It Runs Linux!

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This CF card will replace the mini hard drive

AC to 5VDC power supply - easily replaced by a battery!

I/O ports include mouse, keyboard, VGA, audio in / out, parallel port, serial port, 100-base T Ethernet, and USB!

I have no 2.5 inch ribbon cable (soon to fix this), so I had to convert to regular HD IDE cable and back again to laptop drive

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A while back I was donated some old thin clients running a way outdated Windows CE. These machines are too old to do anything real fancy, but the circuit boards are quite small, require only a 5VDC power supply, and consume about 6 watts of power, so I figured they would be great embedded device platforms if I could get Linux working on them.

This particular device has an 2.5" IDE connector. Originally plugged into it was a 32MB Flash drive. For my experiment, I connected a laptop drive to this IDE connector. I don't have a 2.5" ribbon cable, thus all the extra wires and adapter boards (more on this later). I used my desktop to install a simple base version of Gentoo onto my little hard drive. Gentoo allowed me to tailor to the GeodeMX processor and create a small install footprint (under 500 MB, and that's with lots of development tools, etc!).

These pictures show the moment of truth - it worked! The Linux install is much snappier than the Windows CE, and it has all sorts of great things like Python, SSH, full networking, USB, sound, you name it. I didn't install a GUI because I'm going to use this board to control a robot, but I have a couple other thin clients, so I might try a light GUI on one.

Did I mention this thing draws 6 watts of power? Perfect for a "robot brain". My plan is to now take that compact flash card and install Linux on it, and wire it directly to the IDE bus (I'm told it's easy to do, electrically). This will make a completely quiet, solid-state Linux computer from parts that would have been junked otherwise!

Hopefully later this summer I'll have some photos of the robot that this will control. What a great find!

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	javadoug says: This is really cool. I haven't done any real hardware like this for decades. How about a single chip microprocessor instead of all this. I did a few projects like this when I worked for Westinghouse. Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink )
	Extra Ketchup says: I like this because it puts some older hardware to good use. Linux is great for bringing old hardware back to life. The computer isn't that powerful, but it is very low power. To buy an embedded ARM board, for example, would cost about $150 and up, and that's not with all the features this has. That said, I'd love to see someone figure a way to put Linux on an ARM or MIPS microcontroller. If a micro came with enough built-in memory, it might just hold a small version of Linux. That would give us Linux on a chip for under $10 !!! Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink )
	Michael Domingo says: what a cool lil project. could you use it to give life to a vintage Heathkit HERO 1 robot? (-: Posted 5 months ago. ( permalink )
	Vintage Emulsion says: Nice! Posted 8 days ago. ( permalink )

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Taken on February 20, 2008

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It Runs Linux!

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