Little Guys 8: This one won't fly [EK3 Media Engine] 

Update: An eagle eyed viewer (thanks @SwitchingPower!) noticed something I missed: the component on the backside of the board underneath the CPU is toast. You can see that around 21:20, directly in the middle of the socket on the back. I'd noticed the dirt on it resembled the spatter from a blown semiconductor during disassembly, but I wiped it off and it seemed like it was just the same deposits I saw elsewhere in the thing, and I didn't see a cracked case, so I thought it was just dirty. Sure enough though, I desoldered it - it looks like the back of the case blew out, even stripped the top layer off the PCB. So yeah, this was never gonna work. If this video feels a bit... unenthusiastic? Like I didn't put in as much effort as it deserved? It's because I got about two hours into shooting it and realized that it felt like this thing SHOULD work, and that I was just not skilled enough to figure out what was wrong, so I lost a lot of drive and just tried to salvage something out of it. Turns out it wasn't my fault; wish I'd realized that at the time. Regarding the little six-pin device on the daughterboard plug: I had tried during shooting to get a good look at the label and couldn't make it out, but while looking at the board again today I suddenly found an angle where I could see the lettering. Turns out it says AAPN, which is a MAX6629 (or similar) temperature sensor! That makes a lot of sense! If you see the early version of this video: There's a quip in there about 240V being used in Canada, which is based on something I saw *years* ago about Canadian houses being wired with split-phase specifically so they could bring out 240 to ordinary wall outlets. True or not, it doesn't seem like it's very common, so I removed that line with the youtube editor and it'll take effect sometime in the next 24-48 hours. Yes I pronounced Ontario wrong. Sorry :( I quipped about FCPGA being basically "the" socket for CPUs with pins - that's true as far as most chips go, but what preceded that was plain PGA, without the FC; "flip-chip" referred to the die being upside down on top of the carrier instead of vice versa. Likewise, apparently ZIF came in with the first Pentium sockets - I suspected it was a bit older than I remembered, that's why I hedged on that point. It's actually the 486 I was thinking of, but those weren't any more pleasant to press-fit into a socket than the 370 chips; I remember breaking pins off of one or two trying to get them out, in fact.

The diagonal jumper is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life

My first thought when you said it was rusted was "Tim Hortons? Did someone decide to put a coffee machine right under it and let it slowly get steamed?"

I think I need a “Boy Howdee counter” in the corner of the screen. Makes me smile every time.

I worked at one of the pioneering companies in the digital signage space during the era when this device would have been new. We once got a unit back from a restaurant as "defective" that still smelled of the sanitizing floor cleaner they had mopped into it. Yeah the warranty claim was denied and we let customers know that they should put the unit somewhere where it will not be sloshed with cleaning fluids.

I can't get past that pronunciation of "Ontario."

Those 44-pin mini IDE cables were pretty common in the chunky laptops of that era. They were usually pretty short (for obvious reasons), but longer ones did exist. Also in that era, VIA CPUs were *really* cheap. If performance was of no real concern, there was probably no cheaper option. They showed up in all sorts of low-end devices, especially near the end of the Socket 7 era.

This is so random but I know the Violet that sent this in! She's a good family friend and is a wonderful, kind, smart young woman. Absolutely got surprised by her being the one to send this in.. What a small world! Gravis, you are so lucky to have this connection to her! :D Just wanted to share for anyone reading that her game Ooga really is amazing. I've played its demo and it really is wonderful! If there's anyone who deserves a wish list it's her! Life has tried to kick her down a bit lately but she's still so kind hearted and spirited and that totally shows in the game. Give it a look :)

Fellow Ontarian, here. I’d like to commemorate this Little Guy putting in his time at Tim Hortons. He’s braver than any US Marine or Canadian Mountie.

