@@GabrielSykes their POS provider will. Do you think the fast food place can also service all their cooking and refrigeration appliances, or do anything that isn't very basic operation and floor cleaning? They don't, they pay a service provider that sends technicians to service and repair stuff.
I am disappointed that you didn't take this pc as an inspiration to start your own foreign pizza shop and flee the country to begin your new career. Otherwise, awesome video man!
Former Marcos employee here, the BUMP 1 sticker means it was mounted to the wall and used just to display the orders needing to be made which usually had a ticket printer attached. It was a very simple program at the time i was there. I did troubleshooting when stuff didnt work. Most of the time ot was just restarting those terminals.
I've seen this same PC, or something very similar, at my local Wendy's doing the same job. Attached to the back of a monitor facing the crew, showing order ticket info.
@@HardwareHaven These computers are usually connected to a heat and splash proof extruded alloy button box that's used (With about 20 labelled membrane switches) to scroll through orders and mark completed ones as done. That keyboard is sold as a "Bump bar" because it's primary use is to "Bump" order items onto the front of house screens once they're ready to be bagged.
I got some Lenovo ThinkHub 500's for free from a company that was upgrading their kiosks.11.6" rotating touchscreen, i5-7500T Processor with vPro enabled, 128gb SSD, speakers, mic, tons of HDMI.. I use it with a surveillance camera setup to store footage and monitor the cameras in realtime.......yeah and it also runs a local Valheim and Minecraft server after a massive RAM upgrade and a new SSD.. Moral of the story? Never underestimate the usability of these type of machines.
@@Jaabaa_Prime The Pi still has its uses, but yes. I had the chance to see one of the registers that NCR makes used as an all-in-one PC. With the touch screen they didn't even need a keyboard or mouse to use windows on it.
But this is being used in that enviorement because it's FANLESS , these computers are used in areas where too much dust is expected to get in the fans so they resort to them
it absolutely is a mobile cpu. it's mobile cpus that also happen to be useful, and get used for, these tasks. bga1170 is the socket, which was then succeeded by bga1090. you could argue that some cpus on that socket, namely the c suffixes, would be truer to this statement since they have nonfunctional onboard wifi that is then fused off to make a c suffix chip, whereas the regular ones do have it enabled and functional.
@@destrierofdark_ You are correct in noting that the J1900 has a BGA1170 socket, which is specific to mobile CPUs. The "C" suffix chips are indeed special variants of Bay Trail-T processors that have non-functional onboard Wi-Fi and are designed for use cases where Wi-Fi isn't required. The Intel Atom Z1900 (J1900) is a mobile CPU designed for small electronics, tablets, and smartphones, with a focus on low power consumption and compact form factors.
@@monkepog3236 that bga socket isn't specifically mobile, nor is any cpu on that socket specifically mobile. they're used in thin clients and alike applications just as much as they are mobile ones, and no, the c suffix parts aren't "purpose designed", but better suited. for those suffixed chips, they are the non-suffixed variants with the wifi functionality fused off presumably because it didn't pass the binning tests to be a non-c part. by extension of not having onboard wifi, they're better suited to applications that don't require it.
I have two of these machines. One ran Windows and was the Drive-Thru timer, and the other was a front-side order display/bump bar machine. The second one is passively cooled as well and is actually now my firewall. It's also a J1900 with 4gb ram and a 64gb SSD and two Gbe NICS running OPNSense.
If you can get this cheap enough it would be great for some simple home server stuff. Home assistant, dns, download server or just to mess around ! It would be amazing to keep this out off the tech graveyard
Actually until last year I was running j1900 pc as the proxmox host. It run 2 VMs and bunch of containers but nothing fancy. RAM however was a limiting factor so I had to upgrade.
With all of those com ports, I bet it would make a good terminal server for microcontrollers and or some of those old Unix workstations. Now you have an excuse to find an old SUN or SGI workstation and get it running.
A little insight on this for you from a former food service employee this isn’t a POS system but instead connects to the pos system and displays the orders in the kitchen and the com ports are for check printers and a little controller thingy the allows you to scroll through the orders and bump them off the screen when they’re completed!
In this case it could have been a POS system. When you look at the side with the connection ports the one on the far right that looks like a phone jack is labeled CD, this refers to a Cash Drawer. If used as a POS terminal it likely would have been connected to an office server that could do the heavy processing.
@@myacidninjatheamazing1025 I never Questioned the use of the unit. I simply pointed out that the unit was configured in such a way that it could have been a POS unit. The reality of the situation is that the system likely used the same box for every peripheral location and relied on the server to determine the function. The label indicates what is likely the last use in the restaurant environment. I can't be certain of either as I didn't Install, maintain, or remove the system from the site. I am making an educated guess based on the systems that I have Installed, maintained, and removed.
This CPU, J1900, is part of a range which contain a silicon bug called LPC CLK degradation. Countless devices failed after about 3 years (for example NAS devices from QNAP). The fact that this device still works after more than 3 years is probably because it was designed not to rely on LPC to boot (there are some bootstrap pins which indicate SPI or LPC boot).
^^^ This. Unfortunately this. I recently had a QNAP die on me and had no idea this was a thing until i started researching. Drives, I expected to die over time. Actual hardware itself - sadly, no. First thing i did when he said J1900 was cringe.
I repaired quite a number of those. For less severe cases there is a resistor fix which might work for another year or 2. And for severe cases the CPU can be replaced of coursrle using a high quality SMD rework station such as the WDS-620. But there is a point where is nit worth investing further in fixing old hardware which should not be broken in the first place.
Umm... I'm currently holding onto a J1900 powered Acer Aspire X Prebuilt with a manufacturing date of 2014. Apparently it had Windows 8.1 before I inevitably gave it a Kingston SSD with Ubuntu and a (very much) senseless upgrade from 4GB of RAM to 16GB of RAM. Just now gave it a mini-PCIe Wi-Fi card and antennae.
@@martinmethod427 Ayy I've got the same exact model! The only downside is the RAM... it doesn't like more than 8 GB... how the hell did you upgrade past that??
I KNEW I recognized that pc from somewhere. I worked at a dominos as well that ran on chrome os, that blew my mind. Also as a side note, the Bump 1 stick meant that this computer was at the front of the makeline as you would Bump the orders from there first, to the second screen which you would then bump again and it would push the order through to the printer at the cut table (where the pizzas come out of the oven and you cut them). So you had 2 systems, one at the front of the makeline that showed you what pizzas were coming through and then once you had the dough stretched and sauced you would then bump it down to then see what you needed to add to it. Also on the minecraft serverfront, you could have the server auto generate chunks to a certain point. I was using an old macmini, core2duo, and attempted to have it auto generate up to 10k chunks in each direction which took forever, but it is possible.
We used this as an always accessible supervisor system to console into our L3 switches at our colocation in case there were changes made that were not accounted for. They work super well for simple tasks and it never needed rebooting using Ubuntu Server. Great little box saving us trips to the colo.
If you lived on the road and wanted to do an SSD NAS of some sort, this could be kind of an option. Low power, no moving parts, keeps good temps. Or if you're a mechanic and need a PC to mount on the toolbox for diagnostics.
I have an old Par500 POS at home in my dads shop running bhodi linux and a usb sound card and he uses it just to play music/talk shows. The occasional looking up parts cost and such. Got it free from work when we were upgrading machines a few years ago.
