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I got my hands on a Juli-C400R board. (Specifications) (foto)

This is a nice little board that can run off a simple  +12 & +5 Volt power supply.   It can run fan-less (later more on that) and should be fast enough to run MPD + a stream output and some other software.

So below a quick description about setting it up as MPD + other stuff server:

Goal of the box

The main purpose of the box is to run MPD, allow me to stream (via ssh forward) music from university.

For the rest I have the following tasks planned:

• Simple web interface for MPD.
• IR Remote control.
• IR Control off my stereo. (turn off/on etc)
• Turn light on off (it has some General Purpose IO (GPIO) I might be able to abuse for this)

The hardware

A quick overview of the system:

• CPU:  Celeron 400Mhz
• Memory: 512 MB
• Harddisk:  1GB CF Card. (contains only /boot + grub)
• USB: 2x usb 1.0  2x usb 2.0
• Network: 2x 100mbit
• The root system is placed on NFS, mostly because I want to keep the box as quiet as possible and I did not want to spend lot of money on a large CF card.
• OS: Debian sQueeze
• Soundcard: (temporary) Behringer  UCA202

First thing I did was ditch the power supply it came with, this was a switched 100W  ATX supply making a horrible beeping noise (so this was a no go). Remove the 6000 RPM fan blower.  To make long story short, I removed everything beside the board.

The board can be powered using a normal molex connector, so after digging up an old external CD casing I had a nice fanless, noisless power supply.

edit: This one broke after 2 weeks, so now it is powered for the time being by an atx PSU..  Needs fixing.

So after setting up the Debian on the NFS root and moving /boot and grub to the CF card.

Doing some test shows that the CPU stays a nice 30 degrees, the chipset is another story (it almost feels like an early atom system), this one goes up to 60 degrees.

I added a nice large 12x12cm fan that keeps the chipset a nice 25 degrees. It does however make more noise then the 13 dB they mention (it kinda runs unstable) But doable.

At the moment everything runs fine. Need to add a case later.

Software

• OS: Debian squeeze
• kernel: 2.6.32
• mpd: 0.15.9
• lighttpd

Problem:

Update-grub cannot wrap his head around root being on nfs. So it cannot correctly install the package. So every time I install something, it tries to finish configuring grup-pc and I get a fail, still need to fix this. (Fixed this by modifying the postinst script).

Case

I am not really one to care for casings and stuff like that. So it sits kinda bare next to my stereo at the moment:

(foto)

Monitor

Thinking about getting a samsung U70 as a small status monitor. These are to expensive for now. So I might just use a 4×16 character display for the time being.

Infrared

(foto)

Light control

The general IO proved to be more tricky then I thought, to read/write to it I needed to send the bios interrupts that would then read/set the value. So this required writing a kernel driver. To much work for the time being.

I solved it by letting a small atmel AVR control a few relays, a display and some other hardware and be controlled by the machine via a serial interface.  (The atmel acts as temperature sensor, 4 channel light control, clock, 64 item timer (programmable time+weekday))

I will add a lot of stuff later.