Those caps look like they've suffered a catastrophic failure and vented. So great call to replace them

sdb4 is the extended partition that's hosting the logical partitions of sdb5-10. You can't mount sdb4 directly. Why the error message when you tried complained about memory, no idea. (I was briefly confused about why the sizes seemed to add up to more than the size of the disk until I recalled how DOS partition tables worked)

The Pentium / Pentium MMX, AMD K5 / K6 were ZIF sockets. 486s were the last (x86) to be non-zif, iirc, and some socket 3 486s were lever style zero force. Now I feel old.

Oh thank god! I'm just about losing my sanity with my two year old today, my partner finally came home and could take over and I open up RU-vid to find a fresh CRD upload. Seriously, you just made my evening. Thank you so much for your videos from a very, very tired mum

MPEG2 is an extension of MPEG1 for actual industrial usage. For one thing, they had initially forgotten that everything in the video world was interlaced, and the codec had to work that way, too. MPEG2 decoder can handle MPEG1 streams which use a subset of its functionality. However, unless you need to play a postage stamp sized video on some pre-MMX Pentium, or deliver 20 second porn clips to dial-up users, you won't encounter MPEG1. Trying to figure out file properties in VLC is pretty useless, as it works with many kinds of ephemeral sources, not just files, and only shows most generic metadata. You need to look at its module graph and/or the complete logs to learn what data it really tries to munch. MediaInfo is a handy tool that is so common people using it forget that such problems exist .

AFAIK digital signage is the more common term for what little guys get used for, narrowcasting is more of a marketing concept you can apply to digital signage. Oh and if you google socket 1, which was used for all 486 variants after the 80486, you see that most of the images are ZIF. So they started using zif quite early, which makes sense as LIF is a pain for cpu's (and zif existed before lif anyway)

i remember these when i worked at timmies way back in the day, they used these for the drive thru's they had them in the menu boxes, i remeber opening the drive thru menu box and that little guy sittting in there, if you lookup the tim hortons dive-thru's from that era you can clearly see the screens, so the rustyness makes sense accounting how many ontairo winters that little guy survived in a metal box

The trip through the innards of that little guy was an entertaining slow-motion train wreck. The mystery of the damage endures. Guess we’ll never know if it was finally done in by fire, flood, lightning, or just a good squirt of cap juice.

My random guess is that the little board with the tiny chip is maybe an EDID rom so that the GPU always "sees" a valid monitor and outputs the right resolution even when the external display doesn't have any EDID or is connected with RGB BNC cables

The reason for the "funky washer" for the hard drive is probably an assembly consideration. Consider that the hard drive has to be added after the main board is mounted, and adding a small washer in that confined space would be fiddly and time consuming, especially if it fell off and had to be fished out of the case. Having an easy to handle arrangement like this could be worth it to simplify assembly during production.

Shout out to the boys over at Funshawe, London is my home town. always a joy tuning in to the little guys eps.

38:30 They went with Via because they were cheaper and lower power consumption. If you didn't need the performance and wanted to save every last possible dime, Via was your choice.

Roku started with boxes like this, though not x86 based. I build a kiosk that played videos in a museum (not advertising, phew) in 2004 with a Roku PhotoBridge media player.

11:28 CONTINUITY ERROR. You have been fined 100 bison dollars

As far as lilo on that thing, it was still the default bootloader on a few distros in 2006, so it's not terribly surprising to see it on there. After all, it's not like you'd be dual-booting the machine, and if the goal is just to boot linux, lilo's much simpler, and harder to screw up.

"This is not unreasonable, but it does suck" I think you nailed it there.

FCPGA just means Flip Chip PGA, where the die faces the cooler. For the longest time the die faced the socket, and it led to some cooling problems when we hit the P3 era. ZIF sockets were also starting to become common in systems by the early Pentium era. Socket 4/5/7 are all ZIF, and even apple started using it by the time the G3 was coming out.

Shout out to the little bug on the table at 33:00

Your idea of a good cleaning disappoints me and my sonic cleaning tub.

