I’m gonna be honest here. I love them so much. I get so much enjoyment out of these videos. Like seriously I I look forward to every upload. It doesn’t matter if it’s scripted highly produced with the help of 16 people or just you going through some stuff on your desk cause why not? I enjoy every video you upload. Thank you for uploading these videos. It’s your fault. I go to RePC at least once a week.
I thoroughly agree with and support this statement in its entirety. I get excited every time CRD uploads … anything. Watched so far back there’s nothing left to re-watch. So my addiction to his content flares up like no other channel when I see him post any video about anything. I don’t even look at video titles. Immediate watch, don’t care what it’s about initially. I know I’ll care about whatever it is, feel intrigued throughout whatever length the video is, and in whatever format it is, by the end of it! CRD is also just a very likable, lovable human.
The "old android compiled very late" thing I think is actually fairly common. My car's infotainment screen has a button that dumps you out to the android settings app, turns out it's just an android tablet running *4.2.2*, linux kernel 3.1.10 compiled in November 2018.
I have a treadmill running Android 2.2, compiled March 11th of 2015... which also happens to have an unsecured port open that allows you to read all the sensors and statistics, detect when someone is using the treadmill, and even override the user inputs, all over the network with no authentication whatsoever. Good job, iFit! Oh, this has also been known about for _years_ and they've never bothered to release an update to patch it, so that's fun.
Yup, SOCs and such can have a a pretty long lifespan, but the software bundled with them is kinda just treated like the hardware (designed once, packaged up together, and shipped), so usually the only usable stack for them is whatever thrown together patched Android/Linux/etc the manufacturer inititally brought up. Very very few SOCs actually have upstream Linux support, it's all hacked onto the source code during development (the situation is getting better at least in the Android world with GKI but it's only a bandaid solution to allow updating a specific kernel version with patches really).
Yep, the whole ARM SoC thing is a mess. Usually relies both on the SoC vendor and board vendor for support, so if one or the other drops support then you’re somewhat screwed. For Linux you have a base kernel/distro layer, then above that whatever drivers the SoC vendor has, then from the board vendor, then ones for your specific use case, so you end up with a relatively precarious build system. Most likely true with Android as well, you pretty much have to build the drivers in with your app being the only “dynamic” component. In hindsight it makes sense why some B2B hardware manufacturers go with Windows, as there’s probably much better backward compatibility around drivers and software and such.
hey so this doesn't really have to do with this video but i wanted to say that i've been loving the little guys videos so if that's what the main channel gets for a while then i'm more then happy about it, i hope you can worry less in the near future and that daria (i hope i spelled that oki) feels better soon too
seeing smart mentioned brought me back. in 2004 my school district was flooded with "smart boards." you connected it to a computer via USB and then aim the classroom projector at it. you'd calibrate it by touching parts of the projected image on the board and then it didn't really work very well as a large touchscreen.
Smart eventually evolved to packaging a short throw projector attached with the smartboard, which used IR touch detection across the surface. It was still terrible. But pretty much all projector+touch solutions are.
Promethean (the company that made the screen shown in the video) also made those panels, and when I was going to school they were replacing the smart boards with the promethean ones. Promethean also had their own software that was basically PowerPoint with some extra related features (like all educational software it had a lot of potential in the weirdest ways possible so barely any teachers actually used it to the fullest extent). Now they’ve replaced (well not replaced they just took out the projector, left the boards up for the most part) them with the screens shown in the video, on massive wheeled bases. So much floor space used for just a little bit more flexibility. Like it’s nice that teachers can reoirient classrooms to their liking but man they’re so huge and the computers inside are so slow so nobody ever uses them.
I had the same boards in my school but they started to be present like in 2014. The touching part was terrible, was falling of calibration constantly and the projector was never configured correctly.
We use them in the school I go to. The teachers have to re-calibrate them at the start of every lesson because the tracking gets messed up all the time.
Basically an oversized resistive touch screen. My primary and high school both had these Smart boards in computer labs. The most hilarious thing is that in high school all the projectors were installed to beam on the whiteboard and not the Smart board, making them completely useless. In one lab, the board was mounted on the opposite wall to the projector.
For stripping cable jackets, I love a pair of those generic cheap bright yellow wire strippers that have the sliding mechanism instead of pre-sized holes. They're not great for actual wire, but they're perfect for cable jackets and the like.
