"Philips screws that were all the same size" this is what happens when something is designed to be maintained

I am disappointed that you didn't take this pc as an inspiration to start your own foreign pizza shop and flee the country to begin your new career. Otherwise, awesome video man!

Former Marcos employee here, the BUMP 1 sticker means it was mounted to the wall and used just to display the orders needing to be made which usually had a ticket printer attached. It was a very simple program at the time i was there. I did troubleshooting when stuff didnt work. Most of the time ot was just restarting those terminals.

I don't think the J1900 was ever considered a 'mobile' CPU, it was made exactly for this kind of application.

I got some Lenovo ThinkHub 500's for free from a company that was upgrading their kiosks.11.6" rotating touchscreen, i5-7500T Processor with vPro enabled, 128gb SSD, speakers, mic, tons of HDMI.. I use it with a surveillance camera setup to store footage and monitor the cameras in realtime.......yeah and it also runs a local Valheim and Minecraft server after a massive RAM upgrade and a new SSD.. Moral of the story? Never underestimate the usability of these type of machines.

Repurpose of an old PC system. The reason I love hardware computing SO MUCH.

"Odoo is [...] an ERP software suite" is a hilarious thing to hear if you hail from certain sectors of the internet, i just have to say.

If nothing else a simple system like that would work great for retrogaming.

A little insight on this for you from a former food service employee this isn’t a POS system but instead connects to the pos system and displays the orders in the kitchen and the com ports are for check printers and a little controller thingy the allows you to scroll through the orders and bump them off the screen when they’re completed!

This CPU, J1900, is part of a range which contain a silicon bug called LPC CLK degradation. Countless devices failed after about 3 years (for example NAS devices from QNAP). The fact that this device still works after more than 3 years is probably because it was designed not to rely on LPC to boot (there are some bootstrap pins which indicate SPI or LPC boot).

I remember using a subway POS to play Google Stadia on it, as it was the only game streaming service that wasn't blocked by the company.

With all of those com ports, I bet it would make a good terminal server for microcontrollers and or some of those old Unix workstations. Now you have an excuse to find an old SUN or SGI workstation and get it running.

If you can get this cheap enough it would be great for some simple home server stuff. Home assistant, dns, download server or just to mess around ! It would be amazing to keep this out off the tech graveyard

I have two of these machines. One ran Windows and was the Drive-Thru timer, and the other was a front-side order display/bump bar machine. The second one is passively cooled as well and is actually now my firewall. It's also a J1900 with 4gb ram and a 64gb SSD and two Gbe NICS running OPNSense.

I always enjoy these oddball reuse videos. Thanks!

Hey dude, I noticed the serial ports are an RJ-45 port. You could probably use it to control those Cisco-esque console ports, using an RJ-45 straight through, as a terminal server. Just a suggestion.

Glad to see the “Little Guys” series expanding to more channels

00:30 Oh my, a very divisive question, pineapple on a pizza or not . . . and a default to "Y"? Wow! 😀😀😀

We used this as an always accessible supervisor system to console into our L3 switches at our colocation in case there were changes made that were not accounted for. They work super well for simple tasks and it never needed rebooting using Ubuntu Server. Great little box saving us trips to the colo.

I'm in this exact same boat. I just got some backpack PCs from a defunct VR company. Planning on documenting the teardown.

I have an old Par500 POS at home in my dads shop running bhodi linux and a usb sound card and he uses it just to play music/talk shows. The occasional looking up parts cost and such. Got it free from work when we were upgrading machines a few years ago.

This looks to have been used as a KMS (Kitchen Management System) controller. Usually used with a touchscreen or hardware bump bar for acknowledging or bumping products to the next screen/clearing once prepared. Probably the most common brand for KMS is QSR.

I always enjoy your videos, very informative.

Nice! What I like most about the system is the slim form factor. Recently I built a new router out of an N100 based passively cooled mini PC. It works great, but it's also pretty bulky. This one is flat and has these mounting brackets to screw it under a table, shelf, or even on the wall.

