mouse
21:40 yep, those annoying USB-only PCIe ports exist, and I loathe them! In laptops they do it all the time for 3G modems, and with it, you can plug a wifi + Bluetooth card and only Bluetooth (always USB. Don't ask me why) will work. On the HP Pavilion dv6000 series, side by side one slot does PCIe only, one does USB only. Can't have both. _Or you can if you're me with a soldering iron and a bit of wire..._
The whole combined USB and PCI-E + SATA functionality wasn’t really a thing in business notebooks until the 1st Gen core i series, you could usually choose between a mSATA SSD or a WWAN card. (Or if you’re HP, still support only WWAN cards in a WWAN slot, atleast on the 3rd Gen core series generations, 4th Gen machines are a bit of a mSATA to M.2 transitional period since i have a Acer TravelMate with a 4th Gen haswell i5 that uses a M.2 SSD, yet a dell precision from the same CPU generation uses a mSATA SSD. (I guess SATA M.2 SSD’s are pretty much just a mSATA SSD in a different form factor in a basic sense)
“What on this could need a fan!?” The chipset. The 945GM chipset drew significantly more power than the CPU. I used a similar board as my home theater PC before upgrading to an HDTV.
Sure but to wit, they didn't actually put one in here, so it seems like it doesn't actually need it. I guess maybe it would if they were pushing the graphics capabilities harder?
Yeah pretty much, the CPU draws 2.5w as stated in this video, the north bridge is 10-11w and the south bridge is like another 3w iirc. Makes me surprised Intel didn’t make a special low power version of the 945 chipset. (Though I think they did sometime after releasing the first Atoms) Also have essentially this machine but in a netbook, a Toshiba NB200 except it has a 160gb HDD and a Atom N280 1.66ghz CPU.
Keep in mind the intended environment this system was employed to, hospitals/healthcare. These places are keep at cooler temperatures to help combat bacteria and infections. Just a idea on why this system might not need fans.
@@thegeforce6625 Atom had two primary reasons to exist. Power draw was one. Cheapness was the other. Intel wasn’t wasting any design or manufacturing effort on a new low power chipset until they knew it would be a success. The chipset was already obsolete when Atom came out, but it was easy to make more on some of the older-process fabs. Later, yes, they made proper low-power chipsets, and even SOC versions with the chipset on the same package as the CPU.
I think I know why they used the different Ethernet connectors. To do the trick with the relays, they needed connectors without the built-in transformers. This is one interesting little guy! Thanks for the fun video!
exactly what I thought, the bigger one have built-in transformers. When I saw the space for relays I thought it was to switch-off some PoE device, I was wrong about that.
They don't get all that many, and I don't think they're worth selling because it requires a significant amount of labor to get them ready, but then nobody's going to pay more than 20 bucks for one so it eclipses the labor cost. It's one of the curses of the e-waste industry. By the time you had someone figure out how to take the thing apart in order to make sure there's no personal information left on it so it's safe to resell, you can't make a profit on it anymore.
Maybe its about time they'll start appearing in bangkok piles. (Sometimes in chinatown theres people who sell old cameras, routers, usb floppy drives and random stuff like that like literally in a pile on a mat. Bought a dyndns box once. Its a box that only did dyndns org update of the dynamic dns, seemed weird so bought it. Edit; the prices are 20-40 baht, so like 60 cents to a buck roughly
I've worked in telecom for years, and there are a number of enterprise and small business solutions out there which do the power fail relay bridging for old school analog phone lines, so any analog sets can continue to function bridged directly to outside lines in the even of a power outage. Especially important in settings like hospitals, etc.
that bit with the xp install was so funny. like i was thinking "wow, compact flash, sata AND emmc, thats a lot of connectors that do the exact same thing to put into a machine so small" and then of COURSE when you try to stack them it doesnt know what to do because who would put multiple pieces of bootable media into their lex brik at the same time.
I worked with a DDOS filtering device from a company called Arbor that had a server bypass adapter for fiber modules. The idea of the device is that you would put it *infront* of your edge routing devices, advertise your BGP routes with a /25 instead of a /24, and the arbor device would passively sit there and snoop all your incomming traffic. If it decided that too much of the traffic was illegitimate, it would phone home, and they would use the network of a significantly larger provider (I think it was neustar?) to filter your traffic, by hijacking your routes via a more specific /24 advertisement. Of course putting a single device infront of your edge network is a huge single point of failure, so its network adapters had this relay system, so you could apply updates to it without bringing down your circuits.
I really love how honest you are about technology, it's very refreshing to see on UA-cam - you don't paint a picture of complete perfection or completely preventable failure like most UA-camrs do while speaking in the abstract. Instead you show us what it looks like, point oyr these are the shortcomings you see in it as well as its innovations and best of all you wrap it up in a bow as a story. The story and social context that gives rise to new devices i think is always the most interesting part about tech but many youtubers don't do it justice and just recite the first paragraph of Wikipedia and then pick at low hanging fruit like the fact its reliability is no longer acceptable. I always find it fascinating as a '00s kid how different the challenges people faced in their daily life were before i was born, how creative and daring they were about solving them and how far it truly was to get to where we are today. Thanks again for bringing life to something I would otherwise be completely ignorant of existing
4:19 I am that guy, I am the guy who goes out to fix $300k commercial dishwashers. I have to lay hands on machine because sadly most failures are mechanical. I also work on scales and wrappers, which again most of their failures are mechanical. It's a real shame! 17:49 Cash register controls use relays, maybe it could have been used for those? 26:05 "Convection" *is* this passive effect you describe, you just mean it doesn't need the extra surface area. 26:35 I would call this a union, or a turnbuckle, though I don't feel like either are exactly correct.
I think the convection correction is unnecessary. There is no design element to induce convection currents as a cooling measure. Moreover, the airflow from people walking around the room would probably do plenty more than whatever immeasurable currents the 2W cpu is creating on a surface that large. Not all air-cooling is convection! It also may well be getting rid of its energy through contact with whatever table it’s sitting on, or through radiation.
Coupling nut. Larger ones are used a lot with threaded rods for equipment suspension - HVAC, conduit, plumbing, etc.. Also adapter nut (because of the different threads), registered nut or shoulder nut (because of the turned-down OD for locating and clamping) . . .. The catalog entry for those is probably a _fascinating_ word soup, unless they took the cheesy out of calling it a "specialty nut".
I gotta give you massive props. I have been watching you stuff for a few years now. Your quality has gone through the roof! You have quickly become one of my favorite Ytubers.
The VESA mount is for mounting directly to the back of a monitor that has a normal stand, to save desk space. Very common in government facilities, including hospitals and city offices. It would never be mounted on a monitor VESA arm.
The trick to installing XP on """removeable""" drives is to format it with a normal computer, then in FDisk during the install for XP, you add a second partition and THEN delete the first partition. The removeable disk vs permanent disk thing is in the formatting, usually XP won't even run at all on a removeable drive, despite installing fine (much to the bane of SD2IDE users like myself) but thankfully the solution to our problems is built into the WinXP install CD. I was banging my head on the wall for like six hours cause of this problem, so I hope it brings you many hours of less-headache-riddled XP installing. I dunno if it works with the version of FDisk that comes with the retail version of SP3, but it definitely works with the launch edition of XP that's on the recovery boot disk for my first laptop that I then slipstreamed Service Pack 3 and all the usual life-support programs into... surprised that CD still works but that burned Memorex CD-R has been in the family for 20 years and I ain't about to change that, even if I DID re-burn it into a slipstream disk.
