Edit: So one is definitely going to be the Proselytizer Library Stick (OK I need a better name for it, fine). Going to test out some Debian options on there, just need to find a nice way to make it a user friendly portable library/reader, so feel free to mention whatever comes to mind there as well.

But I have more of these little suckers, so thats just one for now.

So I’ve got a few Intel compute sticks sitting on my desk here, and I don’t know what I want to do with them (aside from throw them out, I’d rather find some value in them if I can).

They are STK1AW32SC, which have the atom x5-Z8330 chips, with a whopping 2gb ram, 32gb emmc, and a microsd slot.

A few things I’ve considered:

  • Take a few LCDs and the drivers and make a “household front end”, basically just point to my locally hosted services (mealie for recipes, hass, etc)
  • Same thing but make it a digital picture frame
  • Compute to point to a magic mirror instance
  • Try out how terrible emulation is on them to make a little game console for the kids thats standalone? They already can use the living room one for that, which is a usff box with a lot more power. So probably not.
  • Automatically boots to rick roll to stick in TVs at my BILs house and drive him nuts?

Open to ideas! I’ve got tons of machines here, so I really don’t need them to do anything - which means the silly and borderline stupid (see rick roll note above) are perfectly acceptable ideas.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 days ago

    About all they’re good for is signage and maybe assist tasks with HA. You won’t be able to drive a decent enough display to do normal desktop things for certain. Maybe use them as little seed devices or something.

    • curbstickle@anarchist.nexusOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Nah, they can definitely do a decent display, I’ve had a desktop running a stupidly fat web app (not mine) on those with 1440p at 60hz. And that stupid thing needed windows, which was even worse. Trying to do a second thing with windows + that stupid app? Waste of time, not going to happen, but the main app ran just fine as bloat on top of bloat.

      But light desktop stuff they can do just fine, however that isn’t what I want. A few ideas from the original:

      • Portable library (definitely going to happen, I’m installing now and going to build Bookworm on it)
      • Portable (not mobile) emulation station, may happen, toss some NES and Genesis games on it. May try that out tonight after the library build.
      • (not from the other thread) Portable kid distraction (basically boot to gcompris) - maybe, I’ll have to see how well that works. Should only need opengl 2.1, but I think that chip supports 4.something, so should be good.
      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 days ago

        You must be mistaken. The sticks you mention have max out at 1080p, and with 2GB of mem, you’re not going to be running any desktop for very long. The Atom chips and the memory limitations just don’t make these useful candidates for anything with a DE.