OnLogic Helix 500: A Linux-Friendly, Fanless + Reliable Edge Computer

[muncrief]

Wow, I'm so glad I bought an Athlon 5370 when I did. I built a complete home theater at the the time for a little over $300. I ran it fanless for awhile but eventually put a tiny fan on it to run it even cooler, and hopefully extend its life. I would never pay $800 for an equivalent, or lesser, system like the base Helix 500. That's just crazy.

[milkylainen]

95+ degrees peak at room temperature. "Reliable".
Space-heater reliable, perhaps.

[t.s.]

Thanks for those two keywords

Definite pain point when considering ARM products for running linux on and not being stay up to date with upstream. Here's hoping Pine64 and ODroid future products can strive for that, I think Pine64 has being doing fairly well at closing in on upstream compatibility with some of their products? Not quite sure about ODroid (at least their ARM products).

Odroid N2+ upstream compatibility is quite good now, as we can use mainstream kernel. Same with majority of RK3399 board like NanoPi NEO4, NanoPi M4, RockPi 4, RockPro64.

[arQon]

> The CPU was consistently pulling around 32~35 Watts at load, as rated by the TDP. The Intel RAPL Linux interface was reporting spikes as much as 98 Watts which obviously was not accurate.

To add more weight to torsionbar28 's comments: yes - given Intel's *staggering* dishonesty re TDP, 98W is unquestionably NOT out of line for actual power draw. It's far more likely that the reported numbers are accurate than that Intel's TDP values are.

Note: TDP *is not* a standard measurement system, despite overwhelming ignorance among even well-informed consumers of what it actually is. The piece that's always left out is "TDP *at a given temperature*" etc, and the TLDR is that you can fabricate almost ANY value for "TDP" that you want, if you want to - and Intel, at a minimum, ALWAYS does exactly that, stretching the truth to impressive extents.

ISTR GN has a really good explanation of it, if you want to learn about both the conceptual model and the actual practices (i.e. "perversion") of it in detail.

[Mez']

If you follow the link, the base spec is a current Celery.

Indeed, they should carrot explain they don't mussle all these up.

[creoflux]

I want to see more of these kinds of things, but more focused on home users and business productivity users. Basically "good enough" fanless computers for those usage cases, people/companies that are not going to game but want to do productivity work and use a browser, etc. Have the appropriate connections / ports for these kinds of users. More like fanless NUCs maybe. Anyway, glad to be seeing more and more of this kind of thing.

I agree with this.

There are a few silent PC manufactures but I think you pay a premium, it is probably because the market is limited. I don't have experience with this model but this offering even has option for Ubuntu:

https://silentpc.com/fanless-pcs/h1-fanless-micro-pc

Recent raspberry pi starts to approach good enough cost / computing. Another option would be a cheap fanless laptop that you mount behind monitor.

[creoflux]

Wow, I'm so glad I bought an Athlon 5370 when I did. I built a complete home theater at the the time for a little over $300. I ran it fanless for awhile but eventually put a tiny fan on it to run it even cooler, and hopefully extend its life. I would never pay $800 for an equivalent, or lesser, system like the base Helix 500. That's just crazy.

For home use it does not make sense.

However for the application OnLogic are targeting it is probably worth the premium. When I work in manufacturing, it was fairly typically to have business computers with a custom images deployed to factory floor without consideration for the environment. In one area the failure rate were really high and the cases would quickly rust because of chemicals used, the fans would also gum up. As I worked in the industry my opinion really shifted and I respected the premium solutions because the off hours support and equipment downtime was terrible. Even though the customers were internal it hurt our departments reputation even in situations where I felt the software was developed well. Lousy hardware choices made the solution less dependable. Even consumer monitors at scale (>100 monitors deployed) were a terrible idea. Even seemingly low failure rates translated to more than expected off hours calls and equipment downtime.

[muncrief]

For home use it does not make sense.

However for the application OnLogic are targeting it is probably worth the premium. When I work in manufacturing, it was fairly typically to have business computers with a custom images deployed to factory floor without consideration for the environment. In one area the failure rate were really high and the cases would quickly rust because of chemicals used, the fans would also gum up. As I worked in the industry my opinion really shifted and I respected the premium solutions because the off hours support and equipment downtime was terrible. Even though the customers were internal it hurt our departments reputation even in situations where I felt the software was developed well. Lousy hardware choices made the solution less dependable. Even consumer monitors at scale (>100 monitors deployed) were a terrible idea. Even seemingly low failure rates translated to more than expected off hours calls and equipment downtime.

I understand creoflux , but have always disagreed on the strategy of paying exorbitant amounts for systems simply to pay more for external support.

While I primarily worked as an embedded systems designer throughout my career, I also took on many other tasks, from developing C++ code for a fault tolerant mainframe at Amdahl, to hardware and software for Cisco, to VP of Engineering at a small internet startup in the early 2000's.

And I saw many fall victim to the "total cost of ownership" ploy. And the bigger the company, the more they wasted on externally supplied systems and support.

But when I was VP of Engineering I planned and built many identical PC systems, created detailed build and maintenance plans and instructions, and used just two in-house technicians for 50+ PCs.

This was far more economical, and gave us far more flexibility and control, than any external vendor could.