Mathematically, it takes three points in 3D space to define a "plane", which is a 2D surface that extends infinitely along a flat surface. Three screws for any "flat" board should be enough. The fourth is for aesthetics and for extra confidence.
I actually used to know somebody whose position on this was that three was better than four, because with three you cannot inadvertently force a flat object into a warped non-flat shape. with four, it suddenly becomes very important that the mating surfaces of all four holes be perfectly coplanar.
Those IODD devices are so awesome. I wouldn't mind a video going over it and/or other stuff from that same company. I like how they have a small yet simultaneously eclectic selection of devices all with interesting different features and styles, and at the same time their website is so badly translated and poorly laid out with no visible indication it's purchaseable or where that purchase might occur, the website is extremely entertaining. In some ways their stuff seems equally as odd as it is cool, which is the best kind of thing.
4:08 - Have a fun/terrifying story involving a system like that..... Except it was in charge of the spillway on a dam. And it was frozen because someone didnt quite understand what it was doing on the LTS update list. So for about 17 hours there was no way to get any info from or send any commands to that Dam....
The USB lanes of the Mini PCIe interface are usually used for built in Bluetooth adapters that come with WiFi cards, like Intel or Broadcom, thr Bluetooth adapter just acts as a USB device, while the WiFi card acts as a PCIe device
There's a version of mPCIe that's just electrically USB. It's a present limitation on a number of laptops boards. Tends to be used for WiFi/Bluetooth-only slots. Same deal with M.2, it's why you can't throw a WiFi and Bluetooth M.2 into just any M.2 slot and have it work without issue.
31:47 regarding your rant here about proprietary cmos batteries, I myself have 3 Nokia n900 phones and each require me to put the time and date in every time I power up the system and my research pointed to the PiTA battery/capacitor they basically 'welded' to the board, I need to source some but they simply don't really exist... Unless someone else could point me in the direction of them lol great video dude, always love watching your videos
For that weird proprietary battery around 32:06, if you ever need to, there are lithium rechargeable batteries, LR2032 for example. Unlike the CR2032, the LR2032 is rechargeable. They also come in LR2016 etc. I only know about this because of the stupid battery in the dreamcast.
The relays would not only trip when power is lost, but also when a watchdog isn't reset periodically... To prevent the device from blocking traffic because of a misbehaving/failing OS or application.
Regarding relays on industrial embedded pc: Generally industrial machines / lines are controlled by PLCs which are ruggedized microcontrollers that reliably run code, however they are somewhat limited in what they can do. So when you need to do something more demanding or have an embedded machine part of another machine, for example a product labeler the labeler would use one of the "little guys" to do the labeling task. The machine (PLC) would still need to communicate / interface with the labeler (embedded pc) and because the PLC could be using 24vdc, 230vac or any other control voltage, relays would be a easy way for the embedded system to handle that. And generally all the communication needed between them are stuff like Labeler_Ready, Apply_label Etc And this is also how many industrial machines interfaces with other machines. It is quite shocking how primitive the communication between two gigantic industrial machines can be, all that is needed is a ready signal that a machine is ready to receive product.
I'm not into that at all, but you made it so intriguing that I kept watching the whole thing. Don't know why, couldn't sleep this night for some reason, and you never fail to entertain, thanks my guy!
discovered your channel recently and have been absolutely loving these videos and their long form format. i don’t want you to think you have to become the “little guys” guy but i don’t usually enjoy long-form content but you and guys like clabretro really nail the style. just saying whatever you wanna make i’m here for
32:31 I have one of those Power books - not sure whether I'm fortunate or unfortunate. I don't think Macs of this vintage are "landfill fodder" without a PRAM battery, they just won't store the date and a few other settings. My concern, however, is that this battery board is a pain to get in and out. I bought a set of Torx drivers specially to get into my PowerBook but tbh I haven't even tried yet - I don't want to brick my computer.
@CathodeRayDude the relay was probably for power down bypass mode. Some industrial PC's have it when its powered down some of the rj45 directly connects to another rj45.
Something in these things is so dang delightful. I have a mac mini on my table, not in use, but it's a delightful little guy. This reminds me a lot about it. But yep that blue oh that blue. I want it. Also. The insides of the mac mini are not fun. Yea it gets the job done, but it's a pain to do anything in there. Lucky you don't usually need to but yea, the inside is just as important on what makes a little guy special. And that brik. I want one. Also oh boy that SSD mount is amazing. Yea it's cheap but it's possibly the most optimal way to mount it. Considering space. Screws cost something. But it's really kinda genius.
Regarding USB pins in mPCI, M.2 also has USB pins, it's commonly used for connecting the Bluetooth part of a combined wireless module (and WiFi would run over PCIe due to the higher data rate required ofc)
The reason for your relay pads is probably because of things called bypass NICs. These are somewhat common in things like corporate WAN accelerators and similar devices. Basically things that "man in the middle" Ethernet for security or performance reasons, but where you still want the network to work if they crash or lose power. When that happens the relays will connect the two Ethernet sockets together which bypasses the smarts in the device.
Mini PCIe does, in fact, have a pair of USB data lines as a standard feature. In Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo cards, Wi-Fi part connects to CPU through PCIe, but Bluetooth usually uses this USB pair. I had an ITX motherboard with mini PCIe slot where USB lanes were not connected, so in order to utilize Bluetooth on a combo card I had to run a pair of wires from the slot solder pads to the internal USB 2.0 header. And it still works!
On the PowerBook's proprietary PRAM battery... it wasn't for no reason, there was actually a feature behind it. A few years before, Apple brought the sleep power of their laptops down far enough to support a use model where, when you were done using the computer for a while, you could just close the lid (which slept it), open it a few hours later, and be right back where you were, without losing more than a percent or two of the battery's capacity. The initial version of this was only capable of suspend-to-RAM rather than suspend-to-disk, so even though the CPU was pretty much shut down, the computer's memory controller stayed alive enough to keep DRAM refresh running. At the time, this was somewhat new, and Apple was in front of the PC industry. Maybe not in terms of date of introduction, I don't remember, but in terms of making it actually work reliably, every time? Way ahead. So Apple's got this cool low power suspend-to-RAM feature, and they're thinking: what else can we do with it? How can we get further ahead? And here's where you have to remember a usage pattern that was once common, but isn't now: laptop power users often carried multiple batteries in their bags so they could swap in a fresh charged one when necessary. Battery capacity was smaller and active idle power management wasn't nearly as good, so if you wanted to use a laptop on battery all day, you had to charge and carry multiple batteries. That's where the big "PRAM" battery comes in. It got upsized and made rechargeable because Apple implemented a feature where you can close the computer's lid to put it to sleep, flip it over to get access to the battery, swap in a fresh one, flip it back over, open it up, and keep going. The "PRAM" battery now supported DRAM refresh during the time when no main battery was in the machine - in essence, it's like a small UPS for the main battery, just enough to keep vitals going for a few minutes. A CR2032 can't cut it for this application, you need something bigger and rechargeable. So they went with a few tiny lithium ion cells assembled into a small battery pack. This feature's time in the sun was pretty short because Apple introduced it just before new developments in main battery capacity, power management, and so forth would make battery swapping far less commonplace.
Always a delight to see another Little Guy uploaded, they're a guaranteed good time. A thought about the blue part of the chassis being an extrusion: That also makes it REALLY easy to produce the double-height version (or really any height you want), just slice off a different length from the extruded stock.
Have a few Wifi / Bluetooth combo mini pci-e cards that taught me about the pci-e/usb combo. The Wifi portion was pci-e while the bluetooth was usb. On some laptops and Full Pci-e to mini Pci-e adapters did not have the usb function so the bluetooth hardware never showed as available on these systems. Took me a while to figure out why the bluetooth hardware just did not seem to exist on these systems.
