NUC on Wood

By Bobby Neal Winters

A few years ago, I went through a period of building computers.  Built an Itty-bitty Ubuntu box and a media center, going through the process one piece at a time.  I liked the one piece at a time model.  You plan out your project; you order your piece for the week; you get it in the mail; then you order your next piece et cetera until it is done. Then you put it all together.

This was a great way to spread out both the expense and the joy.  And indeed as a big part of these projects are to keep my otherwise mischievous mind occupied, it was very effective. Something with four parts would take four weeks to complete and so keep me in a happy place for a whole month.

My path from computer building took me to Arduino and to Raspberry Pi. These categories are both amenable to the one piece at a time model.  

Then earlier this year I happened upon the NUC (Next Unit of Computing) computer.  This is a computer that has a tiny (four inch by four inch) motherboard but will support I3, I5, and I7 processors.  I thought that this would be great.  I could make one and put Ubuntu on it, I would have a Linux box small enough to sit alongside my Windows box but powerful enough to do something beyond the Raspberry Pi level.

And to cut to the chase, I’ve got something working. I got it all to work out today.  Let me go back to the beginning, though, and say some things that might (MIGHT) smooth the road for any of the rest of you who might want to trek down the same road.

The first thing is that I was not able to get the one piece at a time method to work out all that well. Let me explain. When you list out the pieces of a computer, what do you have:

• Case
• Power supply
• Motherboard
• CPU
• Memory
• Hard drive

I was not able to get those first four separately.  Actually, it’s not that simple. I bought the case. I have it sitting unused over to the side right now.  I wasn’t able to get a motherboard to fit it.  I looked my eyes out over the Internet, but the only ones I could find came in lots of 10.  I didn’t want 10. I wanted one.   Within my searches, I came upon a product that combined the first 4 of these.   This was a bit pricey, but it did include a lot.

Here is an opportunity to talk about the power supply.  When you make a computer--even an itty-bitty box with an ITX motherboard--you put the power supply inside.  With this type of machine it goes outside. You use the same sort of power supply that you use on your laptop, your printer, or on most of your peripherals. A mickey-mouse power cord (if you’ve seen one, no explanation is needed; if you haven’t none will do) goes into a transformer which will then connect to your computer with a jack.

Over the next couple of weeks I bought the memory and a solid state hard drive.  Okay, memory is boring.  The SSD is exciting and even--dare I say it--sexy. It was $75 for 120 GB which looks pricey if you compare it to the standard hard drive where the same money will get you 750 GB, but Lord have mercy this smokes.  You turn on your computer and your operating system is loaded.

In building computers these days, my observation has been that if it weren’t for the front-panel connections it would be as easy as putting Legos together.  This already had its equivalent of the front panel connected, so assembly was just snapping the memory cards and the solid state drive into place.

The challenge I had in putting my NUC box together came after the machine was totally assembled: installing the operating system.  As I said, the entire raison d’etre of this box was to run Linux. You can go to the Ubuntu page and download Ubuntu and even get instructions on how to install it from a USB stick. And it “installs” very quickly and easily.  The scare quotes are there because getting it to boot after you’ve gotten it installed is an issue.

I have succeeded in that.  I am not going to tell you the exact method because I am not sure it’s reproducible. It required Internet searches and fiddling with the BIOS.  Once I got it to boot, the fracking keyboard I have wouldn’t work.  I finally installed a wireless keyboard I have lying around and it worked.

I was able to get it to run headless by installing xrdp on it and using remote desktop from my windows machine to login.   At this point, I have no methodology to recommend more specific than some combination of stubbornness and patience.

