All the same size screws, nice, flat surfaces, small and power efficient, multiple mounting points and flexible IO options... why can't we all have nice things?
I cant imagine all the youtubers in another countrys are common friends while in my country some youtubers are hate each other having more subscriber than theirs😅
Very common size / design in digital signage and commercial media applications. Frequently these are based on an Intel industrial NUC motherboard with an internal PSU, I have a couple of those including one that I salvaged from a junk pile completely disassembled... put it back together and it works great.
I’ve noticed you minimize your electrical skills. However, you’ve helped me learn a whole bunch and that’s helped me in both my home lab as well as my career.
Funny. I won Intel Core i5-1135G7 2.4GHz | 256GB M.2 | 8GB RAM for US $95.95 from the same seller. Great computer, the only downside is a realy LOUD fan. I didnt dig deep in to it but it seems to me it blows constantly with no RPM regulation.
@vencdee there is no "better model", it is not standard computer fan and you cant just buy Noctua one and replace it. You will not know another chinese fan is better or not too. So when I buy device I want to power it on and be a happy user and not searching for a dozen new fans in a hope that one of them will be better. And I am pretty sure the problem is not in fan itself but in bad fan speed managment. As I remember, there is no fan speed profiles in BIOS.
@@OstJoker right but another fan at 100% could be silent. if it's a 40mm fan, noctua does make them, but if it's smaller, you're kinda stuck unless you can figure out how to control the fan. Since it's not in the bios, you may consider adding a potentiometer knob inline to control the voltage of the fan that way. it's not pretty, but it works. Good luck.
This is exactly the kind of weird embedded hardware I regularly enjoy tinkering with and discovering the limits of - glad to see I'm not alone in the madness :) Subbed to see what else you get up to!
I wish I could reassemble the PCs I take apart with a clap. That's kind of an awesome use for that little PC. You find the coolest stuff out there. Thanks so much!
As someone who works in digital signage using this exact model amongst many other Senecas, it's cool to see someone use them for more than showing menu boards for gas station pizzas and sandwiches. I prefer the AMD variant of the Element because of its EDID capabilities, but the intels are also decent little boxes too. I wish I knew more about the GPIOs being used on these, but from my understanding in the DS world they can be used with certain screens to power them on/off, or sensors to detect customer presence to display targeted ads. My company hardly uses them (if at all) and seems to rely more on IoT solutions instead.
Customers can have an arbitrary number of IoT GPIO devices that can be anywhere within network range. Imagine if a customer wanted two different GPIO devices and they had to use the pins on that motherboard connector. They would either need a custom cable, or use individual jumper wires going on to the right pins. That sounds like a customer support nightmare.
@@hamjudo now that you mention it. We used to service outdoor menu boards for a popular food chain, and it used a weight sensor to detect vehicles pulling in which hooked up to a little circuit board. We used USB instead of GPIO, but on the circuit board it connected to gpio pins. We only supported the USB cable, a 3rd party vendor supported the rest. Unplug the USB and plug it back in to power cycle, if data wasn't received then we called the vendor to send someone out to repair it.
@@franticpanic4036 Thanks for sharing all of this information. This seems like a pretty interesting gig. I'll keep it in my mind for future employment opps.
Man 4 HDMI ports? Dual NICs? That'd make a helluva battlestation KVM with quad screens for ALL the terminals and dashboards! Talk about being locked in :D
Before pulling the trigger on a BI license, give Frigate a try. I switched over a few months ago and have been pretty happy. It's got a steeper learning curve but development is much more active and the price can't be beat.
I was about to say the same thing so I definitely concur. The development has been super active and they even redesigned the entire WebUI very recently with functionalities that make it a really good competitor compared to alternatives. And the AI object detection works really well with a Coral, and if your CPU has hardware video decoding (like Intel Quick Sync for example) you really don't need super fast hardware.
That would make a great system to use for remote control of your home lab or as a home assistant PC. It might also be fun to control a home brew robot.
You can use GPIO to power the fan and control its speed. (PWM) You need to check if gpio can provide adequate power though. If not, use gpio just for control, and get the power from the weird SATA power port.
