Fanless 8.4" touchpanel PC - What can YOU do with it?

Info & chat about quiet prebuilt, small form factor and barebones systems, people's experiences with vendors thereof, etc.

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autoboy
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Joined: Fri Dec 10, 2004 8:10 pm
Location: San Jose, California

Fanless 8.4" touchpanel PC - What can YOU do with it?

Post by autoboy » Fri Sep 21, 2007 3:32 pm

Found this 8.4" industrial PC when checking out touchpanels for my HTPC. It has a 500mhz AMD geode, 800x600 resolution, 2 ethernet ports, 2 USB 2.0 slots, and bootable CF slot.

Eventually I'm going to replace my HTPC with an HD extender from SageTV (if they ever come out). I have been considering building a fanless PC built off a Via fanless mITX board and a touchpanel for playing my audio files without booting up the TV and getting out the mouse. With a USB audio adaptor and wireless networking, this fanless PC and touchpanel could handle that like a champ. The only downside is the price of $900, but it just might be worth it for the sheer coolness factor. I really want to get this thing!

So, what would you do with this PC?

tarvoke
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Sep 18, 2007 1:17 pm
Location: connecticut

Post by tarvoke » Fri Sep 21, 2007 3:50 pm

make a vt220 emulator?
/hides
(norilly that's what I'd do with it...)

naw really, you could get a wyse 9450xe for say 50-100 bucks. and a 19" serial touchscreen (check pacificgeek) for 200-300 bucks. slap all that up in xp embedded or even lunix and you got yourself a nice touchscreen device for less than half the cost.

cloneman
Posts: 448
Joined: Sat May 21, 2005 9:48 am

Post by cloneman » Fri Sep 21, 2007 4:22 pm

do those wyse systems support anything but xp embedded? For instance, if I used larger CF cards (or even a notebook HD) could I put xp pro on them?

tarvoke
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Joined: Tue Sep 18, 2007 1:17 pm
Location: connecticut

Post by tarvoke » Fri Sep 21, 2007 6:04 pm

in general terms it is a regular x86 pc inside and should run anything from linux/bsd to 2000/xp as long as the storage medium is big enough. via c3 550mhz may not run xp terribly snappy or decode video decently, of course.

from what others have said, basically it has 2 normal ide ports. one of which is taken up by a 256mb flash-to-40pin dealie aka dom/doc. cf.

going on my experience getting full operating systems to run on various embedded hardwares not meant for full os (nortel contivity, toshiba magnia, pcengines wrap, hp thin client, aeronix zipit, ...) it should be do-able, as long as you have the disk space. even if you couldn't go past the base 256mb flash rom, bartpe or equivalent could let you cut xp down enough to run on it. but that'd take effort.

tarvoke
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Sep 18, 2007 1:17 pm
Location: connecticut

Post by tarvoke » Fri Sep 21, 2007 6:49 pm

much as I've been wanting one of those wyse dealies for months, I can't really justify buying one. even cheap as they are on ebay. bleh.

however, at the moment I have hooked up a 5gb microdrive to a cf-ide adapter to my asus c3 terminator (c3 800mhz / cle266 / 512mb ddr) and xp is currently installing to the microdrive quite happily. fwiw. not the most ideal test, but eh it's something.

nb: oftentimes with a flash module hooked directly to ide, you need to disable dma. sucks, but them's the breaks.

jhhoffma
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Joined: Mon Apr 25, 2005 10:00 am
Location: Grand Rapids, MI

Post by jhhoffma » Sat Sep 22, 2007 11:33 am

Something like this.

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