The Headless Pi-Man

By Bobby Neal Winters
As those of you who have sampled this blog recently will be aware, lately I’ve been into building a robot.  I am progressing in that and will report on that shortly.  My account wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t share what got started on that was the Raspberry Pi.  I originally saw--was shown--Raspberry Pi on Facebook over Christmas Break.
I googled it.  Raspberry Pi was backordered, but the Arduino processor showed up on the search.  The rest is history, as they say.  
But I’m nothing if not stub..tenacious. I got my Raspberry Pi and have been trying to work it in amongst the Arduino/Robotics.  I may eventually try to marry them, but we have to see whether they get along first.
The Raspberry Pi is a computer based on an ARM chip...blah, blah, blah.  I’ve seen it described as the motherboard from a smartphone with some nice connectors glued to it.  They sell two varieties.  You want Model B and you can get it for $35 here.  You will also want to get the SD card with the operating system on it; that will cost you $13.
And you will need a TV at first.  It will have to have either an HDMI connector or a RCA jack connector.  These are the two ways that the Raspberry Pi connects directly with monitors.  The Pi was designed to appeal the the hacker mentality.  Since Christmas break, I’ve learned a lot about this psychology.  
There are folks who will spend hundreds of hours to find a way to do something outside of the constraints of the system.  (Be kind to them because you will want them to be your friends come the Zombie Apocalypse.) For these folks--and to make it as cheap as possible--the Pi has been designed so that you can make it work with things you might have laying around: keyboard, mouse, TV, ethernet hub, cell phone charger, etc.
I must confess that this peculiarity of working with anything BUT a computer monitor has cost me the most.  All of the TVs in my home are being watched by someone.  After a couple of misadventures with monitors designed for use with backup cameras and CCTV such as this. I got a cheap little TV for $100.  The bright side of this is that it can be used later for something else.  My youngest daughter is already lobbying for it.
This is all going to be filed under “I” for Irony in the Twilight Zone, however, because I believe I am going to be running my Pi headless.
That’s right, headless.
As it is a Linux box, you can use secure shell (SSH) to connect to it remotely.  As it is such a small little fellow, running a GUI on it makes it run slowly.  The light little browser that comes on it doesn’t do the things I like.
But it is a Linux box so I can put it on my network and set it up as a server.  The only thing I needed the monitor for was to get its IP address so I could connect to it remotely.
However, in the course of this, I have resurrected my Ubuntu box so I may put together a Linux network: A little computer farm in my own office.
There will be more entries as madness descends.

Multimedia Computer: The Ubuntu Mindset

Last Monday I wrote in this space that I had succeeded in getting my Multimedia Computer running and that I had installed Ubuntu on it.  This was a great victory for me.  At the time, it gave me a great feeling of victory that I didn't want to dilute.  A few days have passed now, so I feel I can share more of the truth without spoiling that feeling of victory on my part.

It is still running and functioning fine as a computer, but I there are certain issues involved with making it function as a Multimedia computer.  One of these is the fan.  The original fan that it came with didn't have a plug to attach it to the fan plug on the motherboard.  I thought I'd fixed that by buying an adapter.  The adapter arrived; it is male.  I needed a female. (Insert joke about Ubuntu computer geeks here.)

No problem.  I had an old cheap fan purchased for an old project laying around.  I installed it.  I now remember reading a review of it with PROS--it is cheap, CONS--it is noisy.  That noisy part is being glossed more me even as I write this.  I currently have a female adapter on order.  Ten minutes of work will suffice to fix this.

The next issue is software.  Windows 7 comes with Windows Media Center installed.  You just sit down and run it.  The Ubuntu experience is different.  And it now becomes clear to me what the Ubuntu experience is all about.  To fully explain it, at least to my own satisfaction, I need to go back to the Bible.

In Genesis, when Jacob and Esau are introduced it says: And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents. To me this says that Esau like to push the edges of existence and do things that were hard.  Jacob, on the other hand, liked to enjoy the fruits of what was then modernity.  Were this written today, the description of Esau would remain the same while Jacobs might be described as a man who like living in houses with beds and indoor plumbing.