Regarding the device SMART device functionality. So the tablets you pointed out that go on the table in a conference room are usually "dumb" devices working with PoE. They can usually just be used to join a meeting, show room schedule, dial a call, control the camera or inject a source to project. Until recently, you would have the SMART device connected to the TV and then to the terminal to act as the central connection to your network and also to also to control the screen for the conference call. You can also add some pretty neat room specific controls over them with sensors (turn on if someone is in the room, send alerts/tickets to support staff if there's an issue, make the room schedule available if meeting has not been started within the room). Also, most interactive TV's until recently had very little compute on them, they might only have add proprietary whiteboarding solutions. You would use these devices to load up your own environment configuration. The technology is still present today when you need more compute power or need to run more complex camera/audio systems. However, for smaller sized conference rooms, it's mostly getting replaced by Android/Crestron/Microsoft Hub devices integrated systems (in the TV or camera bar).
The OPS modules with video input I've seen, have it so that the software on the module (usually android) can provide whiteboard drawing overlay on top of a plugged in laptop that a teacher carries with them and plugs in. The ones I've seen though, would also have a USB-B connector to connect to the laptop to switch the OPS software between PC-input and whiteboard drawing modes. Often they'll also have some way to capture screenshots of the video input with the whiteboard drawing over the top, whether that's saved to the OPS module storage, a USB or SD card storage device plugged into the module, or via software back to the laptop itself.
Having an ATSC tuner module is more likely for legacy environments cabled with just some 75Ω coax. It was/is a cheap solution to essentially run your own cable TV network across a campus where each sign is a different channel. It can be prohibitively expensive to replace the cabling.
21:04 I completely missed the "experiments" in the title, so I was just along for the ride of miscellaneous digital signage info until I realized it was the intro lol
I am having flashbacks looking at that promethean. A big cause of the image quality issues on the older interactive displays is that the glass digitizer is not bonded to the LCD panel, leaving an air gap, and the digitizer glass is thick af so it can survive having a chair thrown at it across the classroom. Newer ones are bonded and look much better. The displays are sold with their wall mounts included in the box, but that pattern is fairly standard among them. Pretty sure its just because of the weight. The included mounts are about as flush as you can get to keep them as close to the wall as possible, again probably to save them from rough treatment where possible. I can take one off the wall and send photos if you are interested, but honestly it's not very interesting to look at. You can get a multi-touch 24" monitor from Dell for a reasonable price if you want to use that breakout board to film OPS modules at your desk. Pretty sure the touch input will work over the USB connection.
The one benefit to using a -Pi for signage applications is the power requirements are low enough to run them from PoE. Land the device above the ceiling tiles, plug it into the network, and fish power/HDMI down to a shallow-mounted TV.
(somewhat unrelated tangent) I remember SMART, up until I was in high school every classroom had these smart boards that was basically a 4:3 resistive projector screen, and had these fake plastic markers and eraser. I remember in class we were always recalibrating them. it came with a custom whiteboarding software that was actually pretty good. you could extend the page by clicking it. it just made the boards longer, and you could save and retrieve them, and had multiple pages of whiteboards. probably had to be some really jank program but it worked well for it's intention. also at any time you could pull the marker out and write over the screen. and the way it knows about what marker color you used was that each marker tray was color coated and had like little mouse sensors in each compartment. they first started out using regular projectors but eventually they used smart-brand. and ofc the smart projectors are the ultra-short throw projectors so that shadowing was minimal, but it was pretty rough in the beginning where it was just a normal projector sitting next to a laptop. I do also know the smart-branded ones were AWFUL and you could see the DLP effect really well
It was also VERY rare for the schools to actually upgrade the smart boards with modern TV-style whiteboards, and most of the teachers relied and preferred to have a touch board, so the teachers were all buying bulbs on their own hoping the schools didn't replace their whiteboards with a TV with no touch functionality. I've only ever seen a TV-style touch smartboard ONCE my entire time, and I bet they had to pull hens teeth to get that in their classroom. I remember one teacher was able to get their hands on a monitor-style graphics tablet with a screen in it, and another that was able to get a normal graphics tablet.
I'm so tempted to make an OPS cluster blade system with some of those AliExpress breakout boards, imagine 4 low power easily upgradeable/replaceable systems with no need to adjust wiring in a 2U form factor. Even if they only supported a single 2.5" drive and maybe an M.2 drive, there's still plenty they can do.
I'm going to guess the video capture is for passthrough, since the OPS module _is_ the display's video input, there's no way to plug any other video source into it. Maybe you want the TVs in your waiting room to play live TV and also show information about which customer is next and how long, etc. Just a wild thought!
A lot of these things *do* have video passthrough, but it's weird because I haven't seen an OPS display to date that lacked separate video inputs! I'd have to guess they all do *something* with the captured video. With this thing it maybe uses it to ingest video from the camera on the conference TV, but then why the VGA option?
@@CathodeRayDudeGaiden Another wild guess: PC input? Maybe they wanted to be able to allow for a camera (to see the people) and also have a VGA input for screensharing? That way you can show your PowerPoint to the people on the other end of the conference, as well as have it appear on the big screen, with your webcam off in the corner, next to the people on the other end of the call. No idea if that's the goal but it makes sense to me
@@aaronjamt I’d say so. The first-gen Google Meet units did something like this, but with a DisplayLink monitor with built-in USB HDMI capture card (MIMO UM-1080CP-B). It could either be used to screen share to a Meet call or to display stuff locally outside a call (over UVC - not HDMI pass-through).