Dang! That's awesome! Keep it up! 😎👍

What an interesting little system. This was fun to watch though I don't see myself buying one I love seeing what oddball systems like this can do. Thanks!

Can i just say, your videos being Hi-Def is really cool!

working as a ERP Dev for 2years and Odoo is the least complain I got from clients. Such a solid system

This neat little PC would be great for any number of things. I would definitely keep it and find a use for it.

Been working with systems like that. These style cases usually get mounted under ceilings and uses the whole case as a heatsink. Usually filled with mobile hardware and strictly tailored to the one usecase the customer has. We had similar ones for KFC which only played the inshop radio.

Honestly, this would make a great little PC for light home server tasks like pihole and home assistant like you said. And getting that mini PCIe to m.2 is huge. I also like the idea of using the COM ports for serial applications. Maybe if you could break them out into DB-9 you could make this into a silent retro gaming PC using some old hardware like flight sticks. I'm sure you could get something running DOSbox well on this.

I worked at Domino's Australia until 2005 and we used a different system to the one used in the USA. It was the same supplier that did Hungry Jack's, STM. We had a single Linux or Unix system with Wyse serial terminals for each order screen, makeline, cut bench and customer display. My store was really old it was a Pentium 166. I left just before the Windows based replacement (Pulse) came.

I used to replaced the ones they used to use at McDonald’s before they did a massive upgrade, those things are excellent for heat . Some of them used to hang off the back if monitors right above cooking stations and they were almost invincible

This channel is great because it explores use cases for interesting unusual devices. This thing could be useful if you wanted something low power and passively cooled that did not need a lot of processing power in a location like a basement or garage. It was expensive partially because it's fairly rugged. I would not pay much for it, but I could think of some good uses for it.

Bingus Studios needs to get his hands on one of these

I would absolutely love one of these as a Klipper mule

@HardwareHaven Thermalpads are used on small cores, like PCH, GPU, etc... It's because thermalpaste is harder to apply correctly on such small core. then thermalpad.

Fast Food PC's. Whoulda thunkit? 😁 Good stuff. 😊

Mounting that thing to a wall or even underneath a table is an amazing "feature" for that performance.

I got the exact same machine that I use with proxmox for about two years now, very handy and stay cool without fan. Also I noticed the VGA issue, but I got around it because my J1900 saturn has a display port.

My first thought would be toss it in the server closet and serial console server for all the other servers. Now you have a management node. You could also run a management network off one of the other NICs then it would be a full management system. Toss DNS and LDAP and maybe Kerberos and a CA and very full featured management node

all those serial ports would sure come in handy to interface with motion controllers for a CNC

If I remember Wendell's video from several years ago, he was home rollings a lot of home security stuff communicating over serial.

Might be a good fit for driving laser cutters or CNC machines in a dusty/dirty environment.

I had similar VGA issues w a similarly aged machine. I had to manually add the resolution to the Xorg config and it worked at the correct resolution.

I love the fact that the PC space is accommodating for both ultra-budget/side-of-the-road hardware hacking and repurposing, as well as top of the line multi thousand dollar, skunk-works, custom builds, and pretty much everything in-between.

If you lived on the road and wanted to do an SSD NAS of some sort, this could be kind of an option. Low power, no moving parts, keeps good temps. Or if you're a mechanic and need a PC to mount on the toolbox for diagnostics.

Seems like a great pc for a 3d printing farm

It would definitely be great for Home Assistant. I've been running Home Assistant OS on a BayTrail NUC (same CPU family as the J1900) for about 5 years now, and it has been great.

I recently bought an used industrial PC on eBay. It was full with remote control configurations (Many VNC connections to subsystems and a lot of very specific light management software) , including IPs and some account data to Austria's national theatre. They did not bother erasing the SSD .. well I did then, because I had more important stuff do to than to abuse the situation.

Something interesting would be in the model train community with DCC. Some handheld throttle controllers use a serial connector to communicate.

The large number of com ports make it very useful for amateur radio and other communication systems that use terminal node controllers or other serial based communications devices.