Some of you may already be ahead of me in transferring this to the context of computers.  Esau would be pushing to that more challenging mode of existence with Linux while Jacob would use Windows 7.  (Macs would correspond to whatever they were using in the fleshpots of Egypt for those of you who wish to push this a little farther.)

I grew up on the frontier, starting with a TRS-80 and moving to an Apple IIe and then finally hitting the PC river, as it were, more than twenty years ago.  I've been watching the frontier disappear ever since as we've moved from floppies to hard disks and CDs and DVDs and USBs.  Then came the Internet and the Cloud may supersede it all.  I've gone through all of the contortions that we had to back in the good old days just to get something to print for Heaven's sake.

All of those contortions are why we developed things like Windows 7 and Snow-frickin-Leopard and all of those other things.  Friends, let me tell you, as much as we gripe about these OSs, they ain't so bad.  They beat the Hell out of walking three blocks across campus to access your e-mail from a Unix account and download the file that was sent you using Kermit.  I was younger then, everything did work right, but that rosy glow doesn't make me think I'd like to do it that way all over again.

That being said: This is a hobby.  We do hobbies to stretch ourselves in safe, controlled ways.  I can pretend that I am back on the Computer Frontier as it was in the days of old, but do it while safely living in the modern world.

In other words, I've moved out of the hardware faze and into the software faze which is presenting a new challenge to me.  I will keep you updated, but now the smell of the spring flowers is calling to me.

Multimedia Computer: Part 1, The Case

I've taken my first step to building an Multimedia Computer; I've purchased the case. This is the same case that I indicated in the blog entry wherein I laid out my plan.

I pledge that I will try to take my time with this. Really. This is a hobby and there is a level of expense one expects with a hobby. I shall try not to exceed that quantity as ambiguous as it is. Having preached to myself a bit, let me proceed to a discussing of the case.

I am not much of a photographer. I concede that immediately. Were I a better photographer there are two things on the front that you would notice. In addition to the usual USB ports and audio and video jacks, there is a Firewire port. I hadn't even considered Firewire in this construction. Now I will have to because I've been given a choice: either get a motherboard that supports Firewire or live with the idea that I've got a place to plug something into that doesn't work.

The second thing you would notice is that this has a handle that folds out. This reminds me of the old "portable" Rainbow computers that Tandy put out. They had a six-inch screen, they weighed nigh onto 40 pounds, but they had a handle with which you could carry them, ergo they were portable.

One thing that I had been wondering, given the dimensions of the case, on which side would the motherboard be mounted: the bottom or the left-hand side. I now know that it will go on the bottom. Installing it will be an interesting exercise as there are a lot of cables and a lot of brackets. I will, no doubt, have to enlist the services of Lydia my lithe-fingered assistant.

The cables are bundled and covered by cloth, which is something new for me. It makes me think of this as a high-end case. It might also make me wonder why I am getting it for a relatively inexpensive price. I didn't have to look very far to see the reason and this calmed my mind. There is only one SATA power connector. I will need two of these, at least, if I am going to install two drives. It doesn't take very much imagination to believe that this device was designed and built when hard drives had switched to SATA but optical drives were still IDE. There is no longer a market for such cases and it is cheaper to sell them to hobbyists than it is to stick another SATA power connector in there. At least this is the story I will tell myself until the ghost of a murdered Chinese worker emerges from the power supply seeking revenge.

So, having opened the box, I learned that I need to order a $2-part. I should also note at this point that I neglected an important consideration in my original plan: a TV PCI card. This is the sort of thing I mean. It goes for about $50.

Proceeding into new ground

This morning I installed Ubuntu Linux onto the old laptop that Lydia had been using. It was so easy to do as to be silly. Insert CD (prepared using instructions from here) and follow simple directions.

The laptop had been barely going for a while. There had been a virus issue that had been dealt with in a manner that left the machine without a sound card. I don't know why. After I installed Ubuntu, suddenly the sound card worked. I am amazed.