I was a facility maintenance tech for a domino's pizza franchise for many years. When we upgraded all the pos and host/server computers I Inherited about 100 IBM Lenovo ThinkCenter computers. They are all dated between 2002 and 2004 and have pentium duo-core processors running windows Vista pro. I sold most of them to a computer repair shop and I turned one into an emulation game machine running botacera. But I still have about 10 kickin' around in storage.
In the restaurant industry IT technology was slow as molasses in winter for many many years. 1980s programable cash registers/ordering systems stayed in use for nearly 25 years. Even when new stuff started coming out, the industry was soooooo slow to adopt it simply because changing out IT solutions across 200 - 7000 locations is a huge undertaking.
Ah, working in similar industry tech wise we are talking for years about updating or IT infrastructure. It is just a huge monetary undertaking because of magic two word issue. Custom software.
@@maphantom Working in manufacturing, they avoided changing technology until there was some kind of crisis. Not just money for the hardware and software, but also dealing with the impact on operations was massively painful. People were just used to and comfortable with the old system.
I worked at Domino's Australia until 2005 and we used a different system to the one used in the USA. It was the same supplier that did Hungry Jack's, STM. We had a single Linux or Unix system with Wyse serial terminals for each order screen, makeline, cut bench and customer display. My store was really old it was a Pentium 166. I left just before the Windows based replacement (Pulse) came.
You realize pizza is a carb based crust a fruit based sauce and dairy based cheese. Yes tomatoes are a fruit. My point is anything belongs on pizza if you want it there.
@@tehshingen I think most people forget that pizza sauce is a fruit sauce. Tomatoes are a fruit. The basis of pizza is crust fruit sauce cheese. My point is put anything you want on pizza
I love the fact that the PC space is accommodating for both ultra-budget/side-of-the-road hardware hacking and repurposing, as well as top of the line multi thousand dollar, skunk-works, custom builds, and pretty much everything in-between.
It would be just fine for a MAME cab, I have an old Thinclient running mine at the moment, but it will be upgraded with my current gaming desktop when I get my new gaming PC, it uses lots more power but I will have some better emulators running also
This looks to have been used as a KMS (Kitchen Management System) controller. Usually used with a touchscreen or hardware bump bar for acknowledging or bumping products to the next screen/clearing once prepared. Probably the most common brand for KMS is QSR.
With all the COM ports it would make a great multi user TTY server or BBS (LOL). Heck I even think Jeff @CraftComputing could use one of these to wire directly up to his new invention to remotely flash new firmware for testing. At least then he wouldn't have to re-plug it when testing.
Hey dude, I noticed the serial ports are an RJ-45 port. You could probably use it to control those Cisco-esque console ports, using an RJ-45 straight through, as a terminal server. Just a suggestion.
@@YonatanAvhar I guess it's for like older switches maybe. When you don't have SSH, you can only use telnet. Might as well use a terminal server, it's more secure. Also, I guess if you don't want to lug a laptop into the server closet to configure it via the terminal first, cause Cisco doesn't provide any other ways of configuration out of the box.
The rj45 ports are used on many industrial equipment in the gaming industry they are used for player tracking systems in the casino but you need need to make the custom cables usually only 3 wires are used for transmit, recieve, and ground also be aware sometimes you need diodes and resistors to filter the flow. Could make an interesting terminal to control other systems but I think wifi or cat connections makes better sense these days.
@@OscarCarlsson1986 AFAIK IPMI works on a dedicated lightweight processor (e.g. ast2400) which can control power independently. Given that I agree that setting up a serial tty could be a life saver in case inband network is failing
I had a client that used these in fast food restaurants. These computers are absolute tanks. I think I only replaced 1 in maybe 10 years, and they probably had a couple dozen total. Most of them were mounted in order prep areas in very hot and humid environments, often directly above cooking areas or above food storage areas with heat lamps. They were used to show food orders for prep and had a printer attached that would print the order so it could be put in the bag when done. They also had a super chonky "keyboard" attached that was really just a metal box with a few buttons to cycle through orders and clear them when they were done.
the COM ports in a restaurant environment would be used for bump bars for the KVS screens hence it saying "BUMP 1" on it. the bump bars would allow you to clear orders, recall orders, zoom the screen on orders, select the next page, and a few other things. basically, THIS specific system would be used to display the orders that came in FROM the POS for (in a mcdonalds) the food orders, or if they have mccafe, it would show those orders and print a reciept for that order when you hit the "serve" button on the bump bar
For tape you would need something like Kapton tape. then give it a few layers of kapton tape, making sure to fully warp it. or you could 3D print a small flat bracket that covers the PCB. like a MINI case
that would be a great signal k host signal k is a marine software that gathers data from radar, sonar, AIS... those serial com ports would be handy, since most of the devices in a boat have them although nowadays it all connects via wifi, the serial is more reliable on storms and busy marinas..
Just a suggestion: Run BOINC on it with whatever project strikes your fancy. If you don't mind the power draw, you'll be helping research, education, and other worthy causes. I'm running it on an old HP Netbook with Raspberry Pi desktop OS. Because of the limited 2GB RAM, I've set it to only a single project (World Community Grid). Just boot it up and fuggetaboutit.
About 10 years ago i was working with a demolition company we where tearing down a distribution warehouse that had stopped paying rent got kicked from the site and the land owner decided to build a storage unit complex i was tasked one day with smashing the interior office walls down i got quite a shock when i smashed a partition and found a fully intact server room still with machines and servers the company had built a server room next to the office section and to stop yhe noise built a insulated sliding door that was so well intergrated into the wall no one noticed it until i broke through i hot a whole tray of 3rd gen i7 cpus and a bunch of unused 2tb hdd when they cost a small fortune sold most of it kept an i7 and a bunch of drives and used the money i made to build a sick pc
@@acid3129 Do you have no desire at all to better yourself? And unless you got hurt often, banging walls still requires a level of skill and knowledge to not have the ceiling drop on your head or the the floor to give way
I recently bought an used industrial PC on eBay. It was full with remote control configurations (Many VNC connections to subsystems and a lot of very specific light management software) , including IPs and some account data to Austria's national theatre. They did not bother erasing the SSD .. well I did then, because I had more important stuff do to than to abuse the situation.
Actually its not underpowered. in its day it was perfect in its use case. KVD (Kitchen Video Display) Epos equipment is generally one or two generations behind the mainstream general market when all the gremlins have been discovered and patched. That thing could run 24/7 for years and when I was younger, something like that would have been the dizzy heights that could only be dreamed about. You really only need a computer to do its designed functionality reliably and without fuss.
They don't use overpriced under powered tech. You dont know that these things are made for the Pos/embedded/application specific area of the market. These dont have to run gta 5 at 500 fps or even be a full fledged server...
I used to replaced the ones they used to use at McDonald’s before they did a massive upgrade, those things are excellent for heat . Some of them used to hang off the back if monitors right above cooking stations and they were almost invincible
Com ports or serial ports you can have this thing be a backup on your network gear to get back online after losing network access. For example you get locked out after messing up the IP on a switch in your rack, you log into that thing on the same rack and local into the router or switch you messed up its IP to get it back on the LAN. Or if you don’t want router to respond to management requests you can do management traffic from serial on that instead on the same rack
I am using way too many USB to 9 pin serial for controlling Scanner and Ham radios. I currently use M73 TFF machines, but would love to get ahold of a few of these for testing. I run base Debian CLI...