@@HardwareHaven It all begins with the question: is there anything to steal uberhaupt? The avarage quick burglar crackhead would not be interested in unbolting a 4090 or lugging a 65 inch OLED. I get the idea people these days highly overrate their stuff, especially with the minimal "we do everything on our iPhone" attitude. Which leaves stealing options to be roughly equal to what we had as students: once 2 crates of beer and veggies from the fridge were stolen, en some half-rotten bicyles from the garden.
I bought x3 of those Seneca PCs but with AMD Ryzen CPUs V1605B for $150, crazy deal. So far I have tested with OPNsense and run with no problem, except i couldn't get the working LTE module.
I've used a whole lot of digital signage PCs. This is a really nice model. Back ten years ago, I was a part of a large format digital signage company (LED billboards), and we started using Logic (now OnLogic), and later switched to BrightSign because the BrightSign players had exposed GPIO ports on the back, which are typically used for syncing multiple displays, whether large billboards or smaller HDTVs. It's really cool stuff. I've actually never seen such a small GPIO header, but that's probably just because of the industry I was in. Cool video! Liked and subscribed.
Ahoy, Great video on a subject I love: Industrial computers. A couple years ago I almost bought a Seneca with an older AMD CPU. Instead I bought an Onyx MedPC (used for Kiosks in hospitals) for $50.00 total. It had a lowly J1900 4-core Baytrail CPU. I installed Batocera and used it as my Retro Gaming system until last month when I got a Pandoras Box type system for half price on Prime Days. Still keeping my MedPC though! Thanks again and cheers, daveyb
It's perfect for a tech company to take to trade shows. Can be configured to simultaneously be a mobile router with VPN, server for file share/database/web, and also product demonstration/digital signage.
I bought the most powerful pc i could with the money at my desposal, and I use it to watch RUclips. So I think it is really cool thaat there are people out there making the most of what they have and finding new ways to use tech. :3 I planned on Playing games on my PC but most of the time it is a Social Media machine.
5:19 For the two different NICs, the I219 is built into the PCH for Intel 11th gen, but it only supports a single port. The I211 is functionally identical but a fully stand-alone NIC + PHY in one.
Probably also because it's (i219-v) a bundled deal when you get the PCH from Intel and will be cheaper than separately purchasing another i210/ i211 and PCH.
@@ckbwtf You're actually REALLY close: the V219 can support vPro (only NICs built into the PCH can), but the -V model in this computer has it disabled. The V219-LM found in the Q and W series PCHs does have vPro though.
The i210/i211 can actually do more at the playground of PTP and GPIO-based timing antics. Those 217/219 LOM's do have some HW timestamping capability for packets (ethernet traffic) but in my practical experience they tend to be inferior to a discrete i210 (of which the i211 is a sibling, stripped of some features that are irrelevant in this context). The LOMs' timestamping tends to be quirky (the driver throws a timeout waiting for a timestamp every now and then), and their residual jitter tends to be worse. There's also the i225 which is even more capable, at least on paper, and has had its childhood maladies sorted out by now hopefully, but is short on the technical documentation front. As far as I'm concerned, long live the i210 :-)
That type of PC + BlueIris is what is currently running 47 camera channels on my home NVR system. (I have microwave network bridge links to my other houses in the area) . No tenant has problems with the CCTV coverage and the fact that it has centralised recording. If anybody has not heard of BlueIris, I would very strongly recommend it as it has an incredible amount of functionality built-in as standard. Its not free, but it is by far not the not most expensive NVR software you could buy.
As for mini PCs in general, they really are fun little boxes. I got my HP mini for something like $75, and it can potentially go as low as 9.1 W (though it's more like 35 W typical, which is a cost of about $75/year assuming it's running 24/7). If you can consolidate all of the little services that you run "because there's room for it" on it, you could find yourself running idle/sleep mode or even outright shutting stuff down when unneeded much more often. I've been consolidating my setup over the past year, so much so that I can now switch most of my machines off when I'm not actively using them for something - which _did_ see a reflection on my power bill...
If small physical size is required, that is a good deal. I created some touchscreen info kiosks at an observatory. Had a hidden PC driving a touchscreen monitor. Only external requirement was power. Used a desktop PC inside a custom cabinet.
On Ali-express, I have seen HDMI display "combiner" or "aggregators" to take 4x HDMI 1080p signals and break them out into 4x quadrants of a 4k screen. This seems useful for a cheap 4k TV that doesn't have 4x picture by picture option to be used for monitoring server hardware OR possibly for surveillance. Although, to be fair, you could likely just use some type of tool designed to snap desktop windows to specific locations... I guess the advantage of the aggregator is... it's cheap ands you can connect separate signals to each quadrant.
