20090618
Fit-PC2
Fit-PC2 Front
After using my MSI Wind to run the observatory for a while I found out about this tiny little 1.6GHz Atom-based Windows PC. Doing a little research into its size and other specs, I bought one. The reasons? It will fit inside my AP 900GTO mount, it has 6 USB 2.0 ports, and is fast enough to run the mount, autoguide, manage a filter wheel, and operate my camera. My hope is to monitor observatory ops from inside the house during those cold winter or bug-ridden summer nights. Placing the computer so close to the equipment will significantly reduce the usual tangle of cables associated with digital astrophotography.
Fit-PC2 Rear
One challenge I face is to get Remote Desktop Server running on this system. It came with Window$ XP Home SP3. I have a spare XP Pro license, but I can’t upgrade directly from SP3 (Thanks Micro$oft). So, I’m going to fake it and force RDP to run on Home – or at least try before taking the normal path. I have not tested a headless boot of the Fit-PC2, sans KVM, yet as RDP is required. I do have a fall back position where I put a Keyboard, Video, & Mouse in the observatory at the end of long cable runs.
Since the temperature extremes out in the observatory can be more than you might want to expose a computer to, I plan to swap out the 160GB HD in the Fit-PC2 for a 30GB SSD. 30GB should be plenty for everything I do except for planetary and lunar imaging. For that I have a Sager NP9850 laptop on order with three 320GB 7200 RPM HDs in a RAID-0 configuration, but that is a topic for a future post. I’ll have a fair amount of testing to do, the wireless network throughput out into the middle of my back yard in particular.
Fit-PC2 Top with 2.5" SSD
For those considering the Fit-PC2, here are a couple of initial impressions. It IS small. Build quality seems quite good. I did manage to crash the system once and that will be something I will monitor closely and followup with a more detailed review. You can hear the HD (it was sitting right in front of me during testing, however). The HDMI to DVI adapter cable terminates in a female DVI, so you need a regular male-to-male DVI cable to hook it up to a monitor. Personally, I would have liked a short cable that I could use to directly connect the Fit to monitor, at least initially. I suppose there will be those that can make good use of the supplied cable – folks who intend to use this as a media center. If I need to use a monitor in the observatory, the supplied adapter cable will be replaced by a long HDMI to DVI cable. The power supply brick is small and the cables are pretty short – outlet to Fit is just a hair over 6′ with the brick 2′ from the outlet. It is a standard cable going from the outlet to the brick, so you probably already have a longer cable in your possession.
JMZ said,
June 19, 2009 @ 0057
I just finished swapping the 5400RPM 160GB HD that came with the Fit-PC2 for a 30GB OCZ Vertex SSD. I used Acronis True Image Home 2009. Unlike my experience with the trial version and the MSI Wind, this copy/restore process went with out a hitch and the drive booted straight away with no need to mark partitions as active. Formatting the SSD with NTFS took maybe 45 seconds. The boot time of the Fit-PC2 with the SSD is strikingly fast. Way less than half the time, perhaps only a third of the time it took to boot XP from the HD.
I can’t wait to put the 120GB OCZ Vertex drive in the Wind!
Jeremy Zawodny said,
June 19, 2009 @ 0603
Nice! I’ve had my eye on the Fit-PC2 for a while now but just haven’t come up with an excuse to get one.
JMZ said,
June 20, 2009 @ 0100
I’ve been playing around with a headless Fit-PC2 system and accessing the Fit via VNC. The Fit boots just fine without a keyboard, mouse, or monitor. However, accessing the headless system with a VNC reveals a couple of weaknesses. First of all without a monitor, Winders uses a “Default Monitor” which is 640×480 and a color depth of 4-bits. Yes, you read that correctly – 4-bits. Things do not render correctly with only a handful of colors. I have not found a way around that. Secondly, VNCs are slow, especially over wireless. I was using the free version of RealVNC. It worked, but was too slow to be useful for the things I want to do. So, I plan to run one long HDMI to DVI cable and a long USB extension from the Fit mounted on my pier to the desk in my observatory for KVM accessories. I sort of knew before hand that the VNCs were going to be slow. They were painfully slow 15 years ago and not much has changed since then.