@@HardwareHaven I use a Uniden BCT15X, Uniden BC125AT scanners, along with several ham radios (Baofeng, Radioddity, and others) that all have some version of serial interfaces for control and programming. I use several USB sound cards to feed their audio to an Icecast streamer for in-house listening. Living in the mid-west, listening to NOAA, and RACES, and other folks discussing weather and neighborhood issues on the radios comes in handy. Even if I never transmitted (I am a licensed HAM operator, though) it would still be better than the RTL-SDR setups I used before.
There is a surprising amount of modern AV equipment that still has serial management ports on them, so you could easily repurpose this thing as a robust little serial control box with internet access that would allow you to manage devices remotely, even from your phone.
Wow this is awesome! I appreciate the insights to these kinds of let's say nieche systems. Kinda surprised they use somewhat standard hardware, unlike maybe anything that conneceted to the serial ports when the device was in use at the pizza place. I personally would much prefer something like a Pi as a thin client for obvious reasons but you don't get to see much of these types of systems on a day to day basis without really looking for it so this one was a blast! Thanks YT algorithm - once in like 5 million times it recommended a really great video. Subscribed!
Yeah, this is peripheral beast. Use it to build a DIY 3D Printer. Bonus points for every COM port you use for real features. Extra bonus points if one of the peripheral devices is a "bump" button!
I've worked for mc donald for 1year here in France, and with one of my manager friend, we were the "tech ppl" he explaned to me how every pieces of the network system was terifing with both very outadated specs, missused features and prices of top of the line hardware, for exemple we had a tablet in one room tha was powered by 2x 100mb/sec poe that could scan NFS's in a whole small room, all of the OSs where proprietary super locked often just connecting to remote server for basic function, and what was not using proprietary OS just had windows XP and was still remoting on firm's server
Nice! What I like most about the system is the slim form factor. Recently I built a new router out of an N100 based passively cooled mini PC. It works great, but it's also pretty bulky. This one is flat and has these mounting brackets to screw it under a table, shelf, or even on the wall.
You can think about older laptops and do the same, for example laptops with a broken screen. Most of these laptops have a VGA or HDMI video output and can be still very usable when connected to an external screen. Just by removing the screen of the laptop you get a very neat form factor computer with a mouse and keyboard integrated. Or you can do what I did, take out the motherboard and put it onto a board into a (storage) cabinet, add a wireless mouse and keyboard (with a dongle/receiver) and add an extra extremly silent fan for extra cooling. I did this in my shed. You will be surprised how much better it will perform when it is outside the narrow case and when the cooling conditions are much better.
I work for a company that has some hardware to sell. And our handeld measurement units are ridiculously underpowered for what is possible. But for a handheld unit it is very servicable which is great for our tech guys.
I have a similar device at home. It's been hanging around for so long that I only remembered it because of this video. It used to coordinate robotic arms for welding. Now, it runs CasaOS and serves as my primary backup server. When I'm done with a project (videos, which are very large files), I store them on the device (it has a SATA SSD with a terabyte). CasaOS then automatically makes a copy and uploads it to an internet cloud for redundant backup. I set this up because I used to edit on a laptop. When I finished, I just wanted to close the laptop and be "done." I didn't want to leave it on for another 30 minutes until all the syncing was complete. With this current solution, I let another device, which consumes less power and makes no noise, handle the upload. And how long it takes is completely irrelevant to me... I don't have to monitor it.
Robotics is what I had in mind for this. Low power, passively cooled, relatively small, lots of serial ports, and a "good-enough" CPU for some basic functions.
@HardwareHaven Thermalpads are used on small cores, like PCH, GPU, etc... It's because thermalpaste is harder to apply correctly on such small core. then thermalpad.
DANGER (Power over VGA) These POS systems have the capability to provide power to a video display via the VGA port, you can actually see that option in the BIOS settings when you were flicking through them. If that option is enabled and you plug it into a display or other device not designed for that you can damage them.
I have fiddled with these fanless industrial PCs a lot, and some of them have really high-end hardware, like Core i9s. In general they always have good connectivity, pretty good ambient temperature rating and ability to use quite a wide range of DC power, 12-24 V being the typical one, but I've seen some that will run on 9-48V, which is great.
My first thought would be toss it in the server closet and serial console server for all the other servers. Now you have a management node. You could also run a management network off one of the other NICs then it would be a full management system. Toss DNS and LDAP and maybe Kerberos and a CA and very full featured management node
I used a similar J1900 based "silent PC" as my pfsense router for years - despite the J1900 being on borrowed time (see other comments re the silicon bug), but it worked well and kept up with the 1Gbit WAN just fine. Finally retired this year and replaced by another device of identical form factor, this time powered by an N100 w/ 2.5Gbit NICs - they're inexpensive, silent and just keep trucking on..
I got a similar computer from a 2nd hand shop near me recently. I set it up on Windows 7 x64, 8gb RAM, a taken apart ssd like you did. I hooked it up to a simple 19" 1080p tv and use it for simple game emulation from NES all the way up to PS1 with no issues. I'm thinking about getting a USB based touch screen monitor and making my own UI in C# for a custom emulation station. Just some simple large on screen buttons to navigate/launch emulators... I know I could just use something like OpenEMU or even better, swap to linux and just launch from there, but on Win7, it is virtually flawless
I like to work on my cars a lot and this would be a great little system to pop in my garage, have a keyboard and small screen mounted and just use it to look up videos, websites and order parts whenever I need to. Cool option.
I suggest home automation where you are not pumping vertexes in games nor gigabytes of streaming video. Run your AVR on another box. Many of your environment sensors; weather, security and remote controlling are low data rates. With the decent video you can have a nice looking wall panel creating a futuristic looking vibe from low-tech.
This channel is great because it explores use cases for interesting unusual devices. This thing could be useful if you wanted something low power and passively cooled that did not need a lot of processing power in a location like a basement or garage. It was expensive partially because it's fairly rugged. I would not pay much for it, but I could think of some good uses for it.
I've built POS system for a local pizza place 12 years ago. Thing is - the online built in credit transaction fees are way, way cheaper than the standalone machine was. Security is an issue - I always advise stores with POS to secure their routers and use a separate VLAN for guest wifi
Honestly, this would make a great little PC for light home server tasks like pihole and home assistant like you said. And getting that mini PCIe to m.2 is huge. I also like the idea of using the COM ports for serial applications. Maybe if you could break them out into DB-9 you could make this into a silent retro gaming PC using some old hardware like flight sticks. I'm sure you could get something running DOSbox well on this.
My desktop is a used Thinkcentre T-73 that was thrown out when a local textile mill closed. It came with a 4th gen I-3 'energy saver' I replaced with the 2nd fastest 4th gen I-7, and maxed out the RAM from 4gb to 16gb. I also installed Ubuntu Linux, and it works great for what I use it for. It's been running like this for over 4 years now.
This little machine can still be useful for a variety of homelab things. With working USB ports, you could make it a DBAN /test rig for hard drives or you could make a small terminal server out of the serial ports (provided you can find the pinouts). I just recently had to make a terminal server out of a Pi and some usb-serial UARTs for devices that could only be controlled via serial. Since this thing has three serial ports, it'd be pretty easy to do the same (assuming they can be enumerated in Linux and usable via minicom).