You can check Details > Device Instance Path in Device Manager to see if a device is on the USB or PCI bus. Please report back if you do! I just checked a 5G WWAN card in a Lenovo X1 and it showed up as PCI. According to Wikipedia B-keyed M.2s can have two PCIe lanes, USB2 and 3, and other interfaces like SATA, audio, UIM, HSIC, SSIC, I2C and SMBus.
I absolutely love this series, and I love that you're able to put out more videos with less stress around them because of it. I've always been curious about these little guys. It's great to know that they are truly all goofs, but sometimes quite clever.
The earlier model of the iodd was rebranded by Zalmon, which is the models I have. They have a jog wheel on the side for selecting the disc images, but otherwise work identically.
When Radioshack upgraded their infrastructure around 2003 with new servers, we jumped from some old Win95 machines that ran a X-server client to an IBM 340 desktop on the backroom, to some Compaq Proliena servers with Win2000 and virtualized DOS connected to Optiplex GX60's with XP Embedded. First time we booted those up, I saw the splash and was like, "Embedded? TF is that?" Twenty years later and now I ask the same about "Pro". Which is interesting because standard XP embedded is XP Pro, as it can do domain joins....
I was surprised to learn that even the Nintendo GameCube used a non-replaceable battery (though it's not difficult to desolder and replace with a CR2032 holder). Thankfully they wised up with the Wii (which I'd also consider an adorable Little Guy).
Little Guys and Quick Start have quickly become my favorite series on retro computing. Don't get me wrong, I love LGR, TechMoan, DankPods, etc. but you really get into the weeds about these crazy, weird mid-2000's devices. Covering things that I didn't even know existed on THE SAME PC'S THAT I'VE OWNED BACK THEN! It's entirely fascinating and I thank you for making these videos for weird nerds like me :)
One thing I've been thinking about, is just how openly hostile MS Windows has been becoming towards the "appliance" or "utility computer" use case. (I think the problem started to creep in with Win10, and got worse with Win11.) Makes me wonder if its even practical to use Windows for this kind of stuff anymore, or if there's some super-secret SKU of Windows that's still usable for those applications.
That’s a really cool device you used to emulate the cd drive! If I used older hardware much that would be useful, but it reminds me of what I use today: Ventoy. Same concept except can be installed on a regular ol flash drive. Mine has win 10, 11, and a couple flavors of Linux. I actually use it pretty often at work!
Clarification near the end of the video: most likely reason for the mPCIe port not being called so, is the PCIe name requiring device manufacturers to pay royalties to bear the name. If I'm not mistaken, this is also the reason for SD cards on cheap devices being called CF cards.
I love that I finally saw someone use an iodd device. I have one that I use to host all my recovery media since I work in IT. I have a variety of ISOs and virtual USB images on a 256GB SSD installed in mine.
There's actually a mini PC line already named Brix, that being the one by Gigabyte. They were actually quite capable systems for their time, and I'd be interested in sending over my model, which interestingly has discrete graphics.
Can you send me an email? I already have a model from that line that may be the exact same one, but if yours is different it may be a good addition to the video. cathoderaydude at Gmail. Thanks!
As an it worker, I relate to the part about remote access so much. I can remote into every system except for one and every time somebody calls in with trouble it becomes the most unnecessarily difficult thing.
21:49 Yeah, there is USB in mini PCI-E - At least this was the case for my laptop which I had back in 2012-15. At that time, I really started to get deeper into the technical stuff behind PCs and came across the first eGPU adapters. My laptop was a pseudo gaming laptop with quite a capable CPU (I think it was an i7 2nd gen or something) and plenty of RAM but a totally crappy Geforce GTX 550m or something similar. I got myself an early eGPU adapter card which hooks to your mPCIE slot and I think it used PCI-E 2.0 x2 or x4 - but hey, it was possible! After the adapter arrived from China and I've taken a closer look at it, I noticed it had an USB port - But besides some power manegement ICs and some smaller components, there was no dedicated USB management / hub IC present - so I followed the traces and, besides it having some smaller passive components like capacitors, the traces were just directly connected to the cable out to the mPCIE adapter card. And sure enough, testing it in windows it just... worked. I was baffled. But since I had to remove my wifi card to free up the slot, I just had a cheap USB wifi dongle on the eGPU adapter all the time lol. Worked fine though.
Weird to see it having a VESA mount. You'd expect it to have some mounting holes for a DIN rail clip since usually these foothold devices (or VPN gateways) are mounted inside of a switchgear cabinet to connect onto the client network.
I believe the springs on the heat block are what's holding the board to the chassis. When you screw in the standoffs, it causes the springs to squeeze the head block unto the board. Think about a heat sink for a normal consumer computer that has four screws on springs that go through to a backplate on the motherboard. In this case, the stand-offs are serving the role of the backplate, and I assume there's something you don't see holding the screws in place, so you just screw on the stand-offs.
44:12 Found this out when I installed a WWAN card in my Dell laptop. Not only did it just connect via USB (USB3, which is nice I guess), but it also added 4 whole new virtual serial ports to my computer, so now I'm permanently stuck with COM25-28 unless I take out the card. Fun stuff.
In Device Manager, View → Devices by connection. Then if it's connected by USB, it will be under USB controller's branch in the device tree, and if it's a PCIe card, it will be under PCIe port or bridge. Exception is if your OS is so anachronistic to your hardware that you don't have drivers for USB controllers or PCIe ports. In that case, open the properties for that device, and on the Details tab look at Hardware IDs, these will start with USB or PCI depending on the bus. Also you need to know that some cards are actually two completely independent devices in one, where one device is connected as PCIe, and other as USB; this is typical for WiFi+Bluetooth combo, where WiFi chip is routed to PCIe lanes, and Bluetooth chip is USB.
One ‘Little Guy’ I’d be interested to see in the series is one of the fit-PC models. I think this was the first line of ‘NUC-like’ PCs that was actually sold to consumers, but in 2007, _six years_ before the NUC hit the scene! And it was fanless! These days the manufacturer seems to have backronymed the term ‘fit-PC’ to ‘fanless IoT technology’, but back in 2007 it was just the fit-PC.
With those vesa mounts when we used em at my old print shop we'd put the (gigabyte) bricks on the same mounts that the monitor used so that everything was all self contained on 1 swing arm that hung over the press and able to be pushed out of the way. Pair that with a touch screen monitor and you have an extremely capable work station that could get covered in lint, spray tack, chemicals, ink, etc and stay on practically 24/7 for many years. I quit eventually but some of our oldest stations were still going strong 6 years later... I love these lil guys
Those mini-PCIe slots usually always have both, much like most M.2 E key slots as wifi/cellular/GPS usually uses the PCIe bus for communication, and if paired with Bluetooth that uses the USB portion of the connector.
Fun fact. At the time I was working there, Smoothwall was optimised for the predecessor, the C3 powered LexBook. The relays were there so that the ethernet ports can be bridged out, eg in the event of power failure.
![Little Guys: Episode 4 [Premio / Coinstar]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/KjD2uFC9LOI/mqdefault.jpg)
![Little Guys: Episode 4 [Premio / Coinstar]](/img/tr.png)
![Little Guys 7: The Cop-puter [Motorola MW800]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EP3aKEG79DM/mqdefault.jpg)
I keep getting this comment so to head it off: The fact that the internal bosses are not full-depth doesn't really suggest that this chassis is die cast - that would be an _immense_ amount of extra effort and cost for the return you'd get.
