Ask HN: Good forum for hobbyish ARM(industrial) design discussions and advice?
5 comments
Actually, the idea of coupling together a ARM SoC, a Ethernet switch, a USB audio interface and a bit of power-monitoring circuitry (and some relais) to make a dead-cheap desktop remote management solution has hit me too. Maybe even add a battery to provide a buffer against +5VSB outages (due to "real" power out); after all, a tiny ARM doesn't suck really much power.
But I'm a software guy, not a hardware developer - I can get a basic circuit board done, but no BGA or SMD mounted stuff...
I think the market for such a card - especially if built in half-height to fit into existing servers - is very very great. Wake on LAN just isn't enough for managing thousands of desktop computers, and "true" IPKVM systems come at a hundreds-of-$ price tag, and they're an external box nonetheless.
But I'm a software guy, not a hardware developer - I can get a basic circuit board done, but no BGA or SMD mounted stuff...
I think the market for such a card - especially if built in half-height to fit into existing servers - is very very great. Wake on LAN just isn't enough for managing thousands of desktop computers, and "true" IPKVM systems come at a hundreds-of-$ price tag, and they're an external box nonetheless.
Hey, glad to hear from a like minded soul. It's true they'd likely make quite good ipkvms as long as you're OK with having CVE's pop on your ipkvm gear. I guess they probably already do.
I think even just embracing it as an ipkvm++ opens up a lot of potential additions to the current approach. There's no reason why you wouldn't want to build in remote power and triggers to go into S3/S4 powersave. There are still plenty of shops that prevent sleep to make maintenance easier. And It'd be super easy to hook a usb port up as a usb client and software fake whatever dvdrom you happened to want to boot.
If you ever feel like shooting the shit, i'd be down to hear what parts of it does it for you or whatever else was on your mind. I have the same nick on github.
I think even just embracing it as an ipkvm++ opens up a lot of potential additions to the current approach. There's no reason why you wouldn't want to build in remote power and triggers to go into S3/S4 powersave. There are still plenty of shops that prevent sleep to make maintenance easier. And It'd be super easy to hook a usb port up as a usb client and software fake whatever dvdrom you happened to want to boot.
If you ever feel like shooting the shit, i'd be down to hear what parts of it does it for you or whatever else was on your mind. I have the same nick on github.
Actually all of the bigger SoC families bring USB gadget support with them... the Linux kernel has at least support for USB mass storage and networking (of course, networking is useless, because of low speed) - so it should be possible indeed to internally connect the USB jumpers to the ipkvm board to provide HID and storage.
The only thing is now to get a cheap way to adapt VGA (or better yet, DVI) to an SoC. Video encode is supplied with the chips, the real difficulty will be getting the signals to the CPU, though.
The only thing is now to get a cheap way to adapt VGA (or better yet, DVI) to an SoC. Video encode is supplied with the chips, the real difficulty will be getting the signals to the CPU, though.
I am hoping to for something in english (ha! I'll survive) or just anything that might be suitable. An HN sorta thing where people often have a clue would rock, but the big missing piece is picking soc->minimal reference board revisions->build or source some custom stuff to give the arm some supervoisor like qualities on the x86.
To balance a zero content post, I provide my rough plan to amuse to reader. Basicially I want to combine a SFF server (think HP microserver or so slash less for mini. Most are essentially low end x76 roll your own nas that make do with 150w and 4 sata bays, 2 dimms and 1 eth.
I want to see what I can do if I meld that kind of platform together with a few low poer arm linux servers all in one case. I imagine the arm sections being able to utilize some kind of pci/pci or similar bridge as well as monitoring, reset, ipkvm etc that could leave them as super programmable debuggers more or less, that could always easily act as low power satndins for much of the traffic that wakes up your typical low use server - ntp, ping, mild file serving, ldap, etc. Anything harder and they could provide a superior holding pattern as the main box woke up from deep sleep.