Smart Home Blog

Two new products from the ICOP “Tiny” stable (66mm x 100mm footprint, 63g weight) have just been launched and are ideal for applications where space is at a premium.

The ICOP-6318 provides a fanless 800MHz CPU with 256/512MB system memory. 4MB on board SPI flash is provided whilst additional storage can be added via IDE Disk on Modules. An optional IDE to Micro SD adaptor can also be supplied.

Its fully featured I/O comprises, a 10/100 LAN port and an enhanced IDE port (UDMA), 4 off USB(2.0) ports, 4 off RS232 ports (one optionally 485), 2 off 16bit GPIO ports and finally a PS/2 keyboard & mouse port.
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Tranquil PC has announced the limited availability of the fanless T7-HSG Atom2 powered Windows Home Server and a Media Center PC (will be released soon). Both devices will be based on the Atom2 (Z330) processor which displays as 4 x CPU history streams in Task Manager and is 64-bit compatible.

The T7-HSG is tagged at £299.00 and comes with 512MB DDR2 memory, 500GB hard drive, 4x USB2.0 ports and Gigabit Ethernet. It seems that with Atom2 we can have noiseless and energy saving media PC but with enough power to playback media content including HD.

[via eHomeUpgrade and We Got Served]

Fiire announced availability of its media client for LinuxMCE – FiireStation 1. It is designed to be installed on the VESA standard mounting on the back of most current LCD or plasma TV. FiireStation is thick, noiseless and power. It features 1.5 GHz processor and 512 MB of ram. High performance graphic subsystem based on Via UniChrome Pro II with a sophisticated hardware accelerated video decoder/renderer allows to display analog and digital video interfaces and resolutions from Standard Definition to 720P and 1080i. Audio support is also nice – up to 7.1 channels via S/PDIF and 2 channels of 192/24 analog audio. The FiireStation 1 supports Alpha Blended LinuxMCE user interface with 3D effects (I suspect that it can be used with Plutohome as well).

The big advantage of FiireStation 1 is its form-factor which allows to hide it (doesn’t matter how it looks like), get completely fanless, ventless and noiseless solution much enough to play full HDTV. The bad things are coming from the good side. Because the FiireStation 1 is gonna be behind TV there is no way to play DVD directly on that media client. Another disadvantage is leak of built-in IR receiver to use ordinary remote control (if somebody doesn’t like the coolest FiireChief).

The price of the FiireStation 1 is not too cheap as we want. It’s about 900 dollars which is more expensive than FiireEngine.

CoolIT Systems showed on CEDIA its latest product – the Home Theater PC (HTPC) Cooler. It’s self-contained system is designed to fit a traditional Media Center PC case in the space reserved for dual 3-inch fans, and can be configured to cool both the PC’s CPU and graphics processor.

The benefit of liquid cooling over traditional fans is obvious: noiseless work and better cooling. So, it’s good opportunity to use the HTPC Cooler.

[via Ubergizmo]