Die casting is much more expensive upfront, it produces weaker parts, costs more, takes longer, and the surface finish and tolerances straight out of the mold are not terrific (pock marks, ripple, etc.) It's great for parts with highly complex shapes, where flatness and surface finish don't matter, or for rotationally symmetric parts that can be quickly turned in a lathe, but for anything that requires reliable dimensions or clean-looking flat surfaces, you have to machine them all in afterwards; casting gets you the bulk of your volume, but every flat surface has to be added after the fact. So to get the straight walls on every side of this case you'd have to run a tool over every surface, inside and out, including all those radii, and by the time you're done you've spent the same amount of time it would take to mill it out of solid billet.
Since this has a straightforward two dimensional cross section, it's an ideal shape for extrusion. It would come out of the press pretty much ready to sell, just bandsaw it to length. Yeah, you have to put it on the mill, but you're talking about very little time just to knock off those internal bosses, add the locating grooves for the lids, drill the LED hole, and drill and press in the screw inserts, most of which you'd have to do after casting anyway. That tool mark above the internal boss is also definitely not a gate mark; it's far too deep and too wide.
Besides any of that though, the company sells other machines in chassis' that are identical except for their height. "The same thing except for height" is pretty much what the extrusion process was invented for, so companies that make parts like this one tend to take advantage of it. Will accept disputes if you have firsthand experience getting things like this made. :p
I'm pretty sure I saw that exact enclosure advertised for audio amplifiers and set top boxes a few years ago, but I can't find it. That kind of modification to an enclosure is the kind of thing that enclosure manufacturers offer as a standard service, even in extremely small batches. I love the little _Tunic_ sticker on your TV by the way.
was watching this during a midwest thunderstorm and at 19:15 my viewing experience went something like "but, what happens when this device loses power?" followed by my entire house going completely dark. now I know!
One of the most interesting things to me about industrial SBCs is the almost pathological dedication to silkscreening reference designators for every component.
i worked for a board manufacturing company for a short time in the early 1980s Circuits Engineering (they were shut down when the government found out they were dumping spent toxic chemicals into a large hole behind the building) ..we would take a copper clad board, etch it and silk screen it....
silk screening every component at that time was so that whatever company populated the board the line could simply say put component C1 into C1 silkscreen position..the line people did not need to know what C1 was or what it did..so they could hire very unskilled people to do the populating ...
As an example in the late 1970s i worked for SDC (Sundstrand Data Control) which was manufacturing FDC (Flight Data/Voice Recorders) at fantastic rate they could barely keep up with demand..anyway the entire assembly line were people (oddly 90% of them were divorced women) that did not have any electronic experience they were just assembling widgets..albeit VERY important widgets!
of course board manufacturing has changed by lightyears in the last 50+ years..
@@MickeyMousePark I put ferric chloride down the loo at work. The U bend looked like it was from a truck stop for weeeeeks. Only did that once!
nothing says "industrial" more than industrial quantities of aluminum or iron in the case only to find the same kind of PCB we find anywhere else.
sometimes its not even conformal coated, nor have ceramic components or anything, its just a computer, but with lots of pathological silkscreen as you said... somehow industrial quantities of silkscreen makes it industrial
its almost like no one knows what they are doing and everything is pure cargo-cult.
This is entirely personal but thank you for uploading a lil guy on april fool's day. I get incredibly exhausted by poorly executed lies disguised as goofs and it's really nice to be able to enjoy a genuine exploration of a tiny computer instead of seeing yet another prank. thanks for the wonderful expeditions!
When I have an opportunity to upload something on a day when I figure people are having a rough one I try to take it lol
agreed thanks@@CathodeRayDude
@@MrBeas_Cousin I wholly agree, but hardly fault anyone for playing in on the april fools. :')
@@CathodeRayDudesuper cool, thank you
We appreciate this.
Trying to view the BIOS screen, I tilted my own display back to catch a better angle. My brain has completely forgotten he's staring at a video on an OLED, not a magic window to a TN panel
The reason of two Ethernet RP-45 ports are shorter is passive pass-thru function. These ports have external Ethernet transformers on bottom side of the board. It allows relays to be connected in between RJ45 and Ethernet transformer. Other two RJ45 port have embedded transformers and need power to operate anyway.
"Don't overpenetrate" - #232 in important CRD life lessons
That's what she said
American Healthcare IT worker here - you brought a cynical smile to my face at your description of "put it on a vlan and let it do its thing". I love the dream that plugging in an UNKNOWN DEVICE could be done in any less than 7 months, 6 RFCs and 2 weekly meetings for the duration of the testing phase, and then again for a few weeks after go-live.
... Ignorance? I did this for ten years.
@@CathodeRayDude Ah, meant it more as a jest... Fully getting into the weeds regarding corporate IT policy is far outside the necessary scope of the video. Mostly just musing myself with imagining how much simpler IT could be without all the institutional checks & balances. Sorry if it came off as dismissive!
Huge fan of the series btw! It blew my mind upon starting to do IT how many of these little guys are out there... Spotting new ones in the wild has become one of my new favorite pasttimes.
@@mistaecco yeah, I figured I'd just jab you back. :p I worked with a number of hospitals and other fairly high sensitivity businesses and I remember the misery of it all. They would contact me, ask to set something up, we would do a proof of concept, and then they just tell me that they'd get back in touch once they were ready to actually execute on it, and then four months would go by without a word while they went through their committees and got sign off from everyone under the sun, and then we finally do it, and then once it was done it was so locked down that diagnostics were impossible short of having somebody on site walk over to the device and look at the lights on front. I will never miss that job.
@@mistaecco oh, and I'm glad you like the series, it's actually something that had been in the back of my mind for years and I was just never sure how to execute on it, because again, back in that job, I saw stuff like this all the time and I always wondered what it looked like inside, and there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of these little computers with names you've never heard of on them. I figured it would be a rich source of material and it really has paid off, I think a lot of people have always wondered what was going on in these things.
Oh no. I might want to go and work in the nuclear power sector for sensor networking.... it's gonna be like this, isn't it...
"It's just so damn blue. It's adorable, I wanna eat it." Lmao
it's like billiards chalk! that stuff's gotta taste good!
@@plushifoxed or sticky tack
Call it Brainy Smurf. He is smart and blue too
I bet it tastes like blue Jolly Ranchers.
@@SockyNoob Tried that once, just tastes like gum you've been chewing for half an hour
The fact that it was hooked to a gamma knife to me makes it 1000% cooler. I used to work in healthcare in a facility with a gamma knife, and yeah you're right. It uses extremely accurate high doses of radiation to do surgery (mostly on tumors) without having to actually cut someone open.
It was also the highest security part of the hospital. Im talking rooms made entirely of reinforced concrete and multiple layers of solid steel doors. If an alarm went off in there every emergency responder from the nuclear guys to firefighters to security guards would drop what they were doing and rush over there..
Well yeah, the capsules in radiotherapy machines have been stolen before and broken open, causing deaths and massive cleanup bills. The last thing you want is somebody purposely stealing the capsule.
Whereas here in Australia we lost a tiny radioactive capsule. It jigged loose inside the equipment it was being transported in, and fell out onto the road. Took several days to find it, haha
@@3rdalbum I suppose the famous one is the Goiânia incident, but I'll mention it here for the 5-10% of viewership of this channel that doesn't know about it yet.
I would love to see a collab between you and technology connections. Uou both have an incredible ability to mame something that is boring at first glance be absolutely amazing for almost an hour.
Its a little cathartic that ive seen these machines in so many industrial applications. Thank you for such amazing content.
I work in HVAC controls and we see more and more equipment that have that fail-bypass relay option. This allows the HVAC controllers to be daisy-chained via integrated ethernet switches, but also bypass if one piece of equipment is offline to avoid cutting comms of the rest of the run.
