I just found out tht VIA is releasing a new NANO, even smaller than the current nano.
The current nano is about 12cm x12 cm max cpu speed is 1.5Ghz
At the show at the TECH convention
the new NANO is 7cm x 9cm… max cpu speed is 1.0Ghz.
This is about the same size as a notebook hardrive size.
I saw it and I was very impress by it…it was very small but the heat sink
was very large…tho…
You can use this new board and put in any robot project…
I think it will be great…for hexa bot or biped robot…
P.S.
I just thought some of you want to know just incase you are planing to buy a motherboard for your robot.
The only real problem I see with the nano form factor boards is their cost. That will have to come down quite a bit in order to make them really popular for robotics use.
You probably would not want to put one of these in a tight enclosed area. That heatsink has to have room to radiate all that heat.
It’s always good to find out about new stuff like this. I will eventually want to put a Linux based controller/computer on a robot and I want it to be able to handle video/vision processing on board the robot.
I’ve had my eye on their cheapest 533mhz mini-ITX board for literally four years - and it hasn’t even come down in price by a few pounds!!!
That is crazy - I expected them to drop. I suppose they are at the lowest manufacturing costs they can get and only have them because they need to provide long time support, but still…
I think it’s a supply and demand thing in this case. When supply is limited and demand is high, the price won’t go down much, if at all. If they can find companies to pay the prices they want, there isn’t any reason for them to go down.
Actually, there are some OEM that uses VIA mini-ITX chipset. They are actually 25% cheaper. Don’t know about their QC, but they look exactly the same as the VIA. You might want to consider them.
I hope I’m not thread hijacking too much here… But I plan to add a custom top panel set for the new 4WD rover to hold a standard Mini-ITX footprint MB. I need to get a MB to test the fit etc. Which one whould I get? I want to keep the price as low as possible, but I want to make sure the platform will run Windows and Linux without issues. Think mainstream here, not techno fringe…
the basic mini-ITX mounting hole footprint is pretty standard. where the power connects can move around a bit. There is a nice dimensioned Epia M board on page 8 of this .pdf file
Hey, Jim, if you’re wanting to know which motherboard is the best then I’d say that if you’re on a budget, the EPIA 5000AG will do fine - it’ll run Win2K and XP at a pinch. Maybe the EPIA ML 8000 would be better though.
If you don’t really care about money, the Jetway J7F2 2.0GHz C7 should do the job. Just remember, whatever your choice is, to load those babies up with as much SDRAM as you can!
Just remember that I’ve always found that the EPIA series of chips has crap floating point (a throwback to the Cyrix 6x86, as VIA bought Cyrix shortly after that) - but that shouldn’t matter too much unless you’re bashing away in x86 assembler.
HTH
theChipmunk
P.S. You might be interested in their new ‘pico-ITX’ form-factor, which would be perfect for a biped!!!
Hey… there a new mini-itx board from Intel… called the Little Valley… model is D201GLY… it is really cheap… around $ 80… it is somewhat limited in options compared to other Mini-Itx… but it is really cheap!!.. I hope this helps…