I have camera's at my house. I run my DVR at my girl friends house. Neat!! If someone breaks into my house, there is no way to steal the DVR. I also run BlueIris.
for the half size cards we built little extenders to make them bolt nice into the full slot - after a while suppliers started making them so we could just buy them off the shelf. that was a while ago so you'll have to check on your own but they're only like 5 bucks or so.
I219 is built into the chipset, I211 is on the PCIe bus. The chipset does not offer dual Ethernet, hence the need to add one. Adding one is cheaper than adding two just so they're identical chipsets.
You are literally the only other commenter to get this right. Everyone else keeps coming up with other reasons about drivers or compatibility, but you are 100% correct. Thank you.
Nice little thingie. Could be useful as a NDI codec for webcams and monitors. The CPU should handle a few simultaneous feeds. Then just use a PC to do all the recording and editing, and it can be in a different location than the filming setup.
The Dual NIC controller setup with there exact two model is standard for embedded systems, where you want the maximum compatibility with most OS’es and hypervisors.
@@OPM_Viking Not quite correct. The I219 is an integrated NIC, part of the PCH, but the PCH only supports a single port. The I211 is a standalone NIC. Feature-wise it's identical to the 219, but it's fully self-contained.
@@SpencerN.C.Ok. But this is the config the enterprise manufactures stick to. You’ll find this on most Supermicro boards for embedded applications - so you’ll be fine with this combo 😊
@@OPM_Viking Yes, that is mostly correct, most embedded or workstation boards do use this combo of the I219 with a second stand-alone NIC (although sometimes swapping the I211 for a I210), but I've found the I219-LM variant (with vPro) to be the more common one in commercial and industrial enironments (included in C/W/X/Q series PCHs). The system in the video must be using a consumer-grade PCH (B/H/Z series). But also, while lots of workstation and embeded boards do use the built in I219-LM a lot of server boards you'll find a pair of I210's alongside a dedicated IPMI port instead of a vPro-enabled 219. I used to build networks for corporate and industrial clients.
Thanks 👍 Now you mentioned it, I got it wrong. I DO remember now that the 219-V had issues with ESXi 6.x. - and it is the LM I have on the two SuperMicro boards I am using.
Nice video! Yellow wires normally indicates 12V - a safe bet at least The 2 different ethernet interfaces is likely the I219 being integrated into the chipset, and the I211 being an external controller linked via PCIe.
Hi, note that it could easily become a NAS by adding dual 3"1/2 HDD docks stations on USB 3.0 w/ external power supply (12V/3A), 4× USB 3.0 ports = 8× HDD, so up to 192 TB raw capacity. (NB : works like a charm without any speed reduction under Linux w/ ZFS :)
For 3,5" HDD's, try to solder a wire, from the barrol jack pin, to the 12V pin of the Sata Power connector, and maby connect the two ground pins in the middle with an solder tin blob. 👍
One of the great features of Blue Iris is that you can automatically upload alert videos and images to a remote server via SFTP. So even if someone does steal your NAS and the Blue Iris server, you can still have a copy of the video in a remote location.
This thinking is amusing. Steal your NAS? Who does that? Are you in sight of the mossad? Do you have a 1M Van Gogh sketch on the wall? Do you have police that actually cares about surveillance footage for your own beer burglar? Maybe if you are bycatch for a bigger case, but not for some laptop/phone theft, which is highly unatractive anyway thanks to bitlocker, findMy and bottom low second hand prices.
12V can hurt if you have drives connected. Don't under volt your system. It causes the power chips to have to boost the current. That i3-1115 is dope. Lenovo ThinkEdge SE30 is another similar gem to check out.
We need PCs with: 1. Good dust filters on the air intake. 2. Low noise thanks to large air intakes, large slow turning efficient fans and large heatsinks. 3. High quality ball bearings on those slow turning fans. 4. SUPER IMPORTANT: No Tantalum Capacitors and preferably not Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors. Just properly derated ceramic caps and/or film caps. 5. Enterprise grade solid state drives.
