8track

My quest for low power systems began in my Carbon diet page and now it continues with this system. It is smaller, faster, and uses less energy than the earlier Via EPIA 800 system. I migrated from the C3 to the C7 system. Now to an Intel "Little Falls" Atom 230 board.

Origin of the name 8track. When I was riding around Corvallis one day, I saw a pile of free stuff in front of someone's house. Right on top was a GE portable AM/FM 8 track player. I could not pass it up. I immediately envisioned putting a computer in the case and that is exactly what happened.

I realize now that I could probably have sold it for $10 on Ebay! Well, I have gotten more than $10 worth of entertainment out of it so far.

I used 8track as the unofficial [Solar CREEK kiosk] at DaVinci Days 2006. It ran off solar power all day playing a video and allowing access to the Solar CREEK Web site.

Alas it is no longer in the 8 Track player but I stuck with the name.

Hardware specs

"8track" was originally a complete computer system based on a Via CN10000 Mini-ITX board built inside the 8 track player case. The overpriced Morex automotive power supply died when it was less than a year old. Rather than throw more money at Morex, I replaced the case with a commercially built slim case that fits on the back of my computer desk.

8track now has

1. Intel Atom 230 mini-itx main board
2. 2 GB of DDR2 RAM
3. 80 GB 7200 rpm Seagate SATA drive
4. Casetronic case

With the Morex automotive power supply the power options included using either an old HP Omnibook 800 laptop power supply or a 12 volt gel cell. At the Solar CREEK booth at DaVinci Days, I ran it on a solar panel and a 120 vac inverter.

Originally I used the 2.5" drive because the Morex did not support the power requirements of a 3.5" drive on its 12V output. The Toshiba 4200 rpm 30 GB drive was IDE (PATA) and plugged into a 44-40 pin adapter. The Seagate SATA drive is a huge improvement, it's much faster.

At DaVinci days, I used an Acer 15" display and a PS/2 keyboard and mouse. The monitor ran off the inverter, too. I plugged in stereo speakers and connected to the Solar CREEK web site via a wireless link.

The HP power supply puts out about 35 watts and it had no trouble running this machine in the above configuration. I measured output of the supply and found it took about 10 watts to run.

I need to take measurements on the new configuration.

The C7 board has moved to Bellman.

Main board

Intel Atom 230 based Little Falls board.

This board actually has a graphics chip powerful enough to run the latest whizzy Ubuntu Gnome special effects, which I think are lots of fun and quite effective.

It has 2GB of RAM.

Software

I am running Ubuntu Linux on 8track at the moment (8.10 Intrepid Ibex).

The Atom 230 is a 64 bit processor and it has "hyperthreading" which means it looks like two CPU's to Linux.

At first I tried the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 8.04.1 but since the board has only 2 GB of RAM (the max allowable) there is no advantage to running 64 bit mode. When I installed 8.10 I went back to 32 bit mode.

 0.000000 Initializing CPU#0
16.047896 time.c: Detected 1596.111 MHz processor.
16.900204 Initializing CPU#1
16.977215 Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 3192.22 BogoMIPS (lpj=6384445)
16.977367          Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU  230   @ 1.60GHz stepping 02
16.997432 Brought up 2 CPUs
16.997576 CPU0 attaching sched-domain:
16.997582  domain 0: span 03
16.997585   groups: 01 02
16.997591   domain 1: span 03
16.997594    groups: 03
16.997598 CPU1 attaching sched-domain:
16.997601  domain 0: span 03
16.997603   groups: 02 01
16.997608   domain 1: span 03
16.997611    groups: 03

Multimedia

The Atom board has a standard Intel Northbridge and graphics processor. This is cool because it means finally Ubuntu has all its nifty graphics available to me.

24 Aug 2007 Via C7 (The old board, now in Bellman)

I have most all the multimedia features working smoothly now. HOWEVER, the system still LOCKS UP sometimes when running Realplayer.

Annoying but not bad enough to work on it!

It also occasionally locks up when running VMWare machines! Again, I don't do this often enough for it to be worth working on, I am hoping the newer kernels which now support the C7 processor will fix things eventually.

