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In the course of my business, I deal with dozens of different embedded PC's. There's one thing I wish players in this space would keep in mind: If you want to take a shot at this window of power and performance (the level at which people start thinking "set-top box") you really have to beat out the $250 netbook I can get at walmart. If my first thought is, "nice form-factor but a netbook/mini-itx/mac-mini solves the problem for the same price", you pretty much lose just because the others are easier to get.

This is what really caught my attention about the Raspberry Pi. It was OpenWRT sized and priced, but promises netbook sized abilities. I just wish I knew how to get a case of them.

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I deal with embedded hardware all day long as well. I don't need a case of Raspberry Pis. I need a guarantee that the board will be available for the next five years.

My customers have products that run for that long, even longer. I can't be changing hardware every year because the chip has been end-of-lifed or has become suddenly scarce and the price has quadrupled. And this happens a lot. Even the pico-ITX stuff disappears and reappears constantly, especially when it's from Asia.

Yeah, the one big thing that this one has going for it is its noiselessness due to using its case as a heat sink. Torvalds has also talked about how he wants a "whisper-quiet" computing environment; I'm surprised that so few companies treat this as a design target. It's probably more popular among computers designed to be used as thin clients, which it looks like the mintBox is.

It's nice to see how much you can compress into that small package, though.

(Most) Netbooks are fanless too.

Which ones?

My Dell Mini for one.

Thanks!

Noise bothers me, I even get bothered by the heads resting in a hard drive. It seems that the quieter you get your environment - the more bothered you can become. I've a pretty decent asus gfx card that remains unused, because it has an onboard fan. Both my desktop and laptop are whisper quiet.

I had a friend with a Pentium 4 machine, that he just kept in a nearby cupboard. Once shut behind the door, you couldn't hear it at all. If I was a home owner (and could modify my house at will,) I'd probably just place my PC in another room (preferably a store), and channel cables through the wall. Would be cheaper than wasting money on over-priced cooling. The good thing about this, is that you also don't have to worry so much about what your PC looks like. You can even mount a motherboard in something like a biscuit tin.

A desktop is usually noisy. Recently it gets really hot where I live, and I can see the noise difference my desktop fans make VS the same conditions in Winter... By the way, are there some manufacturers of desktop cases which you could recommend to reduce the noise?

I like your idea of having the PC in a different room than the actual screen and controls. But that's not really an option if you rent an apartment and cannot drill holes through the walls :)

Lots of good advice on http://silentpcreview.com

They have similar recommendations for PSUs, heatsinks, fans, HDDs etc.

This an interesting article about sound proofing your computer. It is written with sound studios in mind:

http://www.quietpcusa.com/how-to-silence-a-computer.aspx

There's lots of good advice on building silent PCs. I actually have a roomy desktop case, a Lian Li, a passive GFX card, an energy efficient CPU and only one big CPU fan, and a pretty silent energy efficient PSU. These were all picked with noise in mind when I last built my desktop PC. My case actually is pretty thin alu, it resonates because of the hard drive and thin chassis, so I've had to tediously dampen the drives with rubber (I wouldn't recommend that case.) Some of the older cases - I'm talking a naughties case, can be found (probably at the local tip) that are incredibly thick, and these make for a better quieter unit in my opinion - but at the same time they can be quite ugly. But then again - most PCs are ugly!

A friend of mine just picked up a Pentium 4 (yes all my friends have P4s), for £20, with a nice thick case, but the thing sounded like a helicopter taking off - the fans were so loud. We replaced the CPU fan (something like an Arctic freezer), and now it's quite easy on the ears.

My PC case is hugely bloated for my needs, I barely touch the DVD unit anymore, so I could just throw it in a trunk. Or make a new chassis for it. I only keep it as the size doesn't make me curse whenever I have to go in there. How about a piano stool for a case?

I think my favourite case I ever had was a micro ATX case that I modded to accommodate the PSU on the front. I could then keep it on the floor and still turn it off easily. As it was low down it was quieter. It also served as a rather nice foot warmer.

An RPi is fanless, right?

Yes

Fanless, and caseless, and bulk-storage-less.

An SD card counts as bulk storage. ;)

>the one big thing that this one has going for it is its noiselessness due to using its case as a heat sink

I am going to disagree with that: IMHO the one big thing being fanless has going for it is lack of need for maintenance. Specifically, without a fan, the case can be designed so that much less dust gets into the case, and dust and moving parts are the main causes of need for maintenance.

The cost-effective way to lower noise is to use better fans (longer blades, better bearings, lower-RPM motors) or to use solid-state drives.

The company that makes the computers featured in the OP also makes a fanless computer powered by an Ivy Bridge Core i7: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/purchase/order-direct-intense-pc/. But they want $836 for the barebones (no RAM, no HDD) version!

One reason the price is so high is that they are forced to use an ultra-low-power (17-W-TDP) processor. If you add just one fan to your design, you can easily accommodate a 65-W-TDP processor, and in fact Intel does not even sell a retail processor (i.e., a processor marketed to people who build their own boxes) with less than 65 W TDP. To be precise, they didn't sell any such retail processors before Ivy Bridge started coming out -- I have not checked since then.

ADDED. I am talking here about systems with some oomph: if an ARM or an embedded-class processor will do the trick, then obviously being noiseless (and compact and low in power consumption and low maintenence) is easy.

Most netbooks don't even support 8GB of RAM. This device is clearly intended to be much more powerful than your typical netbook or Raspberry Pi.

This does beat the $250 netbook, but possibly not along axes you care enough about. The fact they're marrying the distro to the hardware is a pretty big win in itself.

In short: they're not selling to you, so your not buying it doesn't mean they lose.

So true. At this price range, i'm just gonna buy a Mac mini.

"This is what really caught my attention about the Raspberry Pi. I just wish I knew how to get a case of them."

Check out BeagleBone - more expensive than RasberryPi, but they are available. I'm running a BeagleBone as a DNSMASQ server. Linux with package management and full-blown development tools running inside an Altoids tin - yeah! All of these small/cheap/silent linux boards are pretty incredible & there is more to come.

The Bone is currently among my favorites, if not the favorite. I second your recommendation. I liked the Globalscale Sheeva/Guru/Dream for a while but their terrible build quality and ever changing spec put me off them quickly.

When I need graphics (mostly we drive plasma displays for signage) I usually use a Lanner. (http://www.lannerinc.com/Embedded_Computing) Fanless, cooled through aluminum case, generally indestructible and less than $300 each in bulk.

If you just want to throw a switch via wifi, a TP-link 703N with OpenWRT can do it for you for even less than the cost of a RasPi. I've got one opening my garage door from my iPhone.

I think both TP-Link and OpenWrt are very much under-appreciated. Glad to see their names appear here.

By the way, anyone who is using Gentoo should really try to compile your own OpenWrt images. It is a fun exercise (if using Gentoo is fun for you ;)).

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