Sunday, January 31, 2010

Birdbox - Upgrading the central unit

The camera in our birdbox was connected to a 10 year old PC which just coped with recording the photo stills and the odd video clip but it was showing it's age.  To replace it I was after something small, cheap and low on electric use.  I've built all my PC's over the past 10 or so years mainly for the fun and the knowledge is good for troubleshooting problems.

Costing out parts for a really small unit always came out above my budget because small cases are expensive, I looked at an atom based build for the low wattage draw but was undecided as the atom motherboards didn't offer much flexibility.  Acer have a Atom Revo base unit that would have been ideal as it was so small but in the end I wants to build a new base unit.

So I took the bullet 2 weeks ago and ordered all the parts (not many really) consisting of motherboard, cpu, memory, harddisk, case and wireless keyboard.

Following is a short timelapse of me putting the PC together - as you're see there's not much to it, a little screwing and then connecting wires, biggest surprise is that it runs on 50watts.

2 comments:

Philip said...

I'm surprised at you using Windows, have you tried Ubuntu Linux? It's a lot less demanding on resources and is so much more stable. Thanks for your blog, keep up the good work!

An ex Kendalian

lakeuk said...

Tried Ubuntu a few times but always had problems with my hardware not being 100% compatible.