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A project log for Candy Tin PC

Shove a x86 compatible 3.5 inch SBC with hard drive and external ports into a old candy tin left over from the holidays

osgeldosgeld 03/17/2014 at 00:040 Comments

I have had this vortex86 sitting around for over a year now, It was given to me by my work  after it had been removed from a XY glue machine due to it being flaky. Its still flaky and will produce a goblin fart error now and then, but for the most part its stable enough for it to run ADT pro, a serial terminal, and google chrome. 

As I touched on before, this thing is a 586 compatible 800Mhz SOC, and features PS/2 KB-mouse support, 10-100 lan, dual IDE ports, SVGA (upto 1080 resolution, but no acceleration to speak of), FDD,  3x USB2, GPIO, printer port, LVDS LCD io, 8 com ports, ISA header, pci header, mini PCI socket (slap a wifi card on that later) and 256MB of DDR ram. Also on the bottom is a slot for a compact flash card which is tied into the master IDE port.

Its a 3.5 inch form factor computer, and is about the same size as a desktop hard disk, if you ignore the connectors sticking out of it, and is compatible with linux and windows.

The enclosure is from a tin of pepermint bark, measuring roughly 9x6.5x2, which is plenty of space for the computer, a laptop hard disk, 4 extra serial ports, usb ports, and all the wiring without it getting too stuffy.

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