The words "they were bought by a company called Cineplex" said so casually without a hint of irony threw me for a loop, if I go past a movie theater 9/10 times its a Cineplex. I had just assumed they were a large multinational that was probably US based since I've never seen them advertise themselves as Canadian. It's like if someone said "bought by a company called McDonalds" or "cooked with a vegetable called an onion".

Cineplex as in Cineplex Odeon? That’s one of the largest movie theatre companies in Canada

An extended partition is used to contain other partitions, to get around the MBR limit of four glorious partitions. Never tried mounting it, but intuition tells me that cannot be done. And now you do too.

Having now worked in two industries putting computers in places they shouldn't be, I am not at all surprised at the rust. There was one location I was providing support for, always wet and occasionally containing some fun chemicals, in which a computer would corrode to death in a matter of 4-6 months on average. I had never seen CPU pads turn black before, and I'd dare say that environment was suited to do it in record time. The closest I came to digital signage was sticking NUCs on the back of TVs in breakrooms and hallways, usually for security camera remote views and employee bulletins. One of those came back once because it would not boot and after examination I determined that a single drop of mouse urine had killed the Intel Optane Memory board in the NVME slot (this was when we were still using Intel branded NUCs) and had rendered the machine unable to boot. Naturally that NUC went into the recycle bin, then my car, then into my homelab with a new SSD.

As a Fanshawe grad of 2007, this video was delightful. 👍

New genre on RU-vid: forgotten tech (mostly PC lately) ASMR. I dig it

Wow! We finally found our first Linux-powered Little Guy! And it was a really early digital signage system! That tiny mainboard is honestly adorable! Even if we didn't get to see it run, I was happy to see it anyway.

Wow a london shout out! Sitting in my living room 5 minutes from Fanshawe and about the same from ek3. Good ole Fanshawe Love the cathode Ray dude her in london on tar eee oh

I love Little Guys! One of my favourite series on RU-vid atm. Keep up the good work Gravis!

Worked in a digital signage outfit for a few years and saw lots of stuff like this. The "media engine" branding was a trend at the time. We largely used AOpen "Media Engine" mini-PCs based on C2D laptop procs and an external power supply, but otherwise basically the same thing.

Re constant adverts in public. They might not have been TVs with animated ads, but there was those advertising boards with the adverts on a roll, that would switch a new one in every 30 seconds so you were distracted by them. East to blend the two together..

I fell asleep to this video earlier today and had a lucid dream where I was hearing the video in my dream while living out wild scenarios of my own making. Thanks, CRD!

This video was certainly not boring/dull at all. Watching your efforts towards troubleshooting and research is fantastic content, and is on par with the subject item itself.

I remember those Via Chips, what i could decipher: 1) Its a Nehemiah Package. The first Row is not readable, the second row: (133x 7.5) or (133x 9.0) followed by 1.25V The instructions to setup the Chip, making this a Via C3 Nehemiah+ 1ghz or 1.2ghz with a maximum CPU TDP of 12-15 Watts. A Pentium III would start at 13 and would go up to 37 Watts. Even a Coppermine Celeron or a Tualatin-256 would use 30Watt+ at higher clocks. But most remarkable is the release Date, which unvails why this CPU is chosen: The Nehemiah+ was released in 2003, Coppermine und Tualatin Production stopped in 2002. So the only new Processors to source for those S370 Boards were the Via C3 Nehemiah+ The Nehemiah Clockspeed gives about halv the Speed in PIII Power so a Nehemiah 1200 would be roughly as fast as a Pentium III 600. Which draws around 17 Watts of power. But there were no alternatives in 2006: Netburst Pentium/Celeron were drawing much more power, same goes with the Athlon (64) and Duron line. Intel Atom started in 2008, so there were literally no other low Power Processors cheap between 2003 and 2008 except the Via C3.

Hi, yes there was an interesting part in this video, it's the one from 00:00 to 49:04. Thanks for trying to repair this little guy, and for showing off this creepy jumper connection.