Been working with systems like that. These style cases usually get mounted under ceilings and uses the whole case as a heatsink. Usually filled with mobile hardware and strictly tailored to the one usecase the customer has. We had similar ones for KFC which only played the inshop radio.
"[...] this thing has a lot of these COM ports which I imagine are used for connecting to a variety of point of sale devices using a UART connection or whatever, but I'm kinda curious what else this could be used for." Honestly? virtually any task of getting low-volume data from one place to another, no matter how complex or simple the source or sink may be. I personally have deployed on my desktop a VT320 terminal (mostly for output and monitoring data, little input), a line display, receipt printer, and a dot matrix printer. but it's also extremely useful for offline headless deployments; rather than SSH'ing into a box you can keep it as far from the 'net as possible and require physical access to control it. There's novel uses in art, too; you can get some interesting aesthetics from the reception of data sent faster than the receiver is expecting if you play your cards right.
In my opinion, due to its limited cpu power, but plethora of serial ports, you could potentially use it as a networking switch. I used a raspberry pi that had been modified to accept 6 ethernet ports, and two optical ports. I use it to this day as a networking switch between all the clients in my house, and even a data center on occasion when needed. Food for thought.
We are in an era where mainstream PCs have more than 4 core processors, so the best way to utilize this low-power thin client that lacks pcie gen2 x4 expansion slot is dual 2.5Gb network port routing (executing pfsense firewall ) As long as a 2.5Gbe switch is connected to the LAN port, it is suitable for small home studios. It is best to turn off its virtualization function and only give it a single role. As long as its processor is not always under full load, then it It will be a very useful machine.
The donor did you a favor bu swapping incompatible RAM in so it wouldn't but and was "defective". Then was able to keep it and send to you with the correct RAM as "spare". Nice!!
As someone who lives in the area that Marco's was founded in, it's wild to me to hear it referred to as a "very large pizza chain" after all this time. When I first moved here, it was only a local chain. I wonder if the quality's the same in other places in the US as it is here. Personally, Marco's is my favorite, though I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't as good in some other locations.
Ah, the ddr3L. Took me almost a month to find out such thing exists. I must have blamed every single ram manifacturer. Amazing vid as always. Thank you
Hi. Very interessting Video. 1 thing - dont measure batteries unloaded. The voltage may be okay but under load they easily drop when broken/faulty - may not for a RTC backup - but certainly on battery powered systems ;)
That thing is perfect for a home "gateway": providing a vpn, a webserver, a media server, a dns guard, a tiny NAS, sending WOL for remote turning on devices and monitoring other devices. With that little power consumption any ups would make it 100% available. I assume that debian graphics error was due to a wrong graphics driver. Perhaps trying an older kernel would solve it. Still, dont expect it to do more than opening youtube 😂.
At some point, I plan to equip my home with some sort of central computer thingy that can control lights, heating, remind me of appointments or give a weather report after receiving a spoken command. The device in this video is pretty close to what I have in mind: Small, easy to hide away inside a wall or under a desk, closed up, passive cooling, and just powerful enough to run a purely local home assistance software. I might get a raspberry pi 5 with an NPU module, probably and then see where I can get to from there. But essentially, yes: It's perfect as a home server.
paused like an hour ago to do something, came back and i was at your intro and instead of unpausing i started holding escape to choose my boot drive. whoopsies
Every time I walk past a POS monitor in my local Panera, I see the faint outline of an HP Prodesk attached to the monitor. I always have to fight the urge to yoink and take it home with me.
I worked at a tiny point of sale vendor for 8 years. You're likely to run across a ton of former POS systems. They're likely to be standard PC's with seemingly outdated touch screens, but built relatively sturdily. Go ahead and install Linux on them. Chances are it'll work okay. The days of some kind of weird proprietary hardware for POSes died 20 years ago.
"Philips screws that were all the same size" this is what happens when something is designed to be maintained
Indeed... indeed...
Or it's just cheaper to bulk order a bunch of identical screws, what fast food place is gonna be maintaining their POS devices?
Yeah it's better than a sff from hp or acer. 3-4 mixed nuts
@@GabrielSykes their POS provider will. Do you think the fast food place can also service all their cooking and refrigeration appliances, or do anything that isn't very basic operation and floor cleaning? They don't, they pay a service provider that sends technicians to service and repair stuff.
@@GabrielSykes The kind that wants to keep selling fast food if/when their POS device craps the bed?
I am disappointed that you didn't take this pc as an inspiration to start your own foreign pizza shop and flee the country to begin your new career. Otherwise, awesome video man!
It was hard to fit that into this one. That’s all in part 2!
@@HardwareHaven lol, can't wait!
This is the way
Pizza! Pizza! Pizza!
lmaoo
Former Marcos employee here, the BUMP 1 sticker means it was mounted to the wall and used just to display the orders needing to be made which usually had a ticket printer attached. It was a very simple program at the time i was there. I did troubleshooting when stuff didnt work. Most of the time ot was just restarting those terminals.
To*
I definitely had to look up what BUMP meant haha. Which is sad because I worked in a fast food pizza place in high school
I've seen this same PC, or something very similar, at my local Wendy's doing the same job. Attached to the back of a monitor facing the crew, showing order ticket info.
its wild they need 4 cores for that...
@@HardwareHaven These computers are usually connected to a heat and splash proof extruded alloy button box that's used (With about 20 labelled membrane switches) to scroll through orders and mark completed ones as done. That keyboard is sold as a "Bump bar" because it's primary use is to "Bump" order items onto the front of house screens once they're ready to be bagged.
I got some Lenovo ThinkHub 500's for free from a company that was upgrading their kiosks.11.6" rotating touchscreen, i5-7500T Processor with vPro enabled, 128gb SSD, speakers, mic, tons of HDMI.. I use it with a surveillance camera setup to store footage and monitor the cameras in realtime.......yeah and it also runs a local Valheim and Minecraft server after a massive RAM upgrade and a new SSD.. Moral of the story? Never underestimate the usability of these type of machines.
This is why no one should ever buy a Pi now.
@@Jaabaa_Primepreach.
@@Jaabaa_Prime The Pi still has its uses, but yes. I had the chance to see one of the registers that NCR makes used as an all-in-one PC. With the touch screen they didn't even need a keyboard or mouse to use windows on it.
But this is being used in that enviorement because it's FANLESS , these computers are used in areas where too much dust is expected to get in the fans so they resort to them
"you might have noticed that is the desk I recently got as an upgrade for my wife"
That's awesome. My wife isn't upgradable
lmao
I don't think the J1900 was ever considered a 'mobile' CPU, it was made exactly for this kind of application.
You're correct, that was a mistake! I mistakenly saw bay trail and called it mobile.
it absolutely is a mobile cpu. it's mobile cpus that also happen to be useful, and get used for, these tasks. bga1170 is the socket, which was then succeeded by bga1090. you could argue that some cpus on that socket, namely the c suffixes, would be truer to this statement since they have nonfunctional onboard wifi that is then fused off to make a c suffix chip, whereas the regular ones do have it enabled and functional.