The truth is, though, I don't know what I am going to do with this now fully functional laptop other than to tell people "Hey, I've got an Ubuntu laptop!" I've got laptops running out my ears. The truth is that I just needed my fix. I am a junkie now, having made a couple of computers. It's in my blood.

My next project is beginning to form within me. Currently, I have a desktop computer with Windows Vista Ultimate addition hooked to the TV in the family room. I have used it to

1. Record and play TV;
2. Run Netflix;
3. Play DVDs.

It can do a lot of other things as well, but I can't do them there as it is in the family room and people would bug me. My idea is to build a linux-based media center computer. I had mentioned this earlier and a hang up there had been Linux not being able to Netflix, but I got around that by purchasing a Roku. The Roku handles Netflix and a number of other options well.

What I would need to make this would be

1. A blu-ray drive for about $80;
2. A huge hard drive to record movies on for about $80;
3. A small form factor case for about $70.
4. A micro-ATX motherboard for about $60.
5. A CPU to go with the motherboard for about $70;
6. And memory to match for about $60.

Surely I am forgetting something, but this totals to about $420. That is a bit on the pricey side at this point, but it is a start. I will think on this and do some shopping and see if I can do better.

My itty bitty Ubuntu Box

It was scary because it was all so easy. First I ordered the parts:

• the motherboard-CPU combo,
• the memory,
• the case, and
• the optical drive.

Then they all came just as they said they would. First the motherboard and the memory, then the case, and finally the optical drive. At the same time, I had been working with Ubuntu. I had downloaded it back when I was working on my Windows Home Server. It was there on the hard drive on my laptop. I first put it on a thumb drive just because the possibility of booting from a thumb drive seemed so cool to me. Then I burned it on a CD just in case the BIOS on the motherboard wasn't up to it.
Then came Saturday morning. I woke up having slept like the righteous dead at approximately 6:30. The computer was together by 8. I didn't shower, but I did shave; I did make coffee and eat breakfast. I did put the previous day's dishes in the dishwasher. (We'd had a plumbing emergency on Thursday with the dishwasher.)
The point is that it all went together like a puzzle.
The case is the size of a 4-slice toaster. Seriously. It is red and as cute as a button. The mini-ITX board with the Atom CPU is square and a smidgen over six-and-a-half inches on a side. It all plugged in nicely with the various wires: power, SATA cables, USB cables, and front panel wires. Having learned previously the hard way, I took great care with the front panel wires, but there was a nice, color-coded schematic that came along with the motherboard.
Then I put in the hard drive, which I'd bought last September at Wal-Mart, and then the optical drive. This is where the smallness of the case and the strength of the design came into play. It all fit easily. I did stop to think it out; this is something else I have learned. But it all fit.
I'd thought ahead to put the SATA cables on before I even thought about the drives. There would've been no way my huge hands could've gotten in there to put them on with a hard drive in the way. If I ever put more memory in, I will have to take both of the drives out. This is just how it is going to be.
Anyway, the process was somewhere between stacking toast and the second round of Jenga in complexity.
Then I install Ubuntu Linux.
I'd never done this before. I didn't know what to expect. I stuck in the CD, turned it on, and it booted to the optical drive. It began installing. At various points it stopped to ask questions. Once I thought it was stuck but I was patient and it continued. Then it came time for the final restart and it did stick at the BIOS screen. I figure that was more of a function of the BIOS than Linux, so I just turned it off and turned it back on. (Having screwed-up and restarted a lot has given me an inner calm that allows me to do stuff like that.) It worked.
It has now been about 24 hours and I am happy. Ubuntu Linux looks a lot like MacOS on the front-end. I might just be saying this because I am a PC user, but it is my opinion.
Some issues that I've discovered that might matter:

• it doesn't work with iTunes and
• it doesn't do Netflix.
  

These are things I've discovered as I am now contemplating building a machine like this for my youngest daughter. Her iPod and TV are very important to her.
All said, it was a nice couple of hours, but those who've been inspired should read earlier in the blog about the failures.