Starting my ultra-portable PC project (PCp?) update Nov 26th

teraflop122 · Post by **teraflop122** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 2:41 pm

What kind of cpu fan are you using, out of curiosity?

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 6:42 pm

I'm using the CPU fan and heatsink that it came with. 40mm fan, about what modern chipsets come with on them. The socket 370 heasink and fan are far to big for the processor.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Mon May 08, 2006 4:30 pm

Now that school is out of the way I have more time to work on this project. I took the Sammy keyboard pad mini apart, looks nice inside. The keyboard section is completely separate from the controller. The gamepad is split up into two circuit boards (plus two small ones for the 1st set of shoulder buttons), one which has the logic and analog sticks, and the other which is just button contacts plus the potentiometers for the second set of shoulder buttons connected by wires. Should be fairly easy to split up the controller button section and spread it to the two sides of the screens.

Until school starts again, I should be fairly content with just DOS for now, and just plung forward with the hardware work. I need to get the MBR back into shape again, and hopefully DOS is still intact. I was trying to install DSL to the drive, over USB, and something went wrong and Grub no longer comes up (nor does Lilo, which DSL was supposed to install).

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Tue May 09, 2006 12:15 pm

anotherperson wrote:How funny. Your school ends and mine has only recently resumed. Good luck with this. I ought to read through this whole thread some time soon.

That's how the world shifts on its axis. It's just now becoming summer here in the US.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Mon May 22, 2006 3:59 pm

I haven't been too successful in doing much with the mod so far. I made a jury-rigged system to help facilitate easier maintenance of the laptop HD. Unfortunately, it has problems. Normally, I have to take my main rig apart, unplug the harddisks and fit adapters on the primary IDE cable, then plug in the laptop HD, which is rather inconvient, and slow progress down everytime I need to load new software from CD.

Since, I have an ETX board (the size of a cdrom) that has 44-Pin(laptop) IDE, 40-pin(dektop) IDE, and a standard sized connector for floppy. I decided to setup a quick system with it in/on a three 5.25 bay I pulled out of an old system, along with a floppy drive (to help get DOS working again) and a CDrom. The first goal was to get DOS-booting MBR back on the drive, which means booting from floppy. I couldn't get it boot from any boot floppy I had around, all said invalid boot sector, and most of the floppies are known-good.

I tried loading a LiveCD distro of Linux, and that didn't boot either (not the same error). So, scratch that idea for now.

To help, so I thought, with getting the uPC up and running, I bought a Auto USB KVM switch w/ audio, so I could just switch between them without having to unplug a bunch of cables. I find out, after I recieve it, that the stupid thing uses double-tapping the Ctrl button on the keyboard to switch between the two systems manually. That'd be all well and good, except I play games, and Ctrl is usually jump, and double-jumping is worthwhile in most games. Which means, I can't leave the keyboard plugged into the KVM while playing UT2004, or I end up with a blank screen, no audio, and no way to dodge.

I'll probably just hook up video and mouse to it, leave my desktop keyboard plugged into my desktop system, the Sammy pad for the uPC, and the PS/2 keyboard pad (see first page) to switch the KVM. Kludge-tastic! Gah.

Still easier than wrestling with my monitor cable and unplugging my mouse, but annoying to have to do that.

I've ordered 44-pin to two 40-pin adapter cable. That should let me use a cdrom and the laptop HD at the same time. With that setup, I can try Live distros, to see if maybe Vida Linux is the cause of the troubles, and possibly eliminate troubles with distros that occur with installing on another system.

I was going to post some images of the internals of the Sammy pad, the jury-rigged ETX system, and some other photos that I hadn't uploaded yet. However, ImageShack is giving me troubles uploading.

So, enjoy the one pic I managed to get up:
Sammy PS2 controller:

minkster · Post by **minkster** » Mon May 22, 2006 4:42 pm

Whoah, nice job...did you bondo that together to get the keyboard and controller together? Or did the controller come like that? All in all, your work on this project is amazing

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Tue May 23, 2006 1:25 pm

The controller comes like that. I'll likely saw off the bottom portion and mount the entirety of it to my uPC.

If you think the pad looks weird on the outside, you should see the inside! The keyboard circuit is completely separate from the PS2 gamepad section. The gamepad section is split into two main parts, one with the logic and analog sticks, and one with rest of the controls. The two controller circuits are connected together via two sets of wires on either side of the start and select buttons, it's as if they designed it to be cut in half!

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Wed May 24, 2006 6:21 pm

I recieved the daul 40-pin to 44-pin IDE cable and got the KVM hooked up. KVM is still a mixed-bag, it is smart enough not to switch when the other system is not on, which means the Ctrl issue isn't as much of a problem. However, the PS/2 to USB adapter in it doesn't support all the buttons of my mouse (forward and back don't work).The daul 40-pin to 44-pin IDE cable works fine.

