Fun with Mini-ITX

[mdlbear]

So I have the little motherboard I bought last week up and running in a breadboard configuration: almost literally; it's currently attached to a 12-inch piece of 1x8 with drywall screws. The power supply and disk drive are currently sitting loose on the board. The main objective of the breadboarding exercise was to do space planning for a smaller case, e.g an 8-inch cube.

RedHat 7.3 is now happily installed, and I'm now adding the Planet CCRMA audio stuff. The only problems were a bad CD-ROM drive (could have sworn I'd written a note on the bad one...) and a flaky RAM (what do you expect at $20 for 256Mb; fortunately I bought two).

We'll see how it's doing when I get home from work tonight. Then I'll install the rest of the audio stuff, and maybe wrap a few more pieces of wood around it.

Comments

Yup!

[mdlbear]

I'm now trying to decide about form factor: 8" cube (cute, but cramped), 8x8x12 (less cramped; dead simple), 8x12x12 (enough room for a cover and might accomodate the mic preamp), or 12x12x12 (room to stash some mics as well).

Or, for that matter, 3U rackmount. I expect that each variant will be no more than a weekend's work, so I may try several. And probably go with 8x8x12 for now, since my present breadboard is 8x12.

Re: Yup!

[johno.livejournal.com]

What do you plan for keyboard & screen?

Re: Yup!

[mdlbear]

Interesting question, and one to which I don't really have an answer yet. In the short term, I can borrow something from work.

Longer-term, there are four plausible answers:

* get an LCD monitor and a small keyboard.
* use the ancient IBM tablet computer I have lying around, as an xterm
* use a PDA as a miniature front panel display
* use a MIDI control surface and maybe some custom knobs and switches, on the grounds that, darnit, it's a piece of audio gear, not a computer.