Had some old hardware laying around at home, so I thought I would make my own iMac, or more namely, iBigMac. Started with a Dell 15″ LCD, an a7v8x-x with a AMD 450mhz CPU, and a nVidia Geforce graphics card and an unknown amount of RAM. It wasn’t much of a build. Make some holes in the LCD plastic, screw everything down and the hardware part was done.
I planned on using a USB stick to boot it, but he motherboard doesn’t support it so it’s network booting using PXE to my server, which is pretty cool. It’s BIOS is really quick, and since everything is loaded in RAM it’s quite speedy. It’s perfect for quickly looking at a website, and requires a lot less power. 100% recycled parts.
Oh, the red tape is to hold the motherboard on the screen at the top half. None of the holes lined up.
Put gPXE onto the box and use iSCSI booting!
You can use HTTP instead of ghey TFTP using gPXE too
The most awesomely dodgy thing I’ve seen in ages. When are you going into production?
Also, have you planned on using the machine to run BOINC or some other cluster thing? I know you were talking about setting up a PXE-based clustering thingy.
Have you measured how much power the machine/monitor uses in total? And for bonus points, open up the back of the screen and wire the motherboard directly into the LCD’s power supply. There should be at least a 12v supply in there.
I have another 2 Dell 15″ LCD if anyones interested….
Haven’t been able to measure the power draw yet, but I have plans too. The BOINC part is actually easy to do because the whole system is virtually a clone of salad.internaluse.net which runs BOINC, so all I have to do is run it.
I was going to wire the on switch to the LCD but I haven’t gotten around to checking how that switch works, and I’m guessing there will be a difference in voltage between the two. Not sure if the LCD will have 3.5v and 5v rails and if it can handle it. It might be better for me to remove it’s power supply and use the computers instead
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I spoke to M. Hamzah Khan today about gPXE. I’ll implement it on my XEN cluster I think
I think the most expensive part of the whole operation in getting it to use one power source would be the custom components needed.
A cluster of 15″ Dell monitors would be pretty awesome.