Honestly, little guys might just be the best series you've done. I love your take on the stories of these random devices.

these videos are never boring, always delightful, whether the little guy shows up for work or not

The way you pronounce "Ontario" really brings a smile to my face, lol.

I love these great long videos about products I would never think about and learning things I only just understand. Turns out having someone who just likes talking about stuff they're passionate about is a real cool vibe.

Aw man, I was really hoping for some Tim Hortons files on there. I even convinced myself the rust was from it being mounted above a coffee brewer or something.

I love your videos so much. I love this series so much. You're a gem.

RIP little guy, glad you could look at the hdd and get some of its story tho.

Nice vid! Cool that the hard drive files were recoverable ^_^

Tip: LILO boot to shell. Instead of "linux runlevel 1", "linux init=/bin/sh" should get you in. Then remount the root filesystem read/write, and reset/clear the root password.

The Via C3 did make a lot of sense from a TCO perspective.. while less performant than its Pentium3 counterparts at the same speed, they came with a TDP of around 6 Watts, compared to 30-35 Watts for the Intel chips.

I feel like the lil guys line of videos doesnt need one big epic thing in them its just neat looking at all the stuff that was avaivlable over all these years :3

I absolutely love this series

I absolutely love this series.😚 I would not be surprised if Diebold Canada was involved in this project as they had a presence in London at the time in the tech industry in Ontario.

ZIF sockets for processors started becoming common on the 486 and became the norm by the original Pentium. I may have seen some early Pentium (Socket 4) boards that didn't use a ZIF socket but I can't remember a single Socket 5/7 Pentium that wasn't.

41:05 You missed an opportunity to add the internet jingle. The internet jingle is the sole reason I'm watching this channel.

Was just thinking about not having seen a Little Guy in a while, and here we are!

really enjoy these :D

It's never boring, dude. I need to find out about all the stuff I didn't know I needed to find out about.

the Amiga 600 and 1200 are suited with 44pin headers on the mobo for 2,5" drives via a ribbon cable. back in the days we often modded those from 2,5" formfactor to 3,5" by splitting the cable or via an adapter to fit a bigger and mostly cheaper 3,5" drive, cuz 2,5" drives where pretty expensive back then.

Old hardware brings back dim memories. AST multifunction boards (RAM expansion, Parallel and Serial ports) Hercules mono graphics boards, actual separate RAM chips, Hard drives on an expansion card and separately socketed Floating Point chips. My first PC compatible was a no-name 286. Overlocking a Celeron 300A to 450 MgHz. Those were the daze.

I am quite familiar with that power supply from equipment I work with and a very common failure from them, they will feed AC voltage through to the output. If caught early (or lucky) doesn't tend to do any damage, just a failed system, but every so often when one of those power supplies fail, they can send a pretty high spike of AC current to whatever they have been powering. When I see a fluctuating DC reading, also check to see if it is reading an AC current.

18:18 Now that you showed us the cursed jumper config you totally have to try it and show us Reduced Power Spinup Mode! Gaiden! Gaiden!

22:08 - laughing so hard I am choking on my Chipotle. Thank you for this.

i honestly love that you explain electronics and engineering concepts even if you think most of your viewerbase already knows it. i find myself learning something new in every video and names for things i only tangentially knew about by taking apart shit out of boredom.

thank you for your professionalism despite the disappointing computer.

My brother in christ, I would listen to you narrate the phone book. This was not boring at all! You are amazing Gravis, thank you for these videos.

the wow stick can actually be quite easily used as a ratchet since it has metal gears, I have put one through hell and back and only after drilling actual long ass wood self tappers into beams (20+ times) did I manage to break it. you just hold down the button and go ham on it. 100% would buy again

First, the "God's most unloved jumper configuration", and then my instinctive reply of WhoopWhoop to the ICP reference, Great episode!

You're absolutely right in erring towards uploading a video. I enjoyed this video.

