Little Guys: Episode 3 [Lex Brik]

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

This is completely unrelated but I was wondering about that weekly pill container. Do those typically start with sunday in english speaking countries?
I've just never seen that so it had me curious.

I really wish I had an Ergo Brick 386 or 486 from the early 1990s

they machine it out of a solid billet

what does win95 but as a concept mean

32:55 Why not wire a holder for a coin cell if the voltage is the same with an in-line diode to prevent the recharge???

Was trying to work out what SMTWTFS was an acronym for and if the "WTF" was some kind of easter egg. Then I realised it's just a pill box.

mini pci e is probably different but a key e m.2 connector has pins for 4x pcie lanes and usb. They're most commonly used for wifi cards.

You ended up discovering half the things I was going to point out (mPCIe USB, bypass relays, removable disk) so this comment is a bit shorter. On the storage front I woulds suspect the internal flash would be connected through the same ATA bus as the CF card. These chipsets predated eMMC. When a card appears as removable you can use the Hitachi "cfadisk" filter driver to make it appear as fixed.

In regards to the Bypass Relays (I started typing a comment and your edit cut in so I'll keep it short)

These were also really popular in the Telco space for their SBC Gateways (Session Border Controller Gateways) which were used for processing calls.

There were Ethernet versions and the more popular one (in my experience) were ISDN versions.

You could install an SBC in front of an old PBX and configure it to "do something" with the calls (such as go to a new pbx. or call recording.. or convert to SIP etc etc) but as before you could also make the system transparent. Not only would the system automatically connect the two ports together if the power failed, you could set this in software so if you needed to reboot the SBC or make breaking changes the legacy pbx (or the SBC you had behind it) could route calls too

I'm watching this vid (and commenting from) an N270+945GSE+ICH7 system just like this. But mine is a Netbook and i have Linux on it. Chromium, 360p, some performance tweaks. Yeah a system like this doesn't need much cooling at all, just dumping it into the alu side is perfectly adequate. Most of the power consumption coming from the north bridge IC, which includes a GMA950 video and the DDR2 SDRAM controllers. A lot more than the CPU.

Laptop cameras are also just USB cameras. I didn't know about the PCIe adapters… Yikes….

Could make it a RPi case.

CRD has GSV
(Great Singing Voice)☺️

Can you please do a livestream where you mess around with the mini PCIe stuff you already have? I realized that you didn't realize something, and I won't tell you what, so it can be caught on video

For the mini PCIe, the WI-FI/Bluetooth cards use USB for Bluetooth.

msata drive

Used to use that very processor in a netbook with virtual machines. Fast? Of course not. Useful? Absolutely. It was my first machine obtained primarily for watching netflix, and mobile locksmithing. My main laptop could not watch netflix natively at the time without a virtual machine of its own, due to running linux, hence the virtual machines being used to run needed apps.

As for the hard to find battery, used to run 4 aaas instead of an ipod battery, before replacements became at all common. Had to mill out the back of the case, sure, they were never fully charged, but they lasted fine, covered as they were in epoxy. And once the charging circuit sees its at 4.2v, you are golden. For smaller tasks, i imagine you are using a stack of 4 nimh button cells.

multi nics put pfsense on it

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.

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.