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nate

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#151167 15-Aug-2014 23:45
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I have a old shuttle box that runs a promo screen in my cafe.  The promo screen is just a webpage that is loaded in Chrome in full screen mode. That's all this machine does.

Looking at replacing it with an Intel NUC or similar - any suggestions?

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Yabanize
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  #1109373 16-Aug-2014 01:02
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Raspberry pi?



sampler
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  #1109393 16-Aug-2014 08:00
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Nate!,

NUC's in general just work (and work well). They have little if no sound at all (fan noise etc, and are available with Wireless, 4 gig of ram and a 30 gig SSD (mSATA) for under $350. Slap your fav version of Linux on it, set it up to auto run chrome etc and away you go.

As much as I would normally be interested in cheaper options that required more geeking and thoughts, using a NUC would effectively become a set and forget item. Perfect for the intended location (must pop in and grab a salad again).

Cheers

Lee

hellonearthisman
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  #1109395 16-Aug-2014 08:10
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Raspberry Pi, small size, quiet, low power and cheap.



Dynamic
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  #1109397 16-Aug-2014 08:24
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Ingram have an NUC which is a fanless single core Atom.  I bought one for this exact purpose.  VGA and HDMI outputs.  Cost next to nothing.  'Standard' NUCs have a fan to wear out.




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  #1109400 16-Aug-2014 08:43
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Pretty sure the Raspberry Pi would do the job fine. In saying that, I think the single core Atom NUC as mentioned above would do it better.




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CYaBro
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  #1109403 16-Aug-2014 09:08
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Gigabyte also have fanless brix unit with a dual core celeron if you want something a bit more powerful than an atom.
It has VGA and hdmi outputs.




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jonb
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#1109413 16-Aug-2014 09:39
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People have had good experiences with the Chinese NUCs in this thread www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=50&topicid=147440 .
You could also try a tablet with a hdmi out, maybe a Dell Venue 8 from Trade Me.

toyonut
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  #1109440 16-Aug-2014 11:36
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+1 for a NUC. Small cheap and have vesa mounting kits too. Sure the Pi would too, but I just feel the NUC is a bit more versatile.

*EDIT*
Just remembered, chromeboxes.
http://www.pbtech.co.nz/index.php?z=p&p=WKSHDT2706976&name=HP-ChromeBox-G1-Intel-Celeron-2955U-1.4-GHz-4GB-16
Cheap, and pretty much all they do is run Chrome.
A NUC is nearly as cheap though.
http://www.pbtech.co.nz/index.php?z=p&p=WKSPB3005&name=PB-3005-Intel-NUC-Ultra-Compact-PC-Intel-Celeron-N




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HowickDota
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  #1109442 16-Aug-2014 11:44
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My vote is for the raspberry pi, save yourself some money if it's only going to be doing this one basic task.

Dynamic
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  #1109447 16-Aug-2014 12:02
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A Windows-based PC is a no-brainer to have auto-starting with the desired function and can be easily VNC'd into from another terminal if required.  The Pi might take a bit of head scratching or research.




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  #1109448 16-Aug-2014 12:11
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nate: I have a old shuttle box that runs a promo screen in my cafe.  The promo screen is just a webpage that is loaded in Chrome in full screen mode. That's all this machine does.

Looking at replacing it with an Intel NUC or similar - any suggestions?


Get the Gigabyte BRIX, 4GB RAM and a mSATA SSD 64GB from Amazon. Cheaper than the NUC and fast. I use as HTPC (with a larger SSD) and David Cole got one this week for his.






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raytaylor
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  #1109625 16-Aug-2014 19:38
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jonb: People have had good experiences with the Chinese NUCs in this thread www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=50&topicid=147440 .
You could also try a tablet with a hdmi out, maybe a Dell Venue 8 from Trade Me.


I ended up using three of those little chinese units - bought them off trademe, swapped out the hard drives for SSD's and installed windows 7.
We use one as our DNS server, one as the backup DNS and one as a shared file server / dumping ground.
Am even thinking of moving our email server over to one.

They are really good.




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richms
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  #1109633 16-Aug-2014 19:50
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Can be risky getting things out of china like that. I have bought an ITX motherboard in the past that had a duplicate mac address and was missing heaps of capacitors, because it was a "third shift" production run.




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  #1109636 16-Aug-2014 20:10
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I think the device you may be looking for is a Wireless Advertising Display (or even a wired one). 




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richms
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  #1109639 16-Aug-2014 20:15
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Wireless advertising players tend to just run thru a remotely administered slideshow of stills and video, not have a functioning web browser on them. When I looked at one to do a rates board at work, they were totally unable to pull in data from elsewhere so I would have had to make something render things to images and stick them into a network share for the player to display from. We just fullscreen an excel spreadsheet because that was the easiest way to get something usable quickly, but I will be re-doing it via HTML sometime soon.




Richard rich.ms

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