@@destrierofdark_ You are correct in noting that the J1900 has a BGA1170 socket, which is specific to mobile CPUs. The "C" suffix chips are indeed special variants of Bay Trail-T processors that have non-functional onboard Wi-Fi and are designed for use cases where Wi-Fi isn't required.
The Intel Atom Z1900 (J1900) is a mobile CPU designed for small electronics, tablets, and smartphones, with a focus on low power consumption and compact form factors.
@@monkepog3236 that bga socket isn't specifically mobile, nor is any cpu on that socket specifically mobile. they're used in thin clients and alike applications just as much as they are mobile ones, and no, the c suffix parts aren't "purpose designed", but better suited. for those suffixed chips, they are the non-suffixed variants with the wifi functionality fused off presumably because it didn't pass the binning tests to be a non-c part. by extension of not having onboard wifi, they're better suited to applications that don't require it.
We call it 'Embedded CPU' 😅
I have two of these machines. One ran Windows and was the Drive-Thru timer, and the other was a front-side order display/bump bar machine. The second one is passively cooled as well and is actually now my firewall. It's also a J1900 with 4gb ram and a 64gb SSD and two Gbe NICS running OPNSense.
If you can get this cheap enough it would be great for some simple home server stuff. Home assistant, dns, download server or just to mess around ! It would be amazing to keep this out off the tech graveyard
Agreed!
Actually until last year I was running j1900 pc as the proxmox host. It run 2 VMs and bunch of containers but nothing fancy. RAM however was a limiting factor so I had to upgrade.
With forethought and a few tweaks, home theater time!
With all of those com ports, I bet it would make a good terminal server for microcontrollers and or some of those old Unix workstations. Now you have an excuse to find an old SUN or SGI workstation and get it running.
in home voip pbx!
A little insight on this for you from a former food service employee this isn’t a POS system but instead connects to the pos system and displays the orders in the kitchen and the com ports are for check printers and a little controller thingy the allows you to scroll through the orders and bump them off the screen when they’re completed!
this system skibidis my toilet... probs cool but idk
hence why it says BUMP 1. I had to image these hunks of e waste
In this case it could have been a POS system. When you look at the side with the connection ports the one on the far right that looks like a phone jack is labeled CD, this refers to a Cash Drawer. If used as a POS terminal it likely would have been connected to an office server that could do the heavy processing.
@nickm9102 yes but considering it says BUMP 1 on it, it was connected to a KVS and bump bar instead of a POS
@@myacidninjatheamazing1025 I never Questioned the use of the unit. I simply pointed out that the unit was configured in such a way that it could have been a POS unit.
The reality of the situation is that the system likely used the same box for every peripheral location and relied on the server to determine the function. The label indicates what is likely the last use in the restaurant environment. I can't be certain of either as I didn't Install, maintain, or remove the system from the site. I am making an educated guess based on the systems that I have Installed, maintained, and removed.
This CPU, J1900, is part of a range which contain a silicon bug called LPC CLK degradation. Countless devices failed after about 3 years (for example NAS devices from QNAP). The fact that this device still works after more than 3 years is probably because it was designed not to rely on LPC to boot (there are some bootstrap pins which indicate SPI or LPC boot).
^^^ This. Unfortunately this. I recently had a QNAP die on me and had no idea this was a thing until i started researching. Drives, I expected to die over time. Actual hardware itself - sadly, no. First thing i did when he said J1900 was cringe.
I repaired quite a number of those. For less severe cases there is a resistor fix which might work for another year or 2. And for severe cases the CPU can be replaced of coursrle using a high quality SMD rework station such as the WDS-620. But there is a point where is nit worth investing further in fixing old hardware which should not be broken in the first place.
Umm... I'm currently holding onto a J1900 powered Acer Aspire X Prebuilt with a manufacturing date of 2014. Apparently it had Windows 8.1 before I inevitably gave it a Kingston SSD with Ubuntu and a (very much) senseless upgrade from 4GB of RAM to 16GB of RAM. Just now gave it a mini-PCIe Wi-Fi card and antennae.
That would explain why my old jellyfin server randomly stopped booting
@@martinmethod427 Ayy I've got the same exact model! The only downside is the RAM... it doesn't like more than 8 GB... how the hell did you upgrade past that??
I remember using a subway POS to play Google Stadia on it, as it was the only game streaming service that wasn't blocked by the company.
That's honestly dope as hell to have done lol
I support these kind of shenanigans.
I don't have any stories like this. Or at least nothing cool like this lol
I KNEW I recognized that pc from somewhere. I worked at a dominos as well that ran on chrome os, that blew my mind. Also as a side note, the Bump 1 stick meant that this computer was at the front of the makeline as you would Bump the orders from there first, to the second screen which you would then bump again and it would push the order through to the printer at the cut table (where the pizzas come out of the oven and you cut them). So you had 2 systems, one at the front of the makeline that showed you what pizzas were coming through and then once you had the dough stretched and sauced you would then bump it down to then see what you needed to add to it.
Also on the minecraft serverfront, you could have the server auto generate chunks to a certain point. I was using an old macmini, core2duo, and attempted to have it auto generate up to 10k chunks in each direction which took forever, but it is possible.
We used this as an always accessible supervisor system to console into our L3 switches at our colocation in case there were changes made that were not accounted for. They work super well for simple tasks and it never needed rebooting using Ubuntu Server. Great little box saving us trips to the colo.
Had same idea
If you lived on the road and wanted to do an SSD NAS of some sort, this could be kind of an option. Low power, no moving parts, keeps good temps.
Or if you're a mechanic and need a PC to mount on the toolbox for diagnostics.
I have an old Par500 POS at home in my dads shop running bhodi linux and a usb sound card and he uses it just to play music/talk shows. The occasional looking up parts cost and such. Got it free from work when we were upgrading machines a few years ago.
"Odoo is [...] an ERP software suite" is a hilarious thing to hear if you hail from certain sectors of the internet, i just have to say.
Can you elaborate? 😅
@HardwareHaven belief me you don't want to know. Because that is quite a can of worms.
@HardwareHaven I'll just say it's a term for a certain kind of role playing and leave it at that. Delve deeper at your peril. :)
Ah, I see. 😂
Limsa catgirls...
I was a facility maintenance tech for a domino's pizza franchise for many years. When we upgraded all the pos and host/server computers I Inherited about 100 IBM Lenovo ThinkCenter computers. They are all dated between 2002 and 2004 and have pentium duo-core processors running windows Vista pro. I sold most of them to a computer repair shop and I turned one into an emulation game machine running botacera. But I still have about 10 kickin' around in storage.
working as a ERP Dev for 2years and Odoo is the least complain I got from clients. Such a solid system
What is the full form of ERP ?
@@XashA12Musk enterprise resource planning. you can see it as a all-in-one business management
In the restaurant industry IT technology was slow as molasses in winter for many many years. 1980s programable cash registers/ordering systems stayed in use for nearly 25 years. Even when new stuff started coming out, the industry was soooooo slow to adopt it simply because changing out IT solutions across 200 - 7000 locations is a huge undertaking.
Ah, working in similar industry tech wise we are talking for years about updating or IT infrastructure. It is just a huge monetary undertaking because of magic two word issue. Custom software.
@@maphantom Working in manufacturing, they avoided changing technology until there was some kind of crisis. Not just money for the hardware and software, but also dealing with the impact on operations was massively painful. People were just used to and comfortable with the old system.