I love these kind of videos.

With all of the extra ports it would make for a good OOB serial device for network devices that uses the serial port.

I have an old mystery PC sitting around similar to that one. It was a behind the monitor office PC, though. I just know it's old.

It may be a good COM server to access the serial ports of several devices, be it network or home automation processors

Now you have to open your own restaurant.

someone i knew used to get free food by accessing the back office machine and opening up access to the mssql databases very common in that space. small businesses are usually locked in without access to the actual data

You can use that as an IoT home server. There are plenty of sensors which used serial interface in TTL mode.

For tape you would need something like Kapton tape. then give it a few layers of kapton tape, making sure to fully warp it. or you could 3D print a small flat bracket that covers the PCB. like a MINI case

that would be perfect for monitoring solar set up's, at least with the MPPT's that have serial ports on them. you could watch 3 array's.

This thing could be used for automation. Maybe add a CAN-bus controller and some additional serial ports and it would be a beast for that use case.

With all the COM ports it would make a great multi user TTY server or BBS (LOL). Heck I even think Jeff @CraftComputing could use one of these to wire directly up to his new invention to remotely flash new firmware for testing. At least then he wouldn't have to re-plug it when testing.

A good portion of that power draw is probably the power adapter brick, as evidenced by the chassis staying cooler than you expected.

A Marco's Pizza PC Build is crazy!

that would be a great signal k host signal k is a marine software that gathers data from radar, sonar, AIS... those serial com ports would be handy, since most of the devices in a boat have them although nowadays it all connects via wifi, the serial is more reliable on storms and busy marinas..

Yea I scored a Logic Controls LC8100 POS system, its a decent 2005 rig I found at a thrift store, it runs XP the system is great for older games.

I use something similar, same CPU, and I also removed the sata ssd from its case. It runs my Unifi controller and I use it as a G-code sender (over serial) to my CNC engraver. I don't use much more than 10% at highest load on the CPU, been running it for few years now with zero issues.

would be a good LED / light fixture controller PC for ARTNET stuff. Especially better with multiple NICs. Serial ports are good for motor controllers or interfacing with other professional equipment. Like as it is intended, interfacing with AV equipment. You can basically talk with Projectors, AV switchers or Industrial Display Panels. Network switches and UPSes have serial interfaces too...

I have a fanless industrial pc (different model than what you are showing off here). I connected a usb headphone amplifier to it and use it as a dedicated device for listening to music.

Digital Signage Monitors often have an OPS Slot. So these PCs are integrated into the monitor and are user changable for different input cards or PCs.

Perhaps it can be a home security camera "hub/server" if the comports can ingest camera data.

As a free system my current use case is Octoprint as I need just that at the moment.

We are in an era where mainstream PCs have more than 4 core processors, so the best way to utilize this low-power thin client that lacks pcie gen2 x4 expansion slot is dual 2.5Gb network port routing (executing pfsense firewall ) As long as a 2.5Gbe switch is connected to the LAN port, it is suitable for small home studios. It is best to turn off its virtualization function and only give it a single role. As long as its processor is not always under full load, then it It will be a very useful machine.

9:50 "nobody will use it as a gaming machine" - mybe not for playing AAA games, but I find this system useful in home made retro arcade game machine

you could use it as an Octoprint controller for multiple 3dprinters!? It would be fairly powerful for that task, and the serial ports could talk to 3dprinter CNC machines, laser cutter/engravers, etc.

nice lil car computer - add a usb hub and go to town - pihole was the best suggestion but just as a fileserver - install debian with no gui and then use vnc over ssh to avoid screen issues

Maybe it could be used as a remote logging system for a home lab? Specifically with syslog and some other front end software.

