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A beowulf cluster of these.

i wonder if i can get this to act as a router of some sort if i can get it to handle two ethernet connections.

maybe it dont have the cpu of that tho.

Might be funny to put a webserver on it and get instant feedback from devices..or make it log network activity "straight from the cow's mouth".

What is a realistic use for such a device?

Not quite as small but pretty cool:
http://www.littlechips.com/

The thing is though, I'd be really scared of losing it. I guess at any rate, you've got some very good reasoning to have it if you do buy it. The price is $240 USD which is a fair amount of cash. I guess telnet could control it via ethernet if you wanted to instead of using the null modem. Is it possible to strip an SSH binary down to a size which would fit on here? I don't think it would be, but it'd be neat to see.

Nice!

Anyway for a cluster I'd rather take the chip only and mount 20 or so on a PCB.

- Morin

Perhaps systems like these will help RFID adoption on Linux. Seems to be a good match for RFID to me.

Dual LAN would make all sorts of interesting out-of-band apps possible with these tiny devices.

Mac Mini eat your heart out!

there is no case to protect the machine?

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8498487406.html

this one gives you the full dual gbit --
http://www.gms4sbc.com/OtherFF.html

gives you an idea if apple had ditched the 5.25" optical drive how small they could have made the mac mini.

The one from GMS is probably expensive. Their Pentium M board was quite expensive if I remember.

Generally any site that does not state the price means "it will cost more than what is reasonable and we need to convince you to pay up".

It may be a better/cheaper bet to go higher volume and get a VIA-based dual LAN board.

1. This would be the ideal computer for a toy robot.

2. You could put a network camera+picotux in a RC model car and stream the pictures via WLAN. You could then control the car from the computer. Perhaps also combine it with idea 1.

Right, 2 RJ45s and you have a simple firewall or bridge. Slap an IDS or sniffer on it and voila. But its still a bit limited...

Okay, so you cannot get a 48-port 10/100 POE switch and plug 48 computers in your computing grid...

However, those SBC machines could easily go in a nice little stack, support GigE, and can run any kind of Linux you want. Today.

Maybe the Lan plug machines have some good uses, but it is hard to imagine what they are vs. the larger micro-itx designs.

Is 55 Mhz enough to process the data flowing thorough Gigabit ethernet channel?

"What is a realistic use for such a device?"

Industrial monitoring. A lot of industrial devices output by serial. I could see one of these on each machine talking back to a central server updating on each machines status.

I used a something similar for a "realtime" network based control system.

http://www.lantronix.com/device-networking/embedded-device-servers/...

wireless would be fun too..

http://www.lantronix.com/device-networking/embedded-device-servers/...

How about a gumstix computer, they are pretty small and run linux...

http://www.gumstix.com

But I agree if it had dual RJ45 connectors then it would be useful as a nat/firewall telnet/ssh server. Other wise perhaps a very compact small website.

While this ARM module is undoubtledly very cool, for the cost you don't really get much compute power so its barely worth talking about clustering. For some deep embedded use, it does what it does well enough.

A miniITX format or PC104 or even a full size credit card format has enough space to host a great many smaller cpus and share the peripheral costs.

To get tiny cluster performance that will need a different instruction set (not x86 or ARM) that can be built into FPGA or ASIC and run much faster then it can clustered within that divice and more outside.

The problem will always be that real horsepower will always produce heat, but newer designs are going to be much more efficient at delivering useful work without turning into heating systems.