I'm in this exact same boat. I just got some backpack PCs from a defunct VR company. Planning on documenting the teardown.
I worked at Domino's Australia until 2005 and we used a different system to the one used in the USA. It was the same supplier that did Hungry Jack's, STM. We had a single Linux or Unix system with Wyse serial terminals for each order screen, makeline, cut bench and customer display. My store was really old it was a Pentium 166. I left just before the Windows based replacement (Pulse) came.
Getting strong "little guys from cathode ray dude" energy from this video
00:30 Oh my, a very divisive question, pineapple on a pizza or not . . . and a default to "Y"? Wow! 😀😀😀
You can put anything you like on a pizza including pineapple.
@@simontay4851personally I like pineapple, anchovies, and balsamic glaze drizzled over it to top it off.
You realize pizza is a carb based crust a fruit based sauce and dairy based cheese. Yes tomatoes are a fruit. My point is anything belongs on pizza if you want it there.
Pineapple is a perfectly good topping for someone else’s pizza, but none for me thanks.
@@tehshingen I think most people forget that pizza sauce is a fruit sauce. Tomatoes are a fruit. The basis of pizza is crust fruit sauce cheese. My point is put anything you want on pizza
I love the fact that the PC space is accommodating for both ultra-budget/side-of-the-road hardware hacking and repurposing, as well as top of the line multi thousand dollar, skunk-works, custom builds, and pretty much everything in-between.
I'm hoping that stuff like the Steam Deck will see it take over the games console niche as well.
Repurpose of an old PC system. The reason I love hardware computing SO MUCH.
If nothing else a simple system like that would work great for retrogaming.
Maybe buttt a lot of emulators take some decent power to run
It would be just fine for a MAME cab, I have an old Thinclient running mine at the moment, but it will be upgraded with my current gaming desktop when I get my new gaming PC, it uses lots more power but I will have some better emulators running also
This looks to have been used as a KMS (Kitchen Management System) controller. Usually used with a touchscreen or hardware bump bar for acknowledging or bumping products to the next screen/clearing once prepared. Probably the most common brand for KMS is QSR.
With all the COM ports it would make a great multi user TTY server or BBS (LOL). Heck I even think Jeff @CraftComputing could use one of these to wire directly up to his new invention to remotely flash new firmware for testing. At least then he wouldn't have to re-plug it when testing.
Possibly! I might ask if he wants it haha
Hey dude, I noticed the serial ports are an RJ-45 port. You could probably use it to control those Cisco-esque console ports, using an RJ-45 straight through, as a terminal server. Just a suggestion.
I also thought about that, but I can't think of a good reason to not just connect to the switches over SSH
@@YonatanAvhar I guess it's for like older switches maybe. When you don't have SSH, you can only use telnet. Might as well use a terminal server, it's more secure. Also, I guess if you don't want to lug a laptop into the server closet to configure it via the terminal first, cause Cisco doesn't provide any other ways of configuration out of the box.
The rj45 ports are used on many industrial equipment in the gaming industry they are used for player tracking systems in the casino but you need need to make the custom cables usually only 3 wires are used for transmit, recieve, and ground also be aware sometimes you need diodes and resistors to filter the flow. Could make an interesting terminal to control other systems but I think wifi or cat connections makes better sense these days.
Many server motherboards still come with serial ports, you can use it as a poor man’s IPMI.
@@OscarCarlsson1986 AFAIK IPMI works on a dedicated lightweight processor (e.g. ast2400) which can control power independently.
Given that I agree that setting up a serial tty could be a life saver in case inband network is failing
Glad to see the “Little Guys” series expanding to more channels
To be fair, this channel has been doing videos on weird computers a long time ago
Not sure what that is, but sounds interesting! Link?
@@HardwareHaven ua-cam.com/play/PLec1d3OBbZ8LGjvbb0GQwlQxWXmI2PA88.html from @CathodeRayDude
Oh nice! I’ll have to check them out
@@HardwareHaven ua-cam.com/video/wRPDn5zPF7U/v-deo.html
I had a client that used these in fast food restaurants. These computers are absolute tanks. I think I only replaced 1 in maybe 10 years, and they probably had a couple dozen total. Most of them were mounted in order prep areas in very hot and humid environments, often directly above cooking areas or above food storage areas with heat lamps. They were used to show food orders for prep and had a printer attached that would print the order so it could be put in the bag when done. They also had a super chonky "keyboard" attached that was really just a metal box with a few buttons to cycle through orders and clear them when they were done.
I always enjoy these oddball reuse videos. Thanks!
the COM ports in a restaurant environment would be used for bump bars for the KVS screens hence it saying "BUMP 1" on it. the bump bars would allow you to clear orders, recall orders, zoom the screen on orders, select the next page, and a few other things. basically, THIS specific system would be used to display the orders that came in FROM the POS for (in a mcdonalds) the food orders, or if they have mccafe, it would show those orders and print a reciept for that order when you hit the "serve" button on the bump bar
Might be a good fit for driving laser cutters or CNC machines in a dusty/dirty environment.
"a very large pizza chain here in the us" and yet this is the first time I'm hearing about it
Same
US is a very large country. So you may not have seen everything in your country yet
Same
Was a large chain, not anymore since Godfathers had bought out failing store locations in Midwest.
I’ve heard of them, drive a semi all over. They’re actually pretty large in certain areas.
9:50 "nobody will use it as a gaming machine" - mybe not for playing AAA games, but I find this system useful in home made retro arcade game machine
I'm fairly sure that it would work for a Game Cabinet.
For tape you would need something like Kapton tape.
then give it a few layers of kapton tape, making sure to fully warp it.
or you could 3D print a small flat bracket that covers the PCB. like a MINI case
that would be a great signal k host
signal k is a marine software that gathers data from radar, sonar, AIS... those serial com ports would be handy, since most of the devices in a boat have them
although nowadays it all connects via wifi, the serial is more reliable on storms and busy marinas..
Just a suggestion: Run BOINC on it with whatever project strikes your fancy. If you don't mind the power draw, you'll be helping research, education, and other worthy causes. I'm running it on an old HP Netbook with Raspberry Pi desktop OS. Because of the limited 2GB RAM, I've set it to only a single project (World Community Grid). Just boot it up and fuggetaboutit.
About 10 years ago i was working with a demolition company we where tearing down a distribution warehouse that had stopped paying rent got kicked from the site and the land owner decided to build a storage unit complex i was tasked one day with smashing the interior office walls down i got quite a shock when i smashed a partition and found a fully intact server room still with machines and servers the company had built a server room next to the office section and to stop yhe noise built a insulated sliding door that was so well intergrated into the wall no one noticed it until i broke through i hot a whole tray of 3rd gen i7 cpus and a bunch of unused 2tb hdd when they cost a small fortune sold most of it kept an i7 and a bunch of drives and used the money i made to build a sick pc
Let punctuation into your life.
@mattd6085 no what part of worked for demolition company made you think I was good at english
@@acid3129 I can't imagine you were good at demolition on your first day, that's why people practice things. Practice basic literacy.