Been a PC gamer for 10 years, Gaming PC builder for 5, but this year is the year I got into homelab stuff because of you, Colten! Great content that you crush everytime. Keep it up, my guy
Last time I looked for a micro-PC with 2x Ethernet adaptors there simply wasn't any such device available (not where I live, anyway, and importing from the US can easily double the cost of something like this, so definitely not worth it). Even today, they are super scarce. The closest I have yet come is a "Giada" box with a pre-installed WiFi card in the m.2 slot - I removed that and fitted a 2nd Gbit Ethernet card, and it works, but if I'm going to install it in this configuration I'll have to drill & file a hole in the chassis for it. Which will involve completely stripping the computer (including doing the squeaky clean CPU thing, which I'm not keen on because... well, because I'm tired of that job). So my laziness means I'm still running a full-size 200W PC as my Internet router / firewall, which is... wasteful) 😭😭
Picked up myself a little fanless Seneca system earlier this year on ebay. its 5th gen intel nuc based machine that I got for £20 cheaper than the comparible standard nuc but came with the fully fanless case and an integrated psu as well as all the accessories and such. Threw in a network card and its now my router.
Great Video! However per the usual. Step 1: youtuber finds killer deal on a cool bit of tech. Step 2: youtuber makes video about cool bit of tech Step 3: subscribers rush to ebay to swoop up good deal driving price of cool bit of tech to crazy numbers. Results: Before video: Seneca Element MP was won from auction for $85.00 After video: Seneca ElementMP going for Buy it now price $349.99-$499.99 OR I'm way wrong and said youtuber just got super lucky with the deal they scored. I'm not mad, just bummed. Several projects I can think of using this cool little box for. but not for the now price. Alwell maybe next time😃
As for a server application the *28W power consumption of i3 11 Gen CPU* is the greatest concern as it makes the system running cost 2 - 2.5 times higher that let's say the similar system based on N100 CPU.
Nice small factor pc. Relatively good CPU and the GPIO is extremely useful pro projects. Perfect! 🙂 And the miniscule power consumption (for x86 pc) is just a dream.
personally i have all of my wifi cameras in one subnet and then i use pfsense to block that subnet from reaching out...i can still get to the cameras from the shinobi interface and the live feed from home assistant which is on the interwebz...and if i need to get to recordings, I wireguard in...but my point is i just straight up blocked them from the internet with a simple rule using that subnet without needing vlans since that's kinda excessive for my little house...works nicely....did the same for my roku TVs since they CONSTANTLY phone home
8 GPIO pins - especially for input - could be very useful! Just immediately, I can see putting an HD44780 on 6 of those pins to get a dual-line 40ch line display out. :D
The most fun part was that you are obviously one of these folks who think thermal paste gets old. Like vegetables ... like food. That is crazy;) Explanation: We could manufacture CPU modules and heatsinks with surface tolerances (roughness and flatness) that would make thermal paste unnecessary. The costs would of course be absurd, such as an additional $100 for modules and about twice the price for fine grinding aluminum or copper heatsinks. That's why we use pastes that cost less than a cent to apply and are therefore unbeatable in comparison. The relationships are roughly as follows: copper has a thermal conductivity of approx. 380 W/(m·K), thermal pastes from 0.8 W/(m·K) to over 10 W/(m·K) and air, in comparison, has the grotesquely poor values of 0.024 W/(m·K). You see there are magnitudes between those values and the important thing are those between air and the paste. That is what we use to mitigate surface irregularities. You have also to remember that these irregularities make up only under a percent of the whole surface ... so it is mostly to prevent micro hot-spots and not the overall thermal conductivity. While this is all about the principle behind it, let's come to the myths and lack of knowledge you guys share. The VISCOSITY of the thermal paste is solely there to make it easier to apply. This means that when applied, it can flow easily and quickly into the micro-depressions of the surfaces and fill them completely. It has nothing to do with the thermal conductive capabilities of the filling material, the purpose of the paste itself! Compare it visually with to paint a wall with emulsion paint or plaster the wall ... This also dries and retains the property afterwards: SO TO STAY SMOOTH!:) If the thermal paste has filled out the surface irregularities ... its job is DONE! It doesn't get magically moved away over time or gets "bad" like food. Well, there is one thing of course: IF YOU DESTROY THE BOND BETWEEN HEAT-SINK AND HEAT-SOURCE .... hehehe. Then ... of course!!! ... you have to renew the bond. In your defense: You can never know if the previous owner or the manufacturer applied the thermal paste correctly. But you could also believe in a CIA conspiracy. In any case, you can usually tell if there are problems by looking at the CPU temperatures and comparing them with the specifications: RTFM! This side-note is not meant serious, no offense and no obligation to do it THE CORRECT and PROFESSIONAL WAY or give up the half-knowledge and myths you guys obviously transport and share. At the end it is your time and your money (which is really not worth mentioning in the case of thermal paste as stated above) and your faith in the "wetness of the magic paste". Who cares about specs, material-physics and reality? Computer-Nerds? Naaaah! Thanks for the video and sharing your thoughts and experience with this nice little curiosity:)
Some thing like that may be _designed_ for a single purpose but that they are usually good for more than one thing. One guy had some sort of video conferencing thing based on Chrome and you would think it is only good for one thing. The fact is that it really is a computer with an Intel Processor. It is just more similar to a Chrome box but looks like a router. I forget what they call them but they are not that cheap pricewise.