Ethernet

With the initial release of Ubuntu 8.04, the ethernet driver for the Little Falls board was broken. Ubuntu soon released 8.04.1 to fix it -- but the onboard Realtek ethernet interface remained so unreliable that I stuck a 3com NIC in there.

With 8.10 I did more poking around and discovered that I could compile and install the 8101 driver from the Realtek site (release 1.010) and things seem to be okay now.

There are some instructions here that tell how to compile and install the driver. Ignore the part about patching it. The latest driver already has the patches installed.

BIOS upgrade

8.10 seemed to have significant problems, until I realized the system BIOS was at rev level 67 and the current version is 103. Since updating BIOS things seem to be running much better.

The upgrade files can be downloaded from Intel and put on a floppy. Remember floppies? I might still have a drive somewhere in my junk pile.

I downloaded a copy of PCDOS 7, copied it to a thumbdrive.

dd if=pcdos7.IMA of=/dev/sdb1

This gives me a thumbdrive with no space for the BIOS files (and no way to expand it as it's FAT12 format), but PCDOS knows about CDROM's, so I put IFLASH.EXE and the BIOS file onto a CD and ran them from there.

USB problem

In 8.0.4.1 these messages filled log files. This problem seems to have gone away in 8.10.

  26.100735 hub 3-0:1.0: over-current change on port 2[
  26.204644 hub 5-0:1.0: over-current change on port 5
  26.308536 hub 5-0:1.0: over-current change on port 6
  26.412452 hub 3-0:1.0: over-current change on port 1
  26.516351 hub 3-0:1.0: over-current change on port 2
  26.620257 hub 5-0:1.0: over-current change on port 5
  26.724160 hub 5-0:1.0: over-current change on port 6
  26.828059 hub 3-0:1.0: over-current change on port 1

Random number generator

  32.407090 intel_rng: Firmware space is locked read-only. If you can't or
  32.407096 intel_rng: don't want to disable this in firmware setup, and if
  32.407100 intel_rng: you are certain that your system has a functional
  32.407103 intel_rng: RNG, try using the 'no_fwh_detect' option.

Packages of note

Some Ubuntu "upgrade" happened and now Firefox 3 crashes every 5 minutes. I am using Seamonkey but have been thinking about going to Kubuntu so I am looking at what packages I want to reload... I have a ton installed now but most can get dumped.

I used digiKam for photo transfer and archiving. Hugin makes photo sets into panoramas. Vlc plays my videos.

I have been experimenting with QT so I have all the QT packages installed, including the Python support. For Python I have Komodo 5.0.3 I also have the wxPython stuff loaded.

QT is actually the best reason to go to Kubuntu since it's built on QT and the QT development system is built on Kubuntu.

I used eagle to view and edit schematics and circuit boards.

I use VMware Workstation. Save and restore /usr/lib/vmware/licenses

I backed up everything (about 10 GB) on the internal system volume to an external hard drive with this command

mkdir /media/disk-4/bellman-backup-7-Feb-09
tar c --exclude=proc --exclude=var --exclude=home --exclude=dev --exclude=media --exclude=sys --exclude=tmp -f - * | (cd /media/disk-4/bellman-backup-7-Feb-09; tar xpf -)

Where is it now?

8track is now the machine we use here at home 95% of the time. It is so power efficient and quiet that I use it in preference to either the laptop or the old desktop system for most of my work.

Pictures

Exterior view of 8track

A wood strip is fitted to cover over empty slots left when I removed the various controls (volume, tone and so on.) It fits the style of cases of this vintage though it's real hardwood not contact paper!

View inside with back cover removed

Here you can see the interior layout.

There is enough room at the top of the case to accomodate an LCD display. The Trendnet Wifi card fit in easily once I removed its card slot adapter.

I used a router* to enlarge the 8-track slot to fit the mainboard back panel. The styrene plastic is very easy and clean to work with a carbide bit. I probably won't get cancer for many more years.

The large metal ring on the left is an eye bolt to allow me to lock down the case when I leave it unattended in public places.

• Def router: a motor with a spinning cutter attached, not a network device.