I tried some LiveCDs, and all had issues with X11. Knoppix 3.8.1 couldn't find the video chipset/drivers, after having run X for about a minute, it did this twice in a row.

I tried Vida Linux Live .2, it started Gnome, but crashed to a console before it finished loading. I issued startx not long afterwords, it loaded Gnome, but then hard-crashed.

There are comercial X11 for this chipset, but I'm not sure I'm willing to pay for the privilege.

Gah. I might have to try Windows on this.

DOS is probably a no-go, as I can't find drivers for the audio chipset this board has, and using USB stuff under DOS is a pain. Plus, I'm seeing more reason to get a internet-ready OS on it.

monkeymagic · Post by **monkeymagic** » Fri May 26, 2006 4:47 pm

go for a stripped down 98 install trust me it flys on my 500mhz mini-itx

98 comes out under 50mb boots up in like 10secs (dont quote me on that)

i used 98lite from litepc.com pretty painless aswell to setup

PM if you need more info

Also have you seen those slimline ps2 compatible screens they are really sweet 7inch widescreen would look killer

im_an_alien · Post by **im_an_alien** » Fri May 26, 2006 5:20 pm

monkeymagic wrote:98 comes out under 50mb boots up in like 10secs

I like the Linux idea

monkeymagic · Post by **monkeymagic** » Fri May 26, 2006 8:50 pm

That gamepad where did you get it from

it looks badddd!!

me wants one?

monkeymagic · Post by **monkeymagic** » Fri May 26, 2006 9:06 pm

teraflop122 wrote:
Looking at things, it seems that the RAM overheated.
I'd be hesitant to attribute the crashes to overheated ram, as no ram has ever overheated in any of the dozens of small and large PC's I've built. I've never even had trouble with super-budget ram, either. Can you run other, similarly taxing programs? Is it possible that your power circuit is not supplying enough for the system to remain stable?

Well, my PCp project is virtually dead in the water. In the end, I'll probably end up getting a GP2X.

get a gp2x then unportablise it wack on a lithium battery to power the usb hub thatll let you connect mini keyboard and buit in 20gb memory and built in wifi then fire up qtopia for pim functions web browsing and you got the l33t emu for gp2x on the other hand

i wil do this one day..once i am a il moer comfortable amking cases

EDIT: all that stuff already possible on you gp2x youl just be putting it in a box

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Fri May 26, 2006 11:24 pm

monkeymagic wrote:That gamepad where did you get it from it looks badddd!!

me wants one?

http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-m-70-1xk.html#
Keep in mind there are asian characters on it, and some of the extra keys don't output what they should (due to it being a different keyboard layout), though the all the letter and number keys work as they should.

monkeymagic wrote:
teraflop122 wrote:Well, my PCp project is virtually dead in the water. In the end, I'll probably end up getting a GP2X.

get a gp2x then unportablise it wack on a lithium battery to power the usb hub thatll let you connect mini keyboard and buit in 20gb memory and built in wifi then fire up qtopia for pim functions web browsing and you got the l33t emu for gp2x on the other hand

i wil do this one day..once i am a il moer comfortable amking cases

EDIT: all that stuff already possible on you gp2x youl just be putting it in a box

Throw on a touchscreen and somehow upgrade it to 128MB+ and you have a real contender for what I'd want to do.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Sun May 28, 2006 12:37 am

It turns out that X11 isn't the cause of the problem, though it probably plays a factor.

I decided to try DSL on it. It ran the longest of any OS other than DOS that I've tried on this board so far. I even played a few hands of Solitare, and even loaded a webpage in Dillo. However, it hard crashed before fully rendering a page in Firefox.

Which leads me back to excess heat being the problem. Since the board is so small, any heat producing component throws heat on at least one other, so the more the different sub-systems are in use, the higher the likely hood of heat troubles. All the distros I've tried up until DSL were using Gnome or KDE, both of which are more RAM intensive than the windowing manager DSL uses (Fluxbox?), and the distros were far less thin in RAM use even without a GUI compared to DSL. Less RAM use=less heat produced by RAM=less heat going into the video chip (which is directly above the RAM on the other side of the board).

Figuring out a good means cooling down everything is going to be difficult, particularly factoring in that this is going to be in a handheld.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Sun Jun 04, 2006 1:57 pm

Still trying to get the board to work longer. I've mounted a fan to the the heatsink that was getting hot the fastest, and stood the board up on its side. Everything seems to be cooler, but it's still hard locking.

To tide you all over, I've created Flickr photosets for some things:
Sammy PS2 keyboard insides
Jury rigged ETX system

I hope to be adding more directly uPC pictures to the set, but most of those you've seen, and I don't want to hit my upload limit until I take some newer pictures.