[LAU] Building an Open Source keyboard rig

[Gianfranco Ceccolini]

>> Rather than a NUC, I would tend to one of the atom boards. Gpu used to be not open (don't know about new ones), but then, headless for stage work so who cares? Runs on 12v, no fan needed, lots of USB built in, no fan needed, good latency performance. Worked successfully in the previous beta style MOD.
> 

We used the Intel DN2800MT

Great board. By the specs, before we purchased it, seemed to be perfect.

When put to action, we had the following drawbacks:

1 - Is it a fanless mother board, but it does not mean the enclosure of the product can be closed. The MOD Quadra required a lateral cooler that was a pain. The only way to have it totally fanless is to have an enclosure that acts as a radiator - like those amplifiers for cars - but that was not a possibility for us.

2 - although Intel makes lots of efforts to have an embedded board, they are far from being successful. One flop in our board is that the EFI BIOS has a “fast boot” mode which, in principle is awesome, but when activated requires a keyboard confirmation when rebooting after an unsuccessful boot. Really frustrating for use in headless (no monitor and keyboard)  units and shows that Intel is really a newbie in this embedded field.

3 - the EFI is said to be highly programable and Intel seems to even offer an IDE to that, but in real life, even contacting Intel professionals (we had the Intel Inside Logo) I could find a person who could do me a custom EFI.

4 - This last point has nothing to do with the mother board itself, but with the Intel Architecture. Since you are doing a consumer device and it probably will have USB connection, Intel starts being a pain because it does not offer support for USB-DEVICE. Intel computers, by definition, are only hosts to USB devices and cannot act as devices themselves. I don;t know the status of this now with the Galileo and such, but last word I had still kept like that.

5 - Last, but not least, I would not recommend Atom. Celeron and Core seem to be much better CPUs.  Again, in our case, the Atom had a Graphic Chip from PowerVR that was totally unusable in Linux. If we had a Linux Supported GPU, some libraries could make use of OpenCL and move parte of the computing to the GPU. I think that, if you are not moving into a modular CPU like the ARMs and chose to stick with Intel, then go for the horse power.  Evenly efficiency shall not be an issue in this kind of product (unless you want it battery operated)

If you still insist on the Intel Architecture, then I highly recommend www.logicsupply.com

Best

Gianfranco
The MOD Team