How to Set up a Solar PC Computer: Guide for East Timor
Timor-Leste became the 62nd country we've sent our fanless computers to yesterday, when we shipped out a computing station kit of a 12V dual core Aleutia T2 computer and 12V monitor and all the solar kit to run it. This will be operating in a remote area for a Microfinance institute in Australia so it was essential that a) there's enough solar capacity to run indefinitely and b) that it be compact to keep FedEx shipping costs low. And it had to be easy to set up. Solar isn't absurdly complicated (even I've figured it out) but in remote areas it needs to be done right, otherwise you can blow a fuse in the solar panel (or in the DC plugs for the T2 and monitor).
We had a pair of weatherproof 20 Watt Monocrystalline panels joined by piano hinges with a a 5 meter weatherproof cable that terminates in a unique plastic male clip.
We use a Morningstar charge controller - this lets you charge the battery at the same time as you are using the PC - with 3 areas to connect cables: Solar (connect the panels here), Battery (connect the + and - battery leads here) and Lightbulb (connect whatever you want here - in this case a T2 and monitor).
We have a female plastic clip pre-wired to come out on the left (the solar icon) - these clips are set up so you can only connect the solar panel to the charge controller in the correct way.
And the brown (+) and blue (-) cables coming off the middle (battery icon) are again pre-wired to connect to the battery (for demonstration purposes at the office, just a 7 Amp hour deep cycle leisure battery):
As you can see we also have a pair of DC sockets wired in so you don't have to figure out which part of the cable is + and - and can just plug your Aleutia PC and monitor:
Every solar solution we sell is fully tested in London (we are currently setting up an office unit as a dedicated solar lab) and we're going to start YouTube'ing most of them. That way you know exactly how the solution you bought works.
The solar kit is available from our site: http://www.aleutia.com/products/solar
Fanless Atom D510 Processor in Aleutia D1 and P1 Tomorrow
We've already blogged about the D510MO Pine Trail motherboard with lower power consumption and a well thought out heatsink to keep the processor passively cooled. Unfortunately it does not work with Ubuntu out of the box - you have to flash the BIOS at least for 9.10 - but of course Aleutia does that for you before shipping it as part of our free OEM install of 9.10.
We've finished the stress testing of the board and will be offering it in our D1 and P1 starting tomorrow (soft launch tonight). Both feature much lower power consumption. With the D1 we're switching from the Compucase 8K01 case we (and lots of other UK system builders) relied on before to a new, fanless model from Taiwan that is is 2/3 the size. The 8K01 has an internal brick adapter but relies on a cheap 5cm fan to keep it cool, resulting in noise, and meaning there's just an IEC input not a DC input. Moreover, with two of the units, that noise increased over time which just isn't acceptable. Now it will be fanless and have a 19V DC input.
The P1 is still aimed at sailboats and marine customers and so has a 6-26V DC Input with a 40GB hdd or 40GB Intel X25-V SSD (nothing larger is needed for sea navigation). It will be in a wall mount case with the option of a extra Gb lan port, making it ideal as a server. We've also dropped the price £80 and will now offer Win7 with it as well.
Intel Pine Trail: New Energy Efficient D1 PC with D510MO Now Available
We've already blogged about how great this board is and how much lower the power consumption is but now that we've had a chance to test it. we can confirm that power consumption averages 10 Watts less despite the slightly faster clock speed of the CPU (2 x 1.66GHz versus 2 x 1.6GHz). Best of all it's passively cooled. There's still a fan in the D1 case though we are working on making it completely fanless. Still comes with 4GB of RAM, a DVD-RW drive, and a Samsung F3 hard drive for £299 ex VAT.