In regards to that PowerBook G4 Titaniums super proprietary battery, I have an interesting (though admittedly quite silly) idea. On older PC motherboards (around the time of the 286, 386, and 486/ 1980s though to the mid 1990s), there was commonly a Varta branded (or equivalent) 3.6 volt NiCd/NiMH rechargeable battery, and they are known to corrode and destroy the motherboards traces. Since they are known to corrode, it's quite common nowadays to remove the battery completely and install a cr2032. But like you said in your segment about that PowerBook G4 Titanium, the motherboard trys to... well... recharge it. Because of that, those people replacing the battery with a cr2032 will use a diode between (and my memory could be failing me here) the positive lead on the motherboard and the battery holder. That keeps the battery from being charged, as all cr2032s are non-rechargable (if we are to ignore LIR2032s and ML2032 which have their own issues).
Now, I've never done this before on a PowerBook G4 Titanium, so there could be issues that I am not aware of. Just throwing out ideas
XP Pro for Embedded means you can use RDP to remote into it as well as remote WMI but it's cheaper because it doesn't comes with a CAL for AD since it's designed to be used as a standalone computer. Windows XP home didn't had support for remote management, and Windows XP embedded was a completely different thing since you could cut out entire parts of the OS via the OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK), you could literally strip it down to the kernel. XP Pro for Embedded is just normal XP Pro but with a much lower licensing cost.
That's what I figured, thanks for confirming!
When I was in high school my parents newsagency had electronic signage put in by a vendor, basically a 17" LCD on an arm screwed into the ceiling, with a small pc VESA mounted on the back. The company eventually went bust so I claimed the gear. I ended up with a tiny embedded Celeron(?) machine, held in the most austere metal box. It looked like those radiation cans they screw into machines. I think it had power equivalent to a Pentium 3, so it could run Windows XP, a program that showed JPEGs downloaded over the network. and not much else. That was the only time I've had any real contact with industrial computers, and I was fascinated by all the random connectors it had.
Yep you got it! The VESA mounting holes are to secure it to the back of a monitor.
@@jonobst Then it had a huge, very heavy bracket that mounted the machine and monitor to the arm, via the vesa mount. I don't know if there's a term for it, but it was like a vesa extender.
I tried to load windows 99 on an ami indigo industrial socket 370 board, but i put the pci video card in backwards & blew the southbridge :(
People did quite a lot with far less in the way of computing power than we have now....
@@jonobst Yeah, the VESA mounting holes reminded me of the thin clients they had attached to the backs of monitors when I spent a few months after university doing data entry at a hospital.
29:25 The northbridge is indeed responsible for the memory interface; the fact that the CPU specifies an FSB (Front Side Bus) speed is a dead giveaway. The FSB is how the CPU communicates with the northbridge in order to access the memory and PCIe interfaces.
When is intel going to finally have unified memory , when ?
its almost 30 years now since the 386
maybe when their market share is 2% and no one uses intel anymore...
@@monad_tcp I believe they're working on it, actually. We're never going to see it on desktops and gaming laptops where discrete graphics chips are a thing, but laptops that run solely on integrated graphics should be UMA in the near future.
So nice to see someone else that is able to fully navigate Windows with just a keyboard. Especially in industrial applications, this option is a godsend, as many machines are in places where you can't find any surfaces you could half decently use a mouse on. A keyboard is easily hand-held in almost all wonky stances you need to be in to reach some of the deeply burrowed devices!
Oh yes, it's such an important skill. I wish Microsoft had focused more on it, there's some things that are just unreasonably tedious this way, but everything can be done without a mouse
21:40 yep, those annoying USB-only PCIe ports exist, and I loathe them! In laptops they do it all the time for 3G modems, and with it, you can plug a wifi + Bluetooth card and only Bluetooth (always USB. Don't ask me why) will work. On the HP Pavilion dv6000 series, side by side one slot does PCIe only, one does USB only. Can't have both. _Or you can if you're me with a soldering iron and a bit of wire..._
The whole combined USB and PCI-E + SATA functionality wasn’t really a thing in business notebooks until the 1st Gen core i series, you could usually choose between a mSATA SSD or a WWAN card. (Or if you’re HP, still support only WWAN cards in a WWAN slot, atleast on the 3rd Gen core series generations, 4th Gen machines are a bit of a mSATA to M.2 transitional period since i have a Acer TravelMate with a 4th Gen haswell i5 that uses a M.2 SSD, yet a dell precision from the same CPU generation uses a mSATA SSD. (I guess SATA M.2 SSD’s are pretty much just a mSATA SSD in a different form factor in a basic sense)
“What on this could need a fan!?”
The chipset. The 945GM chipset drew significantly more power than the CPU. I used a similar board as my home theater PC before upgrading to an HDTV.
Sure but to wit, they didn't actually put one in here, so it seems like it doesn't actually need it. I guess maybe it would if they were pushing the graphics capabilities harder?
Yeah pretty much, the CPU draws 2.5w as stated in this video, the north bridge is 10-11w and the south bridge is like another 3w iirc.
Makes me surprised Intel didn’t make a special low power version of the 945 chipset. (Though I think they did sometime after releasing the first Atoms)
Also have essentially this machine but in a netbook, a Toshiba NB200 except it has a 160gb HDD and a Atom N280 1.66ghz CPU.
Keep in mind the intended environment this system was employed to, hospitals/healthcare. These places are keep at cooler temperatures to help combat bacteria and infections. Just a idea on why this system might not need fans.
@@thegeforce6625 Atom had two primary reasons to exist. Power draw was one. Cheapness was the other. Intel wasn’t wasting any design or manufacturing effort on a new low power chipset until they knew it would be a success. The chipset was already obsolete when Atom came out, but it was easy to make more on some of the older-process fabs.
Later, yes, they made proper low-power chipsets, and even SOC versions with the chipset on the same package as the CPU.
@@CathodeRayDude Mostly I imagine that in this chassis it was unnecessary, but they might have had other chassis that it might be needed.
I think I know why they used the different Ethernet connectors. To do the trick with the relays, they needed connectors without the built-in transformers. This is one interesting little guy! Thanks for the fun video!
I think you can see on the bottom the two transformers for the ports without the built-in ones! The two GTS chips labeled FC-2149, I think.
I really like this series of industrial pcs
exactly what I thought, the bigger one have built-in transformers. When I saw the space for relays I thought it was to switch-off some PoE device, I was wrong about that.
A gamma knife is what a Jedi uses to butter his toast.
No no, if you stick it in the skin, I'm sure you'll see it's a wealth of life
It's also what a King Gizzard uses for his Lizard Wizard.
Crack the whip I’ll jump the hoop
PHONNYYY JOKE!! - some green dude.
It sounds to me like something from a Fallout DLC
This series must be why I haven't seen many little guys at Re-PC.
They don't get all that many, and I don't think they're worth selling because it requires a significant amount of labor to get them ready, but then nobody's going to pay more than 20 bucks for one so it eclipses the labor cost. It's one of the curses of the e-waste industry. By the time you had someone figure out how to take the thing apart in order to make sure there's no personal information left on it so it's safe to resell, you can't make a profit on it anymore.
Maybe its about time they'll start appearing in bangkok piles.
(Sometimes in chinatown theres people who sell old cameras, routers, usb floppy drives and random stuff like that like literally in a pile on a mat. Bought a dyndns box once. Its a box that only did dyndns org update of the dynamic dns, seemed weird so bought it.
