Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

So part 1 was sort of about what I was doing and why, and part 2 was about the process, so part 3 is about the reality and the future.

For many years if I wanted to control something like a cnc milling machine / Mach3, or run a dedicated private webserver, I’d utilise what I used to call the “50 buck PC” which basically meant any old piece of shit second hand PC that I found on gumtree / craigslist / fleabay / etc.

About 10 years ago I had three of these pc’s and three old raq webservers and a ups sat in a big old rack in the hallway of my house at the time, and so it was for quite some time, until one day I bought a portable power / watt meter in a plug sort of thing, and ran around the house for the next few weeks measuring everything.

Imagine my surprise to find that as expected bedrooms 1 2 and 3 used bugger all, exterior used bugger all, garage used bugger all, but my hallway used as much as the kitchen (image above) and the bathroom (13 kw electric shower, radiant heater etc) combined.

Turns out that dripping taps will fill a swimming pool, and old 50 buck pc’s drip quite a lot, 4 kWh per day to be precise, or 1,460 kWh per year, @ 25p per kWh that’s 365 quid per year on ‘lectric… oh, I had gone through them all carefully to minimise power consumption, disks spun down and everything.

Not that any of those old things were crays, bunch of old shit pentium II stuff sd-ram eide hdd and so on, all compares very unfavourably performance wise with the celeron 3150 brix.. and at 10 watts peak consumption 0.24 kWh per day peak 87 kWh peak per year @ 25p per kWh that’s £21.90 per year in electric, peak, true usage is nearer 15 quid… Ok that’s only one brix so x6 = 90 quid a year to run six brix’s, the power savings in one year alone buy 1.5 brix, and really, let’s get real world and go back to pentium 2/3 and eide and sdram, I reckon one brix with 4 core celeron and ssd and 64 bit OS will outlift any two of those old boxes, probably three.

At that point two brix vs 6 old boxen the brix will pay for themselves within a year, and lift heavier loads.

An arduino (teh full size one) for 11 quid is a dirt cheap microcontroller, at 20 arduinos for one 4 core celeron 3150 brix (inc 4 gig of ram and ssd) is a dirt cheap x86 pc.

So lets get real about the current brix, it does one job, run a fibre galvo, and it uses around 30-32% cpu and 50% of the 4 gig installed ram to do it.

A lot of the time I will be working at 0.03 or 0.01 mm (30 and 10 micron) resolution, I can work to ten times that, but lets stick with 10 micron.

At ten micron with the head scanning at a very moderate 2,500 mm/sec you get 250,000 discrete “points” per second, and for each point such things has laser head pwm frequency, base power and so on all have to be set, so there are a whole bunch of data points for each individual point, and all this is done in real time by the host PC (the brix in this case) from the cad drawings in the laser control software, and shoved out to the laser itself over USB to control it in real time (technically there are electronics within the laser that interpret those driver signals so think printer, printer driver, printer driver board, rather than arduino like direct port / pin output) and of course any errors or skipped steps anywhere and the whole thing turns to crap….

My old mach3 set up with the mill would max out at 100 khz and that was it and that was way more than enough for 3 axis control at up to 1,500 mm/min in any axis plus spindle etc etc

This thing is “barely idling” at 1,500 mm/sec and at 1 micron res that’s 1,5 million points per second, all with individual PWM / power / etc

And the brix runs it at 30% load.

At 5-10% load I’d have wasted money and bought something too powerful for the task, at 75% load I could probably have been wise to get slightly more powerful for the task, just in case, at 30% load I got it just about right.

I plumped for the 4 core 3150 celeron brix because I know these processors are going into embedded industrial PC’s, which are really not *much* more than a brix built to an industrial standard with some watchdog addons etc, so 500 quid a pop not 200, and a fair proportion of industrial PC’s do *real* work for a living.

As I said before, unless you are in pursuit of benchmark hilarity or playing crysis at high res etc, these celerons are really very capable processors, much more so than people think.

Sure, 224 kb of L1 and 2 mb of L2 and no L3 is nothing compared to a xeon, which is the epitome of heavy living for massively corcurrent processes, but my now 3-4 year old socket 2011 i7 is guess what, 4 cores, same as the 3150 celeron, though each core is split into two logicals, unlike the 3150 celeron, and 256 kb of L1, 1 mb of L2 (half the celeron) and 10 mb of L3, sure it also has double the clock and quad channel ram and so on, but the processor and mainboard and ram cost me best part of 1,000 when I bought it new, that’s 5 brix’s in today’s money.

The socket 2011 *will* play crysis, it will also hammer the 3150 celeron at video encoding or creating multi gigabyte archives or working with 500 meg CAD files, but I’ll be honest with you, many days it doesn’t get *any* of those tasks thrown at it

Many days it looks like this, 1% with the odd spike to 3%

Closing thoughts

I think the celeron 3150 + ssd + 4 gig brix is a stonkingly good little PC, it has no moving parts, it sips power, it is capable of surprisingly heavy lifting, it is tiny, it is cheap.

I can see *many* uses and applications, given the limitations of the form factor that prevent plugging in a full size gfx card or an array of 6tb WD reds, from the home rolled car PC to the home rolled active firewall to the home rolled automation / monitoring / control PC.

I think it also makes a great “I just want a PC to browse the internet, do emails, and do office stuff” setup, whether for older people or younger ones.

I think it makes a great “why have a virtual machine when you can have a real one” PC.

I think it would be a great little webserver.

It has wifi and bluetooth on board, so it would make a great little portable wifi / bluetooth / mesh hub

It only has the one RJ45 so you could only use it at a wifi firewall, but that might be good too, I can see applications where that would work.

It would make a great mp3 / audio streaming box, or plug in an external usb3 disk and it would stream 1080p no problem over hdmi, so it would work as a kiosk box too

It would make a great “fit and forget” decryption box too, I have two hard disk images and 5 rar archives on the nas, I’ll be completely honest with you I can’t remember what are in any of them, three of them were legacy items that came to me from someone deceased, a brix would make a great little brute force box, just check it every couple of months, if it does it does, if it doesn’t it doesn’t.

A previous commenter asked about crypto currencies, I don’t actually know anything useful about them, but for 200 quid and 10 watts max power and total silence I wouldn’t be too dismissive of the number crunching ability of a brix running 24/7 for weeks or months, rather like the dripping tap kwh power consumptions of those old 50 quid PC’s, I suspect the final numbers will be surprisingly high.

I have heard already from one person who just ordered one, he is going to use it to brute force wifi and then packet flood the network to death, he is actually buying two, the second one will just run wireshark, cheaper and easier and better than plan A which was scouring craigslist for a couple of old stinkpads….