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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4059
Hi all.
Am trying to find a way to get a "bare" A1 motherboard (AOA150 ZG5) to boot without any of the peripherals attached.
the problem is that the BIOS only supports booting from SSD or SATA, which isn't a lot of help when you want to install 8 boards into a small space with only SD storage in the expansion slot...
i had a thought, the internal camera uses a USB interface which is easy to access so what about just building a PIC or AVR + 49DB321F 32Mbit or so flash chip containing a basic boot image and menu (XP, Freedos,etc).. seems the least awkward method and gets around the annoying "save BIOS" bug.
also am trying to find a way to "bank switch" BIOS's, so far the only method that I can see working is to solder two Winbond chips "dead bug" style and switch between them... if anyone finds a cheap source please let me know
Registered Member #2893
Joined: Tue Jun 01 2010, 09:25PM
Location: Cali-forn. i. a.
Posts: 2242
"the problem is that the BIOS only supports booting from SSD or SATA, which isn't a lot of help when you want to install 8 boards into a small space with only SD storage in the expansion slot... "
Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4059
yeah, this could work as all the boards have network ports.
a thought i did have, once booted the BIOS can be cached to RAM so one option is to connect all the chips with the /CE line on a master/slave with a second larger chip containing the boot image.
EDIT:- the reason I am using these specific motherboards is that due to the small size and low thermal load (the atom CPU only draws 12W for low-end Core like performance) the boards can be put in a relatively small space with custom made heatsinks to cool the array.
the current plan is to start off with flat steel plate with holes drilled for the existing mounting holes, and electroplate onto that about 6mm of copper to form the CPU and GPU heatsink units (on opposite sides) then make a stack of eight boards with required brass PCB spacers and power etc. Will probably be adding reset circuitry in the form of a magnetic switch hooked up to the Ctrl and Esc (and Alt Delete) on each board so in the event of a BIOS failure I don't then need to dismantle the whole array to fix one board
another interesting hack that can be done is to use quorum sensing to analyse each board's temperature and then generate the required fan voltage to cool them correctly. so in the event that the sensors say average temp 40C, the system then adjusts the fan speed to keep it below this.
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Help request:- Aspire One