Edit; the prices are 20-40 baht, so like 60 cents to a buck roughly
I've worked in telecom for years, and there are a number of enterprise and small business solutions out there which do the power fail relay bridging for old school analog phone lines, so any analog sets can continue to function bridged directly to outside lines in the even of a power outage. Especially important in settings like hospitals, etc.
that bit with the xp install was so funny. like i was thinking "wow, compact flash, sata AND emmc, thats a lot of connectors that do the exact same thing to put into a machine so small" and then of COURSE when you try to stack them it doesnt know what to do because who would put multiple pieces of bootable media into their lex brik at the same time.
I worked with a DDOS filtering device from a company called Arbor that had a server bypass adapter for fiber modules. The idea of the device is that you would put it *infront* of your edge routing devices, advertise your BGP routes with a /25 instead of a /24, and the arbor device would passively sit there and snoop all your incomming traffic. If it decided that too much of the traffic was illegitimate, it would phone home, and they would use the network of a significantly larger provider (I think it was neustar?) to filter your traffic, by hijacking your routes via a more specific /24 advertisement. Of course putting a single device infront of your edge network is a huge single point of failure, so its network adapters had this relay system, so you could apply updates to it without bringing down your circuits.
I really love how honest you are about technology, it's very refreshing to see on UA-cam - you don't paint a picture of complete perfection or completely preventable failure like most UA-camrs do while speaking in the abstract. Instead you show us what it looks like, point oyr these are the shortcomings you see in it as well as its innovations and best of all you wrap it up in a bow as a story.
The story and social context that gives rise to new devices i think is always the most interesting part about tech but many youtubers don't do it justice and just recite the first paragraph of Wikipedia and then pick at low hanging fruit like the fact its reliability is no longer acceptable. I always find it fascinating as a '00s kid how different the challenges people faced in their daily life were before i was born, how creative and daring they were about solving them and how far it truly was to get to where we are today. Thanks again for bringing life to something I would otherwise be completely ignorant of existing
4:19 I am that guy, I am the guy who goes out to fix $300k commercial dishwashers. I have to lay hands on machine because sadly most failures are mechanical. I also work on scales and wrappers, which again most of their failures are mechanical. It's a real shame!
17:49 Cash register controls use relays, maybe it could have been used for those?
26:05 "Convection" *is* this passive effect you describe, you just mean it doesn't need the extra surface area.
26:35 I would call this a union, or a turnbuckle, though I don't feel like either are exactly correct.
I think the convection correction is unnecessary. There is no design element to induce convection currents as a cooling measure. Moreover, the airflow from people walking around the room would probably do plenty more than whatever immeasurable currents the 2W cpu is creating on a surface that large. Not all air-cooling is convection! It also may well be getting rid of its energy through contact with whatever table it’s sitting on, or through radiation.
Coupling nut. Larger ones are used a lot with threaded rods for equipment suspension - HVAC, conduit, plumbing, etc..
Also adapter nut (because of the different threads), registered nut or shoulder nut (because of the turned-down OD for locating and clamping) . . ..
The catalog entry for those is probably a _fascinating_ word soup, unless they took the cheesy out of calling it a "specialty nut".
I gotta give you massive props. I have been watching you stuff for a few years now. Your quality has gone through the roof! You have quickly become one of my favorite Ytubers.
The VESA mount is for mounting directly to the back of a monitor that has a normal stand, to save desk space.
Very common in government facilities, including hospitals and city offices.
It would never be mounted on a monitor VESA arm.
Yea, tho always never quite as practical as you'd want, so a lot more stuff like Lenovo's Tiny-In-One system being used nowadays
yeah but it would be funny to have one monitor arm for your screen and another one for your pc XD
The trick to installing XP on """removeable""" drives is to format it with a normal computer, then in FDisk during the install for XP, you add a second partition and THEN delete the first partition. The removeable disk vs permanent disk thing is in the formatting, usually XP won't even run at all on a removeable drive, despite installing fine (much to the bane of SD2IDE users like myself) but thankfully the solution to our problems is built into the WinXP install CD. I was banging my head on the wall for like six hours cause of this problem, so I hope it brings you many hours of less-headache-riddled XP installing. I dunno if it works with the version of FDisk that comes with the retail version of SP3, but it definitely works with the launch edition of XP that's on the recovery boot disk for my first laptop that I then slipstreamed Service Pack 3 and all the usual life-support programs into... surprised that CD still works but that burned Memorex CD-R has been in the family for 20 years and I ain't about to change that, even if I DID re-burn it into a slipstream disk.
Appreciate your detail on this
Mathematically, it takes three points in 3D space to define a "plane", which is a 2D surface that extends infinitely along a flat surface. Three screws for any "flat" board should be enough. The fourth is for aesthetics and for extra confidence.
I actually used to know somebody whose position on this was that three was better than four, because with three you cannot inadvertently force a flat object into a warped non-flat shape. with four, it suddenly becomes very important that the mating surfaces of all four holes be perfectly coplanar.
@@CathodeRayDudemust be someone who wrote a renderer. It actually can be problematic for 3d printers that tend to have 4 leveling screws
@@lassikinnunenbecause nothing is ever really a "flat surface" in the real world, everything warps
I love all of the little guys you've taken a look at so far!
Those IODD devices are so awesome. I wouldn't mind a video going over it and/or other stuff from that same company. I like how they have a small yet simultaneously eclectic selection of devices all with interesting different features and styles, and at the same time their website is so badly translated and poorly laid out with no visible indication it's purchaseable or where that purchase might occur, the website is extremely entertaining. In some ways their stuff seems equally as odd as it is cool, which is the best kind of thing.
i am so excited for more little guys!!! you can never get enough of little guys.
Even though it's mass produced that thing seems so hand-built. Proper nerd design choices everywhere.
That IODD ST400 is like a physical version of Ventoy boot menu. Very interesting.
4:08 - Have a fun/terrifying story involving a system like that..... Except it was in charge of the spillway on a dam.
And it was frozen because someone didnt quite understand what it was doing on the LTS update list.
So for about 17 hours there was no way to get any info from or send any commands to that Dam....
No Dam info!
Knowing how resource intensive modern Windows Updates are, I can't imagine how much chug that poor thing had to have gone through...
The USB lanes of the Mini PCIe interface are usually used for built in Bluetooth adapters that come with WiFi cards, like Intel or Broadcom, thr Bluetooth adapter just acts as a USB device, while the WiFi card acts as a PCIe device
There's a version of mPCIe that's just electrically USB. It's a present limitation on a number of laptops boards. Tends to be used for WiFi/Bluetooth-only slots. Same deal with M.2, it's why you can't throw a WiFi and Bluetooth M.2 into just any M.2 slot and have it work without issue.
31:47 regarding your rant here about proprietary cmos batteries, I myself have 3 Nokia n900 phones and each require me to put the time and date in every time I power up the system and my research pointed to the PiTA battery/capacitor they basically 'welded' to the board, I need to source some but they simply don't really exist... Unless someone else could point me in the direction of them lol great video dude, always love watching your videos
For that weird proprietary battery around 32:06, if you ever need to, there are lithium rechargeable batteries, LR2032 for example. Unlike the CR2032, the LR2032 is rechargeable. They also come in LR2016 etc. I only know about this because of the stupid battery in the dreamcast.
"I wanna eat it" - Your protogen is showing, Gravis :P
The relays are for bypass ports. That would be for redundant setups, bridging the ports, when daisy chained to second device.
Oh lol you explained it anyway. It's common on Talari, Riverbed, Cloudgenics, ....
The relays would not only trip when power is lost, but also when a watchdog isn't reset periodically... To prevent the device from blocking traffic because of a misbehaving/failing OS or application.