I went through a bit of of a phase where I used a small mini-ITX PC with low power hardware kind of like this (maybe a bit more powerful than an Atom) for my home server/router (which runs Gentoo). It did fine...but I once I started getting Unifi devices and expanding my wifi rather than just plugging into a cheap wifi access point, I decided I wanted more expandability, RAM, and storage space, and a bit beefier CPU since I also do compiling on that machine - no GUI though. Because I do basically everything on my server except for actually playing games. I don't store anything important on Windows machines, everything even remotely important is stored on that server. So 2 years ago now (time is flying) I got a Micro-ATX B series motherboard and stuck an i3-12100 in that machine, along with a PCIe multi port network card. I guess it uses somewhat more powerful, but having a CPU that isn't too far off from the i7-6700k I used in my gaming PC just a few years ago was a pretty big jump. I can still see the draw for having a mount it to the wall, set it up and forget it type of low power server with no moving parts/maintenance though for certain tasks. Heck I could probably use that machine as a server/router if I was in a pinch and had nothing else. Just put Gentoo on it and I'm sure it could handle my needs, even if it's not ideal.

It looks the perfect machine for running Octoprint on.

make it happy by having it serve up recipes in your kitchen

The serial connections would work well for microcontroller programming.

I once saw a edge AI industrial PC that had 8 POE ports and and intel 6th/7th gen CPU and really wanted to get it for my home security camera setup (Frigate NVR) because it would have been incredibly clean setup. It was also passively cooled, so PoE switch and server all in one easily mountable body. However only used unit I could find was in Canada and shipping was 100 USD.... I also could not find anything even similar to it because it was an industrial product and it is not like make it easy to find your competition. It's intended use was for quality control using machine vision over an assembly line: looking for observable cracks or imperfections etc.

That's very similar to what I use for my home router.

Installing one of these distros packed with emulators, or even a media center with kodi would be great.

Definitely appreciate the "re-use" vibe here. Imagine how many of these get ewasted.

I suggest home automation where you are not pumping vertexes in games nor gigabytes of streaming video. Run your AVR on another box. Many of your environment sensors; weather, security and remote controlling are low data rates. With the decent video you can have a nice looking wall panel creating a futuristic looking vibe from low-tech.

just came across this video. betting there’s gonna be a running doom reference

Should check out the Xfce desktop environment. It is light weight enough to run on this.

Would probably be a good fit for CNC.

ive got an wild idea, you could use this pc for a central kvm of some sort to connect to all of your other servers since it has so many com ports

If your VGA adaptor won't pick the right resolution I've found that can be down to cheap VGA cables that don't have the pins wired for the monitor to communicate it's capabilities back to the video card so it just goes with a default that's often unuseable. I had this issue with a certain combination for years until I happened to switch out the cable one day and it suddenly worked. It wasn't a big issue for me since I usually ran it as a headless lab machine anyway but super annoying to find that I'd been struggling due to someone trying to shave a penny off the cost of making a VGA cable.

Love the video, quick question, what software are you using at 9:06?

One Advice: I have a Storage/Printroom PC as well. You want a Windows PC/MAC OS there or something a little more beefier which can run Orcaslicer at ubuntu at a decent speed. You can print from the Smartphone app. But a good search and fast edit of an STL needs a Mouse and a decent PC.

I use to work on POS systems, status screens, and bump bars in restaurants. I always hated those 4 pin power adapters. Employees would break them when they'd unplug the computer and plug it back in.

YES. Forcing it into place is always a great fix in the IT world!!!

thosew would be perfect for a sff 90's - early 2000's gaming pc. should pretty much run everything flawlessly, using xp and a low end gpu...

At some point, I plan to equip my home with some sort of central computer thingy that can control lights, heating, remind me of appointments or give a weather report after receiving a spoken command. The device in this video is pretty close to what I have in mind: Small, easy to hide away inside a wall or under a desk, closed up, passive cooling, and just powerful enough to run a purely local home assistance software. I might get a raspberry pi 5 with an NPU module, probably and then see where I can get to from there. But essentially, yes: It's perfect as a home server.

Bunch of serial ports you can do a console server for network devices (i.e enterprise ones that actually have console ports)

I use a similar lenovo system with an Athlon Silver 3050e for my opnsense box, works great for what it is