Lots of ways to use the GPIO, heck it would definitely run Raspbian Desktop so you could fake out a much faster Pi, you can bit bang the GPIO to fake loads of chip interfaces and don't forget the I stands for Input so you could trigger actions from all sorts of external sensors and chances are that board also exposes a 'true' I2C somewhere. Short story, I want one.
The front panle also have a HDD/Storage LED. You should have gone to Ceneca and try to buy the missing parts, or at least check which ones should come and buy them from other sources
Great video and an interesting machine. The device looks like something Cathode Ray Dude would be interested in under his "little guys" series hes been running
to me, it seems like its more of a CCTV box, to monitor many things on several displays. As it uses the onboard gpu rather than having a dedicated one, which is more common for digital signage if im not wrong
Btw the Tiger Lake series is great for power efficiency and CPU features and has become a budget option. i have an 1135-G7 cpu laptop w/ 16GB RAM (soldered) that I got for $110 with no ssd drive (Lenovo model 14ITL05) the 1115 is the cutdown cpu version. I am very interested if they have more of these for $100, but I would really like the better CPU for my uses. The case and form factor is great! Good io
ASRock Jupiter X600 has an AM5 socket and isn't much bigger than that little computer. I've used the ITX tower version DeskMeet X600 as a comically fast NAS, normally I have a 2x10gbit NIC in it but I once had a spare 100gbit NIC in it, got 48gbit transfer speeds.
Thanks for the coverage! Unfortunately, Arrow Electronics discontinued the Seneca line earlier this year (2024) but hopefully there’s still old stock available for some time. Do you know if some other company bought the product family from Arrow?
If you need something tiny, powerfull, latest generation, for NAS, media server, iOT, signage, brand new and powered with either POE or USB PD, etc. Minisforum S100 is your best choice!
@HardwareHaven - I am in a similar situation and starting to set up an NVR with ~10-ish (mostly Reolink) cameras - including their Wired doorbell. I might be getting couple Odyssey Blue (v2) computers that you are using for your router for this purpose as well as the Coral TPUs. Have you compared Blue Iris with Frigate for NVR duties? Is one easier to set up / maintain than the other? In watching few videos (Apalrd(?) - thanks for reference to his channel in previous video), ti appears Frigate has good built-in support for the Coral TPUs (as well as other hardware - like Nvidia GPUs, OpenVINO, etc. for object detection). Not sure how easy or hard it might (relatively) in Blue Iris to setup some of the same functionality. Great video regardless. Keep it up.👍
I haven't spent enough time with either to really provide much feedback. Frigate seems to be missing some functionality I like, such as recording schedules and a timeline viewer. BI has those and also seems to have a ton of other features in an easier to use interface. Getting object detection was a bit odd as I had never used BI or Code Project AI, but once I got it working it seemed to do just about as well as Frigate. Once again, very little experience with both. I might do a video on BI here soon.
@@HardwareHaven I was under the impression that Frigate did allow recording schedules. But you are right, it does not have that functionality built in; the person I saw using schedules with Frigate had created the recording schedules in Home Assistant. And yes, BI is likely a more mature product - I was hoping though to keep the NVR bit more 'lightweight' without needing to install full fledged bloated install of Windows on the Odyssey. Perhaps, it might not be too bad if it uses a lighter / "Tiny" version of Windows as the base OS. Anyway, look forward to video if you decide to move forward with it. I know Rob (The Hook Up) had done a video on BI and even one with setting up AI based detection but that was a while back - so yours might have updated / more current information.