@mattd6085 all I did do was bang walls
@@acid3129 Do you have no desire at all to better yourself? And unless you got hurt often, banging walls still requires a level of skill and knowledge to not have the ceiling drop on your head or the the floor to give way
I recently bought an used industrial PC on eBay. It was full with remote control configurations (Many VNC connections to subsystems and a lot of very specific light management software) , including IPs and some account data to Austria's national theatre. They did not bother erasing the SSD .. well I did then, because I had more important stuff do to than to abuse the situation.
Now I understand why my Pizza always late, they use overprice underpower tech 🤦♂️.
The pizza's late because Hardware Haven took the computer away
Actually its not underpowered. in its day it was perfect in its use case. KVD (Kitchen Video Display) Epos equipment is generally one or two generations behind the mainstream general market when all the gremlins have been discovered and patched. That thing could run 24/7 for years and when I was younger, something like that would have been the dizzy heights that could only be dreamed about. You really only need a computer to do its designed functionality reliably and without fuss.
They don't use overpriced under powered tech. You dont know that these things are made for the Pos/embedded/application specific area of the market. These dont have to run gta 5 at 500 fps or even be a full fledged server...
I used to replaced the ones they used to use at McDonald’s before they did a massive upgrade, those things are excellent for heat . Some of them used to hang off the back if monitors right above cooking stations and they were almost invincible
Dang! That's awesome! Keep it up! 😎👍
Com ports or serial ports you can have this thing be a backup on your network gear to get back online after losing network access. For example you get locked out after messing up the IP on a switch in your rack, you log into that thing on the same rack and local into the router or switch you messed up its IP to get it back on the LAN. Or if you don’t want router to respond to management requests you can do management traffic from serial on that instead on the same rack
Seems like a great pc for a 3d printing farm
yeah, i was thinking octoprint could work
Definitely appreciate the "re-use" vibe here. Imagine how many of these get ewasted.
I am using way too many USB to 9 pin serial for controlling Scanner and Ham radios. I currently use M73 TFF machines, but would love to get ahold of a few of these for testing. I run base Debian CLI...
I'm curious about this... I know very little about Ham radios, but now I'm intrigued
@@HardwareHaven I use a Uniden BCT15X, Uniden BC125AT scanners, along with several ham radios (Baofeng, Radioddity, and others) that all have some version of serial interfaces for control and programming. I use several USB sound cards to feed their audio to an Icecast streamer for in-house listening. Living in the mid-west, listening to NOAA, and RACES, and other folks discussing weather and neighborhood issues on the radios comes in handy. Even if I never transmitted (I am a licensed HAM operator, though) it would still be better than the RTL-SDR setups I used before.
There is a surprising amount of modern AV equipment that still has serial management ports on them, so you could easily repurpose this thing as a robust little serial control box with internet access that would allow you to manage devices remotely, even from your phone.
Mmmm. Still has that greasy pepperoni scent.
Surprisingly it didn't. I was a bit shocked.
Wow this is awesome! I appreciate the insights to these kinds of let's say nieche systems. Kinda surprised they use somewhat standard hardware, unlike maybe anything that conneceted to the serial ports when the device was in use at the pizza place. I personally would much prefer something like a Pi as a thin client for obvious reasons but you don't get to see much of these types of systems on a day to day basis without really looking for it so this one was a blast! Thanks YT algorithm - once in like 5 million times it recommended a really great video. Subscribed!
Yeah, this is peripheral beast. Use it to build a DIY 3D Printer. Bonus points for every COM port you use for real features. Extra bonus points if one of the peripheral devices is a "bump" button!
A “bump” or “bump bar” is typically a kitchen display used to track all orders in a queue
I've worked for mc donald for 1year here in France, and with one of my manager friend, we were the "tech ppl"
he explaned to me how every pieces of the network system was terifing with both very outadated specs, missused features and prices of top of the line hardware, for exemple we had a tablet in one room tha was powered by 2x 100mb/sec poe that could scan NFS's in a whole small room,
all of the OSs where proprietary super locked often just connecting to remote server for basic function, and what was not using proprietary OS just had windows XP and was still remoting on firm's server
Head spinning but watched all the way through. A swap parts inventory and general working knowledge, like you have, is indispensable. 🎉
can it run doom
well, the ipod can run doom with rockbox so 99% yes it can
Bingus Studios needs to get his hands on one of these
I used to work for a car manufacturer, and we had a number of machines just like this for prototyping Infotainment systems.
Nice! What I like most about the system is the slim form factor. Recently I built a new router out of an N100 based passively cooled mini PC. It works great, but it's also pretty bulky. This one is flat and has these mounting brackets to screw it under a table, shelf, or even on the wall.
9:08 oh boy, only 1 lane of PCIe Gen 2. I feel your pain.
@@terrydaktyllus1320you good bro? I just read an essay responding to a two sentence comment.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 🤣🤣🤣
@@terrydaktyllus1320 🤣🤣🤣
You can think about older laptops and do the same, for example laptops with a broken screen. Most of these laptops have a VGA or HDMI video output and can be still very usable when connected to an external screen. Just by removing the screen of the laptop you get a very neat form factor computer with a mouse and keyboard integrated. Or you can do what I did, take out the motherboard and put it onto a board into a (storage) cabinet, add a wireless mouse and keyboard (with a dongle/receiver) and add an extra extremly silent fan for extra cooling. I did this in my shed. You will be surprised how much better it will perform when it is outside the narrow case and when the cooling conditions are much better.
11:08 typical linux experience, and that's why Windows can only lose to MacOS
I work for a company that has some hardware to sell.
And our handeld measurement units are ridiculously underpowered for what is possible.
But for a handheld unit it is very servicable which is great for our tech guys.
I have a similar device at home. It's been hanging around for so long that I only remembered it because of this video. It used to coordinate robotic arms for welding. Now, it runs CasaOS and serves as my primary backup server. When I'm done with a project (videos, which are very large files), I store them on the device (it has a SATA SSD with a terabyte). CasaOS then automatically makes a copy and uploads it to an internet cloud for redundant backup.
I set this up because I used to edit on a laptop. When I finished, I just wanted to close the laptop and be "done." I didn't want to leave it on for another 30 minutes until all the syncing was complete. With this current solution, I let another device, which consumes less power and makes no noise, handle the upload. And how long it takes is completely irrelevant to me... I don't have to monitor it.
Robotics is what I had in mind for this. Low power, passively cooled, relatively small, lots of serial ports, and a "good-enough" CPU for some basic functions.
@HardwareHaven Thermalpads are used on small cores, like PCH, GPU, etc... It's because thermalpaste is harder to apply correctly on such small core. then thermalpad.
DANGER (Power over VGA)
These POS systems have the capability to provide power to a video display via the VGA port, you can actually see that option in the BIOS settings when you were flicking through them.
If that option is enabled and you plug it into a display or other device not designed for that you can damage them.
I have fiddled with these fanless industrial PCs a lot, and some of them have really high-end hardware, like Core i9s. In general they always have good connectivity, pretty good ambient temperature rating and ability to use quite a wide range of DC power, 12-24 V being the typical one, but I've seen some that will run on 9-48V, which is great.
My first thought would be toss it in the server closet and serial console server for all the other servers. Now you have a management node. You could also run a management network off one of the other NICs then it would be a full management system. Toss DNS and LDAP and maybe Kerberos and a CA and very full featured management node
I used a similar J1900 based "silent PC" as my pfsense router for years - despite the J1900 being on borrowed time (see other comments re the silicon bug), but it worked well and kept up with the 1Gbit WAN just fine. Finally retired this year and replaced by another device of identical form factor, this time powered by an N100 w/ 2.5Gbit NICs - they're inexpensive, silent and just keep trucking on..
