BB FANS

Laptop + iPhone = Apple Tablet - the world's first touch-screen
Back at work after his liver transplant, Steve Jobs is set to pull off another coup

By Cahal Milmo Chief reporter
Independent

The folding plug: a revolution for consumer electronics
By Chris Green
Independent

This has to be one of the smallest PCs on the market !

And I'll let you know how it performs once I get Windows installed on the Solid-State-Drive I bought to go inside it.

I have an 8 inch touchscreen monitor to go with it and a mobile application.
Actually there's two mobile applications ,one of which was requested by someone who spotted my Kenwood radio software and wanted a cut-down version to control his radio while marshalling on his motorbike.

My application involves a camera and a GPS. Have a look HERE. If you go back say ten pages I think you'll find examples. It's an on going project brought to life by some talented hobby programmers.

That is small! Let us know how it goes please.

You should see the keyboard I bought from Hongkong to go with it.

Once it's up and running as I want I'll take some pictures.

Please do.

I'm sitting here with the laptop running the radio rewiting the program the other person wanted with the 8.4 inch touch-screen monitor also connected so I can test functions.

So far so good ,though I have found a few things I'd missed 10 years or so ago when I originally wrote the program.

I have also discovered that I can change the volume of the radio so longs as you don't alter the control on the radio as it over-rides the software.
I just hope he isn't running Vista as it's sure to complain.

OK this the Fit-PC2 with 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU and Wifi.
As it sits in the pictures the PC has a Solid-State-Drive fitted with XP Pro.
It also has a minature keyboard ,a small mouse ,a USB to DVI adaptor with a VGA converter connected to an 8.4 inch touchscreen monitor.
Also installed is a GPS Mouse and a PS2 Eyetoy which make a really good quality webcam. And you can see the magnetic mounted external Wifi aerial.
You can also see the 4 port USB Hub I'm using though I have 7 port externally powered one on it's way.

Seems to perform well but will need some extra cooling as I don't think the case provided enough on it's own. Though getting Windows on it was fun as it couldn't see the full capacity of the SSD so a 20GB partitiion was made into which XP was installed, the remainder was partitioned to form two more drives.

The mouse isn't really needed and when installed into the final location it'll be all touch screen. I had lots of fun configuring the graphics adaptors so the USB one was Primary without the on-board DVI adaptor being used.
And putting in my Wifi key was interesting as it used keys that wasn't present on this keyboard with it's US layout.

It has no problems recording from the camera in various resolutions at upto 30 frames per second using different compression methods with the GPS data overlayed on the video. Think the highest data rate was about 16 MB per minute with no dropped frames.

Thanks for that It's a good idea putting the £10 note there to give a better idea of size, otherwise it wouldn't necessarily be that noticeable how small it is.

As a extra piece of info I've straped an AMD XP CPU heatsink and fan to the lid as an experiment to see how well it cools the case and CPU.

Without the fan running playing a widescreen movie in Window Media Player the CPU core temperature was 30C with the fan running this fell to 12C ! (18-25% CPU load). It idles with the fan running at 9-10 C !!

I now seriously thinking of voiding the warranty and opening the case to drill some hole to screw the heatsink to the case adding some heatsink compond to further help it soak up the heat.

Now if it does this well it should cope with summer temperatures in a vehicle.

Yes you need to make sure it doesn't overheat (especially in a vehicle in the Summer heat). Is the machine quite quiet (without the extra fan)?

Yes without the fan it's silent as there's no moving parts hence the solid state drive in place of a normal hard drive. The SSD also reduces the power levels.
With a normal 2.5 inch Sata Hard drive the PC draws around 10 Watts flat out so that's around 1 AMP at 12 volts ! The SSD draws a lot less power than a hard drive so the whole system is very low power. The CPU is I think 2 Watts max. The monitor draws 600 mAmps or 6 Watts so for less power than the average car radio I have a mobile wireless PC with a GPS Camera system.

There are entry level commerical systems that cost less but they are too wide-angled and don't record with the data on the video plus you are limited to using SD/HCSD cards to record onto. But I have a 51GB partition for recordings so the only limitation is the camera with the frame rates and the resolution.
This EyeToy I've got only looks to support 30 FPS (Frames Per Second) so I have the choice of 30FPS at 320x240 or 15FPS at 640x480 though it's own software I thinks shows 50FPS which is what I was hoping for.