This video reminded me of when I saw a digital whiteboard system in school. From what I remember, it is i7 with 16GB of RAM, and it was running Windows 8.1 with custom software. And now I think there's a possibility that the actual PC was an OPS module or something. (I've heard that it costs over $10k, so yeah.. students had to be very careful)
The SMART lync module has a table console, exactly for the reason that you need to be close to it to manipulate a "smart board". If used as video conference, you would need some sort of remote control in the board meeting to accept calls, so you don't have to jump out from your chair to accept and hangup calls. If you have to walk up to the screen to accept and reject calls, you won't "look" as professional.
You can pop the pins out of the molex-esque connectors and put the new pins into the old connector. I had to do this with a noisy hdd enclosure and noctua fan
Our school uses Promethean boards, but it's such a shame cause they barely use the actual computer part of them. The Promethean's built in screen sharing app sucks (or at least used to suck), so our school district brought a bunch of external cast boxes for use with them. I've seen the slot in the side, and never really thought that was the whole computer, just like an external module thing that had the wifi card in it (it has two wifi antennas sticking out of the side). One strange thing, and I have no idea if this is courtesy of our school IT department or Promethean themselves, all the boards in both my schools (weird dual enrollment program, not super important) have an android version of DosBox installed. God knows what that's intended for, but I installed windows 3.1 on one of them for fun.
Yes, you can get adjustable cable jacket strippers. There are several flavors, some are best for smaller cables like network cat wire, while others are more for larger power cables like SO cord. Both types use an adjustable depth blade then you spin them around the cable and job done. The larger one can also rotate the blade 90 degrees so you can slit the jacket along the length.
Using that So-DIMM socket for something other than RAM can be a potentially bad idea unless there is something to clearly denote what it is. Though these are not really something that someone would tinker with it could be bad if someone mistakes that for a RAM slot and fries everything. I just hope that they had other copies of any data that would be on that SSD. That is because a mistake this severe could possibly damage all things on that board.
im watching this again 2 because i find these things amazing and i didnt know anything about them! i would love this 2 be in every tv! im looking 4 1 now pal thank you for the amazing vid
Another thing you can do with weird configurations of IBM PC compatibles is typing a short command to run hw-probe, and add them to public Linux hardware database. The tool has already been bundled in Debian Live .isos, but can be installed on almost any Linux system, in 5 different ways. It gives you a nice web page with all the hardware details, and all the diagnostic tool dumps. Someone else may also find it useful later when trying to figure out how something works. There is also an additional ACPI table upload option. I understand that driver writers for Intel hardware also work at Intel, and therefore know how it works before everyone else, but the rest of us can also be scratching our heads about uncommon components and device ids. The only thing that might be unwanted when running hw-probe on the main system is that it uploads disk models and their SMART data (to generate some long ass reports on disk reliability), and someone may deduce how many terabytes of porn you're hoarding. However, there are options to disable checks for specific kinds of hardware, and disks can simply be unplugged for that boot.
...yeah, actually: The little OPS modules *do* look like wee little servers. I could imagined a to-scale server rack a few of those could slot into as a miniature cluster. In fact, even the OPS connector itself would be a good fit for the job, as the rack could then house a built-in KVM switch, and a network switch.
25:59 Harbor freight has self-adjusting wire strippers that will grab on the outside layer without cutting through to the inside wires. They don't always cut all the way around on the first try, but turning the cable 90 degrees will pull the outer shielding off clean.
OPS came in two sizes. OPS which is the smaller size, and OPS-C (the c is for china to my understanding) which are the larger sized devices. OPS started production in 2010. The c models started production in 2015. Some displays that were released later on actually will have a panel. On normal OPS modules you just leave it in place and the entire module is enclosed inside the display. But you can remove the panel and it allows the c type to be installed just exposed on that one side.
Ah! Yeah, OPS-C looks like the term, awesome. Yeah I'd noticed that approach in a couple of proprietary OPS-like systems, and of course it's very common with the newer intel SDM, so it makes sense it's used here too. Thanks!