I am the technician they call in to troubleshoot some of these little guys. this series is fun, I never get to take them apart.
Hey thank you a ton for turning me on to metronomy man. I thought that lyric was really funny, and it turns out that song is a banger.
you're welcome, it is one of my goals in life to spread awareness of this specific album, it's solid gold cover to cover
yeah, got minibared too for a while by such improv
Regarding relays on industrial embedded pc: Generally industrial machines / lines are controlled by PLCs which are ruggedized microcontrollers that reliably run code, however they are somewhat limited in what they can do. So when you need to do something more demanding or have an embedded machine part of another machine, for example a product labeler the labeler would use one of the "little guys" to do the labeling task. The machine (PLC) would still need to communicate / interface with the labeler (embedded pc) and because the PLC could be using 24vdc, 230vac or any other control voltage, relays would be a easy way for the embedded system to handle that. And generally all the communication needed between them are stuff like Labeler_Ready, Apply_label Etc
And this is also how many industrial machines interfaces with other machines. It is quite shocking how primitive the communication between two gigantic industrial machines can be, all that is needed is a ready signal that a machine is ready to receive product.
I'm not into that at all, but you made it so intriguing that I kept watching the whole thing. Don't know why, couldn't sleep this night for some reason, and you never fail to entertain, thanks my guy!
discovered your channel recently and have been absolutely loving these videos and their long form format. i don’t want you to think you have to become the “little guys” guy but i don’t usually enjoy long-form content but you and guys like clabretro really nail the style. just saying whatever you wanna make i’m here for
You’re so good at making these videos. It’s fun to watch.
Oh dude I have one of those IODD devices. LOVE IT. Best invention ever.
32:31 I have one of those Power books - not sure whether I'm fortunate or unfortunate. I don't think Macs of this vintage are "landfill fodder" without a PRAM battery, they just won't store the date and a few other settings. My concern, however, is that this battery board is a pain to get in and out. I bought a set of Torx drivers specially to get into my PowerBook but tbh I haven't even tried yet - I don't want to brick my computer.
@CathodeRayDude the relay was probably for power down bypass mode. Some industrial PC's have it when its powered down some of the rj45 directly connects to another rj45.
Holding a (modern, semi-modern?) smartphone next to this thing is like the biggest flex on it ever, unintentionally.
Hope this isn't an April Fools episode. 45min is a little long for that.
I do not participate in April Fools lol
Something in these things is so dang delightful. I have a mac mini on my table, not in use, but it's a delightful little guy. This reminds me a lot about it. But yep that blue oh that blue. I want it.
Also. The insides of the mac mini are not fun. Yea it gets the job done, but it's a pain to do anything in there. Lucky you don't usually need to but yea, the inside is just as important on what makes a little guy special. And that brik. I want one. Also oh boy that SSD mount is amazing. Yea it's cheap but it's possibly the most optimal way to mount it. Considering space. Screws cost something. But it's really kinda genius.
Ohhhhh heck yea it heatsinks to the chassis
I love how it has that rubber support for the SATA cable but half of the other components are just missing screws by design
hahahaha right? It fits the philosophy though: compromise where necessary, but otherwise build it tough and thoughtfully
Regarding USB pins in mPCI, M.2 also has USB pins, it's commonly used for connecting the Bluetooth part of a combined wireless module (and WiFi would run over PCIe due to the higher data rate required ofc)
If you love these sandwiched design computers, a 2005-2009 Mac mini would be a great addition to the series.
The reason for your relay pads is probably because of things called bypass NICs. These are somewhat common in things like corporate WAN accelerators and similar devices. Basically things that "man in the middle" Ethernet for security or performance reasons, but where you still want the network to work if they crash or lose power. When that happens the relays will connect the two Ethernet sockets together which bypasses the smarts in the device.
Whoops, should have kept watching! I see you figured it out.
Mini PCIe does, in fact, have a pair of USB data lines as a standard feature. In Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo cards, Wi-Fi part connects to CPU through PCIe, but Bluetooth usually uses this USB pair. I had an ITX motherboard with mini PCIe slot where USB lanes were not connected, so in order to utilize Bluetooth on a combo card I had to run a pair of wires from the slot solder pads to the internal USB 2.0 header. And it still works!
On the PowerBook's proprietary PRAM battery... it wasn't for no reason, there was actually a feature behind it.
A few years before, Apple brought the sleep power of their laptops down far enough to support a use model where, when you were done using the computer for a while, you could just close the lid (which slept it), open it a few hours later, and be right back where you were, without losing more than a percent or two of the battery's capacity. The initial version of this was only capable of suspend-to-RAM rather than suspend-to-disk, so even though the CPU was pretty much shut down, the computer's memory controller stayed alive enough to keep DRAM refresh running.
At the time, this was somewhat new, and Apple was in front of the PC industry. Maybe not in terms of date of introduction, I don't remember, but in terms of making it actually work reliably, every time? Way ahead.
So Apple's got this cool low power suspend-to-RAM feature, and they're thinking: what else can we do with it? How can we get further ahead? And here's where you have to remember a usage pattern that was once common, but isn't now: laptop power users often carried multiple batteries in their bags so they could swap in a fresh charged one when necessary. Battery capacity was smaller and active idle power management wasn't nearly as good, so if you wanted to use a laptop on battery all day, you had to charge and carry multiple batteries.
That's where the big "PRAM" battery comes in. It got upsized and made rechargeable because Apple implemented a feature where you can close the computer's lid to put it to sleep, flip it over to get access to the battery, swap in a fresh one, flip it back over, open it up, and keep going. The "PRAM" battery now supported DRAM refresh during the time when no main battery was in the machine - in essence, it's like a small UPS for the main battery, just enough to keep vitals going for a few minutes. A CR2032 can't cut it for this application, you need something bigger and rechargeable. So they went with a few tiny lithium ion cells assembled into a small battery pack.
This feature's time in the sun was pretty short because Apple introduced it just before new developments in main battery capacity, power management, and so forth would make battery swapping far less commonplace.
The "Let's Ask the Internet" Jingle needs to stay. i'm living for it
Always a delight to see another Little Guy uploaded, they're a guaranteed good time.
A thought about the blue part of the chassis being an extrusion: That also makes it REALLY easy to produce the double-height version (or really any height you want), just slice off a different length from the extruded stock.
Have a few Wifi / Bluetooth combo mini pci-e cards that taught me about the pci-e/usb combo. The Wifi portion was pci-e while the bluetooth was usb. On some laptops and Full Pci-e to mini Pci-e adapters did not have the usb function so the bluetooth hardware never showed as available on these systems. Took me a while to figure out why the bluetooth hardware just did not seem to exist on these systems.
You can check Details > Device Instance Path in Device Manager to see if a device is on the USB or PCI bus. Please report back if you do! I just checked a 5G WWAN card in a Lenovo X1 and it showed up as PCI. According to Wikipedia B-keyed M.2s can have two PCIe lanes, USB2 and 3, and other interfaces like SATA, audio, UIM, HSIC, SSIC, I2C and SMBus.
38:11 so basically a CD-version of what the Gotek is for floppy drives? Awesome!
I absolutely love this series, and I love that you're able to put out more videos with less stress around them because of it. I've always been curious about these little guys. It's great to know that they are truly all goofs, but sometimes quite clever.
Not sure why, but plopping the monitor down on top of the Brik made me actually laugh out loud.
was absolutely intentional, it made me chortle so I kept that take
The earlier model of the iodd was rebranded by Zalmon, which is the models I have. They have a jog wheel on the side for selecting the disc images, but otherwise work identically.