JMZ said,
June 21, 2009 @ 0201
All of the USB ports on the rear of the Fit-PC2 are mounted upside down. You can connect a keyboard via a USB hub and have a mouse connected via a hub in the keyboard. So, you only need to dedicate one USB port to a remote keyboard and mouse.
David Holz said,
June 21, 2009 @ 2054
If you plug the Fit-PC2 into a monitor (and set it up for it), you should be able to unplug it afterwards and access it over a VNC with a more reasonable resolution and color settings. I commonly remote-access my desktop in Florida from Virginia. None of the monitors are ever turned on but I still get the same 3 monitor resolution and colors as if they were.
I can also manage to get 3 fps with Cable-to-DSL access speeds, which are much slower than wireless network transfer rates. Over my own wireless I seem to be able to get framerates as high as 10 fps (using UltraVNC and the Mirror Video Drivers). You might be able to get more by manually tweaking the image compression settings to match what you really need.
Of course, if you’re trying to get live video feeds, wireless speeds might not be enough. Running a LAN cable out to the observatory from the house should give you the bandwidth you need (UltraVNC claims to be capable of real-time performance over LAN), but I have no idea how feasible that would be.
JMZ said,
June 21, 2009 @ 2212
The first thing I did was to hook up a monitor. It was 1280×1024x32. Later I tried the headless setup and VNC only to see 640×480x4. As soon as a plugged in a monitor it jumped to the higher resolution and stayed there even after I unplugged the monitor. It will not, however, boot headless to the higher resolution – or at least I can’t seem to make it stick. I even hacked around a little in the registry with no luck.
My wireless range does not extend out into the observatory – yet. I’ve also just ordered a long HDMI-DVI cable and have given up on VNC.
JMZ said,
June 25, 2009 @ 0042
I installed a GMA500 driver from the Fit-PC2 website with the option to default to 800×600x16. Have not had the opportunity to test yet.
JMZ said,
June 26, 2009 @ 1941
I obtained a long HDMI to DVI cable (16′) and tested it. It works great and will allow me to put the fit just under my AP 900GTO mount. Keyboard and mouse work well at the end of a long cable run and via a hub – except if you want to access the BIOS setup. For that you need to plug a keyboard directly into the back of the Fit
JMZ said,
July 26, 2009 @ 2255
I noticed something today that I’d like to pass along. I have two USB 4-port powered hubs attached to my Fit-PC2. I accidentally disconnected the power to the Fit-PC2. While attempting to plug the power back into the Fit-PC2, I noted that I drew a few arcs off of the metal housing. The power bus on the Fit-PC2 has the USB ports powered all of the time. So when the power is disconnected from the Fit-PC2, powered USB hubs can and do provide power to the unit. The case is grounded and the design of the power plug for the Fit-PC2 is such that it is quite easy to drag the + terminal across the – case and draw a nice arc. No harm was done, but it is something to take into consideration.
BS said,
August 11, 2009 @ 1904
“I installed a GMA500 driver from the Fit-PC2 website with the option to default to 800×600×16. Have not had the opportunity to test yet.”
How did this go for you? I would really like to have a headless machine as well. Everything works fine except the display quality on boot up is 640×480×4 as you have mentioned. I tried to reinstall the driver to no avail.
JMZ said,
August 12, 2009 @ 0114
The VNC frame rate was too slow even at the lowest resolutions so, I just wired in a monitor, keyboard, & mouse.
r0y said,
October 1, 2009 @ 1958
Eh, wait a minute.. About that arc thing…
First off, powered USB hubs may not source power to Vbus on upstream ports. If your hub does this, throw it in the garbage. It is violating section 7.2.1 of the USB 2.0 specification.
Second, the only way I can envision a complete circuit from the + of the power supply connector to anywhere through contact with the case is if the – of the power supply is connected to earth ground and the case was also getting earth ground elsewhere (for example, through your monitor). Powered USB hubs usually use a power supply with a 2-prong plug, so there would be no DC path from any of the USB pins to earth ground.
JMZ said,
October 30, 2009 @ 0225
Hey rOy,
I can’t condone any of the design decisions that went into the Fit-PC2. I can only report on what I have discovered. Right or wrong this is what happens.