"I just really really doubt they would use a SATA plug if it wasn't SATA" he said while he plugged the capture card / SATA Controller back into the DIMM slot 😄
You need to shoot the intro for that 75 inch behemoth as if you've been shrunk and you're trying to Google how to reverse your predicament on a 10 inch tablet that's now bigger than you are
I wouldn't worry about the thin wires. An equivalent cross sectional area of 18AWG are more than enough for 8 amps and you know the actual draw will be lower. I was going to say the legendary Dell 2001FP monitor used the exact same spec power adapter but I can't math, it's only 4.5 amps.
various schools i went to used SMART devices similar to the one you mentioned that would connect to a full size pc, or sometimes a dedicated drawing tablet-pc hybrid with an attached stylus and related hardware buttons to change drawing modes for drawing on the display and such
Capture cards said 1080 without a frame rate because at the time, the 1080 standard topped out at 30p and 60i. Computers had pretty much no restrictions on resolution or frame rate, but 1080 is a _television_ standard (specifically part of the ATSC broadcast specification) and thus limited. And to be extra pedantic: 30p is not the same as 60i, but the bandwidth is the same, so a capture device that can handle one should be able to handle the other.
Going to assume you know of Vetco Electronics on the Eastside, they would likely have the proper plug needed for making a better setup, along with bench power supplies for testing things.
While this is somewhat obvious, I recommend connecting the DC side first with that style of connector. If you fumble while connecting it it is possible to make a poor connection with the polarity reversed.
smart would of charged a fairly high price....they are a huge name in schools here in the UK every classroom probably has a smart board (interactive whiteboard that can work kinda like a digital drywipe whiteboard) so hearing they sold a OPS kit that would of made a smart board into a teams calling board makes alot of sense....smartboards themselves were a fave amongst teachers as they could both play YT vids on them or use them to write out things on screen
From what I can tell, these would fit into a 10" rack, which would make for a really cool miniature homelab setup with a bunch of these and the standalone breakout boards you showed early in the video. Get a really beefy 19 volt power supply and run them all off of the 1
right?? i can't stop thinking about this. it's completely practical to fabricate a backplane based system for using these as independent blades in a compact server system, particularly thanks to the NIC connecting through the OPS connector. i'm legitimately thinking of developing an open design for a PCB with say, three slots on it, which can be daisy-chained with up to four additional boards so you can put 12 modules in a ~4U space, all running off a single power source, with NIC/USB/HDMI breakouts beneath each one. maybe a built in ether switch? maybe a built in KVM?? maybe built in remote power control????
@@CathodeRayDudeGaiden I would 100% buy something like that that fit into a standard 19" rack. A few of the more modern ones would make an amazing proxmox cluster I think
I've just learned that what I thought was an ethernet port on my OPS breakout is actually serial - the NIC is *not* connected to the port. sad day! but there's enough USB that you could put a USB NIC chip on the backplane...
@@CathodeRayDudeGaiden yeah it wouldn't be too hard to fit 1 per module, maybe 2 depending on what you're doing with them. Or you could just use the ones on the front of them, which might actually be easier if your switch is in the front of your rack
check out loctite 406 for a super low viscosity, high strength plastic glue that will just wick into cracks - perfect for stuff like getting that fan back together. costs a bit, but i'm still using the tiny bottle i bought 2 years ago and i use it on EVERYTHING!
And now I'm realizing that the hundreds of ClearTouch LCD IFP displays my district just installed (and that the tech department mounted on the stands we also assembled.. RIP our spines) likely have these OPS modules in them. They look exactly as you show here, with the stupidly old version of Android. They're.... annoying. Cool, and more useful than the old Smartboards we had, but annoying. And fucking heavy.
Checked their website - yep, at least some models of their current lineup are still OPS based (OPS is falling a bit out of favor these days) and have i5 10th gens. Take a peek around the sides, should be very easy to spot the module.
so theoretically, you buy one of these computer modules, gut it, buy a SNES, reverse-gut it, smack in the guts and some adapters, and make a cartridge-SNES that you put into your TV to plug SNES cartridges into; and do that for every console that will fit in the casetridge
yeah that tv is a "smartboard" with android and OPS connectors. All the ones in the school I work at has them, they're really pieces of crap but they do the job.
Try just "ops adapter", that gets a few results, though the one I got was specifically: "National standard universal interface OPS boot board with network port for the first time in the entire network"
Oh, cars were "positive-ground" (the body was positive instead of negative) for a really long time. I said 30s but I'm pretty sure it continued up into at least the 60s.
Also yes, that capture device is 30fps. I have a 1080p 30fps capture card, which i found didn't work on linux unfortunately. Also, that phillips chip was released in 2008 or 2006 from my research.
yeah idk how much actual technology is shared between them, just that teams definitely followed s4b to fill the "incredibly awkward and slow chat app that's tied incredibly deeply into exchange in ways nobody wants and that are pretty much detrimental across the board" niche
Com express, PC104 and the related standards are things I'm interested in, but since I have absolutely no knowledge of them at the moment, I have to start from a dead stop, get the gear, figure it all out, so it's something that I'm not likely to do until I stumble on it organically, since I have so much other stuff on my plate. Definitely going to happen eventually though