43:06 MBR partition table is limited to four partitions; the type "Extended" is just a hack to add more partitions.

yayy another fun little guys video, thanks for exploring that toasted slideshow machine

Not boring at all. We love you, Gravis.

I do wanna say, even if the video is "boring" honestly I just enjoy being here for the ride. I love both styles of vids, your more "I'm presenting a topic" and "I'm at the workbench", both are just good to vibe to and maybe learn some things along the way Like cursed pin jumper configurations

Even if the 'Little guys' don't work ultimately, you still make the journey interesting. 👍 Thanks Gravis

The ZIF socket was actually invented way back in the 386(!!!) era, though only commonly used starting at the end of the 486 era with Socket 3.

My Sweet Summer Child, you don't know what an Extended Partition is? I envy you It is a container for extra partitions, just take a look at the start and end clusters.

"Little is a philosophy not a physical fact." Excellent :3

The hue of that Dell laptop is astoundingly beautiful LOL

For reference if you were to get the same size coffee (now a medium) and a honey cruller today it'd be $3.39 + tax. Mind you the crullers now are different to the crullers then since nothing has been baked fresh at Tim Hortons since 2010. Now everything comes in from a factory frozen and is finished at the store.

really enjoy the Little Guys series good, bad, or ugly there's always something to learn.

that diagonal jumper _can't_ be real

I'm curious if you'd be able to boot the hard drive image in a VM / emulator.

Thank you; I honestly had never encountered that pronunciation of Ont-air-io. On-tar-io; makes complete sense that someone could find that sound but I had never thought of it. 🏴󠁣󠁡󠁯󠁮󠁿

That jumper is gonna give me nightmares.

Absolutely not boring. I love Little Guys.

Regarding the electric screwdriver. We use a Panasonic EY7410 cordless screwdriver at work. I think that it fits perfectly in what you are looking for, between a small electric screwdriversand a drill. It might be a bit pricier because it's mainly intended for industrial but they have really solid torque with 2speed gearbox with adjustable clutch. I'm starting to sound like a salesman :D Anyway really interesting little guy once again. We used to say that computers with a VIA CPU is ''Viallinen'' and that can be interpred as broken or a thing with a via, and in this case both :D They weren't really good desktop chips compared to P3 or a Celeron. They are probably good enough for an embedded system like this.

Wasn't having a great day today, seeing the Packard bell logo redone to represent ICP made it substantially better. ❤

6:07 Cineplex is the movie theatre monopoly here. I bet EK3 was a contrivance to be bought by one of the big corps.

Mcdonald's Canada sells small coffees for a dollar right now 😂 Also, there's a very rich history of manufacturing and design of computer systems in Ottawa and other areas of Ontario, that has largely died out and is starting to be forgotten..

God. The amount of digikey bags I save because "I'm going to use that for something" but end up just storing them all in a bigger digikey component bag....

Can you imagine being the guy watching this being a 2010 Fanshawe College Alumni?

@43:00 sdb4 didn't mount because that partition is an MBR extended partition than includes all the partitions after it. Take note of the size of sdb4, which roughly is the sum of the following partitions. This exists because MBR data structure had a limit of partitions of 4 originally, but it was later extended by producing a fake, unmountable partition containing the extra partition's metadata. No ideas on the weird linux mount error though

Yo Dude, appreciate the quality content, as always. Thanks for keeping your nose to the grindstone.

The little board in the add on connector... based on the pinout you showed, that might connect to the digital IO pins? could that be a temperature sensor? Back then, these weren't as common on board as they are now...?

TCO often refers to "Temperature Compensated Oscillator" but I think that's usually TXCO "Temp Comp Crystal Oscillator"

Thanks Steve.

Not surprised those caps gave up the ghost and took other power regulation components with them. That board was manufactured right in the middle of the capacitor plague era. I seen dozens of mainboards from the later Pentium 2 boards all the way through the Core 2 days die from bad caps that often times took power regulation components with them. So there was no way that board was going to work even with the caps replaced.