I've got one of them too! It's a great little device (lspci on linux seems to indicate that the Zalman branded one is actually made by Fujitsu, iirc)
When Radioshack upgraded their infrastructure around 2003 with new servers, we jumped from some old Win95 machines that ran a X-server client to an IBM 340 desktop on the backroom, to some Compaq Proliena servers with Win2000 and virtualized DOS connected to Optiplex GX60's with XP Embedded. First time we booted those up, I saw the splash and was like, "Embedded? TF is that?"
Twenty years later and now I ask the same about "Pro". Which is interesting because standard XP embedded is XP Pro, as it can do domain joins....
I was surprised to learn that even the Nintendo GameCube used a non-replaceable battery (though it's not difficult to desolder and replace with a CR2032 holder). Thankfully they wised up with the Wii (which I'd also consider an adorable Little Guy).
A non-replaceable battery? IIRC the manual had instructions for changing the battery. Either I'm misremembering or different versions were different.
Your audio for these videos is really good. I could mindlessly listen to you talk about anything. All while learning random stuff.
Little Guys and Quick Start have quickly become my favorite series on retro computing. Don't get me wrong, I love LGR, TechMoan, DankPods, etc. but you really get into the weeds about these crazy, weird mid-2000's devices. Covering things that I didn't even know existed on THE SAME PC'S THAT I'VE OWNED BACK THEN! It's entirely fascinating and I thank you for making these videos for weird nerds like me :)
One thing I've been thinking about, is just how openly hostile MS Windows has been becoming towards the "appliance" or "utility computer" use case. (I think the problem started to creep in with Win10, and got worse with Win11.) Makes me wonder if its even practical to use Windows for this kind of stuff anymore, or if there's some super-secret SKU of Windows that's still usable for those applications.
44:06 -- a quick way to check if it's PCIe or USB is to look at the hardware ID in Device Manager
oh duh why didn't I do that
23:24 that SATA support looks like an off-the-shelf self-adhesive furniture bumper like they sell at Home Depot xD
That’s a really cool device you used to emulate the cd drive! If I used older hardware much that would be useful, but it reminds me of what I use today: Ventoy. Same concept except can be installed on a regular ol flash drive. Mine has win 10, 11, and a couple flavors of Linux. I actually use it pretty often at work!
Clarification near the end of the video: most likely reason for the mPCIe port not being called so, is the PCIe name requiring device manufacturers to pay royalties to bear the name. If I'm not mistaken, this is also the reason for SD cards on cheap devices being called CF cards.
I still can't place why, but this whole series is just kind of a comfort series for me now.
These videos are as lovely as this little guy is blue!
I love that I finally saw someone use an iodd device. I have one that I use to host all my recovery media since I work in IT. I have a variety of ISOs and virtual USB images on a 256GB SSD installed in mine.
There's actually a mini PC line already named Brix, that being the one by Gigabyte. They were actually quite capable systems for their time, and I'd be interested in sending over my model, which interestingly has discrete graphics.
Can you send me an email? I already have a model from that line that may be the exact same one, but if yours is different it may be a good addition to the video. cathoderaydude at Gmail. Thanks!
I literally just started watching this dude yesterday. Is gone for months. Then drops a fresh vid for me? What a sweetheart 😘
Well there was a little bit of a gap when he had some medical stuff late last year, but he's posted pretty much weekly for a couple of months.
As an it worker, I relate to the part about remote access so much. I can remote into every system except for one and every time somebody calls in with trouble it becomes the most unnecessarily difficult thing.
Most excellent video good sir! Thank you for your time abs talent. 👍
21:49 Yeah, there is USB in mini PCI-E - At least this was the case for my laptop which I had back in 2012-15. At that time, I really started to get deeper into the technical stuff behind PCs and came across the first eGPU adapters. My laptop was a pseudo gaming laptop with quite a capable CPU (I think it was an i7 2nd gen or something) and plenty of RAM but a totally crappy Geforce GTX 550m or something similar. I got myself an early eGPU adapter card which hooks to your mPCIE slot and I think it used PCI-E 2.0 x2 or x4 - but hey, it was possible! After the adapter arrived from China and I've taken a closer look at it, I noticed it had an USB port - But besides some power manegement ICs and some smaller components, there was no dedicated USB management / hub IC present - so I followed the traces and, besides it having some smaller passive components like capacitors, the traces were just directly connected to the cable out to the mPCIE adapter card. And sure enough, testing it in windows it just... worked. I was baffled. But since I had to remove my wifi card to free up the slot, I just had a cheap USB wifi dongle on the eGPU adapter all the time lol. Worked fine though.
Thank you for the real video on April first ❤
I did not know such things existed, but that IODD device is precisely what I need for an upcoming project. Thanks for highlighting that it is a thing!
Weird to see it having a VESA mount. You'd expect it to have some mounting holes for a DIN rail clip since usually these foothold devices (or VPN gateways) are mounted inside of a switchgear cabinet to connect onto the client network.
Every time you say Ship brickhouse it cracks me up. Ive never seen one but used many a brick shiphouse.🤣
what he's actually saying is shit brickhouse which is kind of a spoonerism of brick shithouse
I believe the springs on the heat block are what's holding the board to the chassis. When you screw in the standoffs, it causes the springs to squeeze the head block unto the board. Think about a heat sink for a normal consumer computer that has four screws on springs that go through to a backplate on the motherboard. In this case, the stand-offs are serving the role of the backplate, and I assume there's something you don't see holding the screws in place, so you just screw on the stand-offs.
44:12 Found this out when I installed a WWAN card in my Dell laptop. Not only did it just connect via USB (USB3, which is nice I guess), but it also added 4 whole new virtual serial ports to my computer, so now I'm permanently stuck with COM25-28 unless I take out the card. Fun stuff.
I love the name Little Guys.
Aaand that was also all I wanted out of it. Thank you!
In Device Manager, View → Devices by connection. Then if it's connected by USB, it will be under USB controller's branch in the device tree, and if it's a PCIe card, it will be under PCIe port or bridge. Exception is if your OS is so anachronistic to your hardware that you don't have drivers for USB controllers or PCIe ports. In that case, open the properties for that device, and on the Details tab look at Hardware IDs, these will start with USB or PCI depending on the bus.
Also you need to know that some cards are actually two completely independent devices in one, where one device is connected as PCIe, and other as USB; this is typical for WiFi+Bluetooth combo, where WiFi chip is routed to PCIe lanes, and Bluetooth chip is USB.
One ‘Little Guy’ I’d be interested to see in the series is one of the fit-PC models. I think this was the first line of ‘NUC-like’ PCs that was actually sold to consumers, but in 2007, _six years_ before the NUC hit the scene! And it was fanless!
These days the manufacturer seems to have backronymed the term ‘fit-PC’ to ‘fanless IoT technology’, but back in 2007 it was just the fit-PC.
With those vesa mounts when we used em at my old print shop we'd put the (gigabyte) bricks on the same mounts that the monitor used so that everything was all self contained on 1 swing arm that hung over the press and able to be pushed out of the way. Pair that with a touch screen monitor and you have an extremely capable work station that could get covered in lint, spray tack, chemicals, ink, etc and stay on practically 24/7 for many years. I quit eventually but some of our oldest stations were still going strong 6 years later...
I love these lil guys
Those mini-PCIe slots usually always have both, much like most M.2 E key slots as wifi/cellular/GPS usually uses the PCIe bus for communication, and if paired with Bluetooth that uses the USB portion of the connector.
Fun fact. At the time I was working there, Smoothwall was optimised for the predecessor, the C3 powered LexBook. The relays were there so that the ethernet ports can be bridged out, eg in the event of power failure.