I’ve known about “System On a Chip” and “System On a Board” for many years. I have one of the early embedded software development kits, including some TI chipset.
The most common style of these today is likely the Arduino class of SoC. These things are incredible.
An idea I pitched years ago, for potential military use, was a swarm of small single purpose computers that could be dropped in mass from an aircraft.
Something about the size of a quarter with one or two sensors, a mesh Wi-Fi system, GPS, and a battery. These would drop like the “helicopter” seed pods, scatter over an area, then set up a monitoring network. Using spread spectrum, low power, and burst transmissions, the network might be difficult to detect.
As the sensors detected “things”, they would report to a transmission unit, which would then send a report to home base.
This was all based on a small battery. We figured we could get these things in mass and get them ready to toss out the back of a C130 for less than $100 each.
Today, I can buy a chip that will do that, put it on a custom board with all components for less than $20 in low unit counts.
So SoC, way cool.
The other thing that has been happening is that the physical size requirements for a personal computer have gone way down. Whereas the original XT motherboard was 8.5×11 and the AT was 12×13, we are now seeing Mini-ITX at 6.7×6.7 and even Nano-ITX at 4.7×4.7.
My son found the Mini-ITX form factor computer a few years ago. A full computer that was the size of 3 boxes of .45cal. It weights less.
His computer came with 2 HDMI ports, 4 USB3.2 ports, a headphone jack, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 1Gb Ethernet. It had upgradable memory and at least one M.2 port. This thing just works.
What is cool about it is that it mounts to the back of a monitor. He needs his keyboard and two power supplies.
It is what I got my lovely wife for Christmas this last year.
Can I ditch the big boxes?
Things go in circles. My primary machine lives in a case I purchased almost 20 years ago. It has a new power supply, an extra video card, and a SAS controller. It is designed to handle 9 internal drives plus the optical drive. It can connect to external SAS cabinets.
It was designed to have 36 TB of storage in a ZFS pool. It is heavy. It requires big fans. It is a workhorse.
But, I’m moving away from ZFS. It is a great system, I love it. It just does not meet my current needs. I’ve moved to ceph, a distributed system.
Ceph does not use raid technology the same way that ZFS does. Instead, it depends on having many nodes with lots of redundancy.
With ZFS, my normal was one parity drive for every 4 data drives. So a 20% overhead.
In its fast mode, ceph has a 200% overhead. For every block of data stored, it requires two copies. There are modes that are more optimized, but they all seem to have higher overhead than a raid system.
But because I don’t need to create 5 drive pools, I can do something different. More boxes with just a few drives in each.
I don’t need all that motherboard. I don’t need all that memory. I don’t even need all that much CPU.
Some of the servers I’m using only support two SATA drives, but have an NVMe slot. Still, it is a big box.
My answer was to go looking. I found a cheap ITX-Mini motherboard. It would have been cheaper off the boat, but I found it on Amazon. A used i5 CPU. It will handle an i7 and maybe an i9. A cheap 128GB NVMe, and some DDR3 ram. Toss in a CPU cooler and it is a fully functional system.
It only has a Gigabit Ethernet, but it has a PCI slot. It has four SATA ports.
The cheap case I found has four hot swap bays for SATA drives. It takes a Mini-ITX motherboard. This thing is perfect for what I require.
So yes, this can do the job. I can downsize.
What else is cool about these Mini-ITX boards?
They really are designed with specific markets in mind. I found one with 2 2.5Gb RJ45 and 2 10Gb SFP+ ports. It has GPIO ports, comes in an extruded aluminum heat sink/case. It replaced the old router and everything got faster.
There are versions with multiple RJ45 ports. Different layouts. Different CPU designs. Some come with a CPU on the board, making them a SoB. Some are AMD, some are Intel based.
What I couldn’t find is a board with four SATA ports, a PCIe slot, and GPIO.
Which brings me back to PI
The board I want needs to have hardware-driven Ethernet, GPIO pins, and serial IO. It also has to be cheap. I think I found it in the Banana PI M2 Ultra.
It has everything I need, it was very cheap, less than dinner for three at the fast food joint.
My step backward? It requires power that I can’t give it. GRRR. So it requires a dedicated power supply.
Oh well, my NTP server is almost here.
Comments
One response to “One Step Forward n Steps Back (geek)”
I’ve been following a Jay Valentine on the omega4america substack and on Rumble. His fractal-computing.com site makes many claims of superiority of what he calls ‘Edge Computing’. This runs on a NUC(Next Unit Computing) which sounds like what your son has. There are claims of improved speed, efficiency and lowered associated costs in development, maintenance, and upkeep that sound really good.
I have no way to vet these claims. Have you heard of them? Do you have an opinion about Fractal Computing one way or the other?