A Squeak PC
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As some of you know I have a fledgling company that sells a weather 
station that I designed. Basically it is software that does a nice job 
of plotting various weather parameters over time (see current weather 
in Truckee, CA). In the past I have done this in Basic on cheap DOS 
boxes, but a year ago I rewrote it all in squeak and looked around for 
a cheap PC powerful enough to run Squeak. In selecting a suitable 
processor and making up a Linux environment, I engaged the help of 
Michael Rueger.

Our first shot at this in the spring of 2002 was the Shuttle, a 
low-cost PC with motherboard, to which we added inexpensive processors 
and hard disks. We (mostly Michael) got it all working, but the fans 
were way too loud. There were three of them: one for the processor, 
one for the power supply, and a third for the cabinet in general. We 
added tweaks to slow them down, which helped a lot, but it took a lot 
of time (think money) to prepare each unit. Even after doing this, it 
turned out that many of the hard disks were noisy. To top it off a 
number of the units expired in the field, possibly due to the fan 
mods, but we're not sure.

The main reason we did not pursue the exact causes of failure was our 
discovery in the spring of 2003 of a seemingly perfect replacement 
built around the new Mini ITX boards. What is Mini ITX? Briefly it is 
an extremely compact (16x17cm) implementation of a Pentium-compatible 
motherboard, designed originally for the needs of the set-top box 
market. The configuration is quite complete, featuring Ethernet, 2 USB 
ports, RS232, printer, display, mouse, keyboard, video out and stereo 
sound in and out. In addition, the design is very low on power so that 
the 533MHz units can run with no fan at all. You can imagine how good 
this looked to Michael and me.

But wait -- there's more. The particular unit we came across (see the 
Silent Station) was available with an adaptor that allowed the use of 
a Compact Flash card in place of an IDE disk drive. In this 
configuration, all software could be cloned on a simple flash card, 
and booted to run with no moving parts except the boot button and the 
electrons. The price: around $230 in single units.

We have now assembled a software kernel that includes a lean Linux 
base (modified by Ian Piumarta to provide direct frame buffer 
display), and a full Squeak 3.6 image and VM, all fitting on a 32M CF 
card with about 10MB left over. For my needs this is an ideal 
solution: buy a Silent Station, stick in a CF card, and resell it as a 
graphical weather station. It's especially nice that the Silent 
Station uses a 12v supply, which means you can hack together a 5-hour 
UPS from a lead-acid battery and a trickle charge circuit.

In addition we are making the entire configuration available so others 
can build cool embedded applications using Squeak. Michael will be 
putting all his Linux scripts and documentation out in the next couple 
of days (link goes here, Mike, when you are ready). As soon as the 
dust settles and I've had some chance for testing, I will provide 64M 
flash cards with a full and current Squeak development system for a 
nominal cost. These can be dropped into any Mini-ITX box with a CF 
adaptor. If you don't have one, the adaptors are available from 
SolarPC and elsewhere on the web (search: Flash IDE adapter).

The Mini ITX standard has a growing and fanatical following of 
computer "hot rod" style enthusiasts (see http://www.mini-ITX.com/). 
Now we have a complete software development and delivery package the 
size of a matchbox that can be plugged into any of these boxes and run 
for decades with no noise and high reliability.

Could there be more? Yep. It's called Nano-ITX (see Nano-ITX). All the 
above on an 11x11cm board with a 1GHz processor. Announced by VIA but 
not yet available. They'll probably be pricey for a while, too.

- Dan Ingalls