Hardware Talk :: Damn Small Machine in DSL Store!



We are still taking orders.  I am going to make it an ongoing item.

Unfortunately there is a delay in the initial order, the manufacturer is out of stock and there will be a two or three week delay.
What chipset does the nano-itx motherboard have?  I'd love to have Linux BIOS running on such a machine.  Even without running a disk you could have a compressed ramdisk with some utilites to do basic things.  I did see a website with the 40 GB microdrive used in the new ipod. :cool:  That's twice the hard drive I have in the Debian 1GHz PIII Laptop i'm typing on right now.  If you had Linux with a few utilities you could  do simple things like text editing etc. from a ram disk in memory and spin up the microdrive to save it later.  Remember, with wearable computing every milliamp counts...  I have an IPaq 3800 which I could use as a screen. (The earphone jack broke which also prevents the speaker from working, so I have no sound) :(
so I got a gumstix with the audio stixboard ... I still have to build a little case for it though...   :D

PS.  This message was supposed to go here.  Can anyone nuke the "chipset" topic? :(
So the memory is not expandable?  I was hoping for a SODIMM connector.
Any chance that a double-decker CF-IDE adapter will fit in the machine?  It would be nice to be able to use two CF cards for 8GB maximum internal flash storage.  The pics show a parallel port but no TV video out.  Is that backplane an accurate representation of the I/O available on the final unit?  It is nice to see the parallel port, as I mainly want to use this in place of legacy systems.

One more question, is it possible to setup DSL to act as a USB storage device?  That is, is it possible to make the Nano-ITX machine behave as if it were a USB hard drive when connected to another computer via the USB port?  That would be great for sharing files with people, as you could always keep your DSL Nano-ITX machine on you.  Setting up a network file share takes more effort than simply plugging in a USB drive.
The problem is that your USB ports are connected to a USB host CONTROLLER instead of a USB device.

However, it should be possible to use some kind of special device driver to make a usb port behave as if it is a slave somehow.

I believe that this is how USB to USB file transfers are done using 3rd party utilities like Norton Ghost or laplink.

If a Linux driver exists for a similar operating mode, it is possible in theory but you would need to compile the driver and install it in order for it to work.
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