Tbh for warehouse those would been usefull. The normal Desktops at our work are dusty and loud after 2 years
I got a similar computer from a 2nd hand shop near me recently. I set it up on Windows 7 x64, 8gb RAM, a taken apart ssd like you did. I hooked it up to a simple 19" 1080p tv and use it for simple game emulation from NES all the way up to PS1 with no issues. I'm thinking about getting a USB based touch screen monitor and making my own UI in C# for a custom emulation station. Just some simple large on screen buttons to navigate/launch emulators... I know I could just use something like OpenEMU or even better, swap to linux and just launch from there, but on Win7, it is virtually flawless
I like to work on my cars a lot and this would be a great little system to pop in my garage, have a keyboard and small screen mounted and just use it to look up videos, websites and order parts whenever I need to. Cool option.
I suggest home automation where you are not pumping vertexes in games nor gigabytes of streaming video. Run your AVR on another box. Many of your environment sensors; weather, security and remote controlling are low data rates. With the decent video you can have a nice looking wall panel creating a futuristic looking vibe from low-tech.
This channel is great because it explores use cases for interesting unusual devices. This thing could be useful if you wanted something low power and passively cooled that did not need a lot of processing power in a location like a basement or garage. It was expensive partially because it's fairly rugged. I would not pay much for it, but I could think of some good uses for it.
I've built POS system for a local pizza place 12 years ago. Thing is - the online built in credit transaction fees are way, way cheaper than the standalone machine was. Security is an issue - I always advise stores with POS to secure their routers and use a separate VLAN for guest wifi
Honestly, this would make a great little PC for light home server tasks like pihole and home assistant like you said. And getting that mini PCIe to m.2 is huge.
I also like the idea of using the COM ports for serial applications. Maybe if you could break them out into DB-9 you could make this into a silent retro gaming PC using some old hardware like flight sticks. I'm sure you could get something running DOSbox well on this.
My desktop is a used Thinkcentre T-73 that was thrown out when a local textile mill closed.
It came with a 4th gen I-3 'energy saver' I replaced with the 2nd fastest 4th gen I-7, and maxed out the RAM from 4gb to 16gb. I also installed Ubuntu Linux, and it works great for what I use it for. It's been running like this for over 4 years now.
This little machine can still be useful for a variety of homelab things. With working USB ports, you could make it a DBAN /test rig for hard drives or you could make a small terminal server out of the serial ports (provided you can find the pinouts). I just recently had to make a terminal server out of a Pi and some usb-serial UARTs for devices that could only be controlled via serial. Since this thing has three serial ports, it'd be pretty easy to do the same (assuming they can be enumerated in Linux and usable via minicom).
Been working with systems like that. These style cases usually get mounted under ceilings and uses the whole case as a heatsink. Usually filled with mobile hardware and strictly tailored to the one usecase the customer has.
We had similar ones for KFC which only played the inshop radio.
That PC might me a decent Point of Sale terminal, You need Serial Ports for Cash Drawer, Pole Display, Receipt Printer, Weight Scale, Barcode Scanner.
I have one of those mini PCs and all I currently use It is to run Linux and then connect to my main computer via Steam Link.
Fast Food PC's. Whoulda thunkit? 😁 Good stuff. 😊
"[...] this thing has a lot of these COM ports which I imagine are used for connecting to a variety of point of sale devices using a UART connection or whatever, but I'm kinda curious what else this could be used for."
Honestly? virtually any task of getting low-volume data from one place to another, no matter how complex or simple the source or sink may be. I personally have deployed on my desktop a VT320 terminal (mostly for output and monitoring data, little input), a line display, receipt printer, and a dot matrix printer. but it's also extremely useful for offline headless deployments; rather than SSH'ing into a box you can keep it as far from the 'net as possible and require physical access to control it. There's novel uses in art, too; you can get some interesting aesthetics from the reception of data sent faster than the receiver is expecting if you play your cards right.
In my opinion, due to its limited cpu power, but plethora of serial ports, you could potentially use it as a networking switch. I used a raspberry pi that had been modified to accept 6 ethernet ports, and two optical ports. I use it to this day as a networking switch between all the clients in my house, and even a data center on occasion when needed. Food for thought.
It is a kitchen display system unit. Many restaurants don't own those, they are leased and maintained by a third party company.
We are in an era where mainstream PCs have more than 4 core processors, so the best way to utilize this low-power thin client that lacks pcie gen2 x4 expansion slot is dual 2.5Gb network port routing (executing pfsense firewall ) As long as a 2.5Gbe switch is connected to the LAN port, it is suitable for small home studios. It is best to turn off its virtualization function and only give it a single role. As long as its processor is not always under full load, then it It will be a very useful machine.
The donor did you a favor bu swapping incompatible RAM in so it wouldn't but and was "defective". Then was able to keep it and send to you with the correct RAM as "spare". Nice!!
As someone who lives in the area that Marco's was founded in, it's wild to me to hear it referred to as a "very large pizza chain" after all this time. When I first moved here, it was only a local chain. I wonder if the quality's the same in other places in the US as it is here. Personally, Marco's is my favorite, though I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't as good in some other locations.
Ah, the ddr3L. Took me almost a month to find out such thing exists. I must have blamed every single ram manifacturer. Amazing vid as always. Thank you
This neat little PC would be great for any number of things. I would definitely keep it and find a use for it.
Mounting that thing to a wall or even underneath a table is an amazing "feature" for that performance.
Hi. Very interessting Video. 1 thing - dont measure batteries unloaded. The voltage may be okay but under load they easily drop when broken/faulty - may not for a RTC backup - but certainly on battery powered systems ;)
That thing is perfect for a home "gateway": providing a vpn, a webserver, a media server, a dns guard, a tiny NAS, sending WOL for remote turning on devices and monitoring other devices. With that little power consumption any ups would make it 100% available.
I assume that debian graphics error was due to a wrong graphics driver. Perhaps trying an older kernel would solve it. Still, dont expect it to do more than opening youtube 😂.
At some point, I plan to equip my home with some sort of central computer thingy that can control lights, heating, remind me of appointments or give a weather report after receiving a spoken command. The device in this video is pretty close to what I have in mind: Small, easy to hide away inside a wall or under a desk, closed up, passive cooling, and just powerful enough to run a purely local home assistance software. I might get a raspberry pi 5 with an NPU module, probably and then see where I can get to from there. But essentially, yes: It's perfect as a home server.
paused like an hour ago to do something, came back and i was at your intro and instead of unpausing i started holding escape to choose my boot drive. whoopsies
Every time I walk past a POS monitor in my local Panera, I see the faint outline of an HP Prodesk attached to the monitor. I always have to fight the urge to yoink and take it home with me.
I have a similar piece of hardware from a slot machine and use it as an opnsense firewall, absolutely PERFECT
I worked at a tiny point of sale vendor for 8 years. You're likely to run across a ton of former POS systems. They're likely to be standard PC's with seemingly outdated touch screens, but built relatively sturdily. Go ahead and install Linux on them. Chances are it'll work okay. The days of some kind of weird proprietary hardware for POSes died 20 years ago.