I love small PCs like this Seneca and could see using it to replace my, comparatively, huge HTPC! You tested it against the RPi4 but am wondering how it stacks up against the RPi5?
5:28 I was told that there are ways of setting up the different nics that makes it easier to have 2 different ones for driver support and network configuration. Most of my workstation will have 2 intel that are the same and a different model nic for the other 2
![Twenty One Pilots - The Line (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Audio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XCz7WUotXs8/mqdefault.jpg)
All the same size screws, nice, flat surfaces, small and power efficient, multiple mounting points and flexible IO options... why can't we all have nice things?
Why have any of those things when you can have “AI” in the name?
I cant imagine all the youtubers in another countrys are common friends while in my country some youtubers are hate each other having more subscriber than theirs😅
I would love to see a comparation to raspberry 5 . Maybe you'll help him....
Very common size / design in digital signage and commercial media applications.
Frequently these are based on an Intel industrial NUC motherboard with an internal PSU, I have a couple of those including one that I salvaged from a junk pile completely disassembled... put it back together and it works great.
@@thimirawishvajith3935 INDIA
Hardware Haven isn't a normal tech channel, and I love it!
You're quick on these man haha!
@@HardwareHaven Can't say no to a Hardware Haven video!
So do I!
Agree
Me too!
I’ve noticed you minimize your electrical skills. However, you’ve helped me learn a whole bunch and that’s helped me in both my home lab as well as my career.
I liked the tone and humor in this video a lot. Nicely done. Not overly goofy but hilarious enough
So you were the one who bought that! you and I were bidding against each other lol
the eBay bidder she tells you not to worry about:
Funny. I won Intel Core i5-1135G7 2.4GHz | 256GB M.2 | 8GB RAM for US $95.95 from the same seller. Great computer, the only downside is a realy LOUD fan. I didnt dig deep in to it but it seems to me it blows constantly with no RPM regulation.
@@OstJoker Easy... Replace the fan with better model...
@vencdee there is no "better model", it is not standard computer fan and you cant just buy Noctua one and replace it. You will not know another chinese fan is better or not too. So when I buy device I want to power it on and be a happy user and not searching for a dozen new fans in a hope that one of them will be better. And I am pretty sure the problem is not in fan itself but in bad fan speed managment. As I remember, there is no fan speed profiles in BIOS.
@@OstJoker right but another fan at 100% could be silent. if it's a 40mm fan, noctua does make them, but if it's smaller, you're kinda stuck unless you can figure out how to control the fan. Since it's not in the bios, you may consider adding a potentiometer knob inline to control the voltage of the fan that way. it's not pretty, but it works. Good luck.
If you are using this computer for video surveillance, you can use GPIO to trigger an alarm if something is noticed that requires your attention.
I'm a fan of this idea
Another good use for GPIOs is automatically rebooting misbehaving hardware, with the help of a relay board.
A siren!
@@TayschrennSedai Or something like this ruclips.net/video/EWqrlnNckSk/видео.htmlfeature=shared&t=30
Can it play the Doom OST? Asking for a friend 😅
This is exactly the kind of weird embedded hardware I regularly enjoy tinkering with and discovering the limits of - glad to see I'm not alone in the madness :)
Subbed to see what else you get up to!
Some industrial PCs live in clean rooms (to whatever standard)
They're cleaned before they go IN
But all the other industrial PCs make fun of them for not getting their hands dirty.
@@AlexSwanson-rw7cv 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I wish I could reassemble the PCs I take apart with a clap. That's kind of an awesome use for that little PC. You find the coolest stuff out there. Thanks so much!
As someone who works in digital signage using this exact model amongst many other Senecas, it's cool to see someone use them for more than showing menu boards for gas station pizzas and sandwiches.
I prefer the AMD variant of the Element because of its EDID capabilities, but the intels are also decent little boxes too.
I wish I knew more about the GPIOs being used on these, but from my understanding in the DS world they can be used with certain screens to power them on/off, or sensors to detect customer presence to display targeted ads.
My company hardly uses them (if at all) and seems to rely more on IoT solutions instead.
Customers can have an arbitrary number of IoT GPIO devices that can be anywhere within network range.
Imagine if a customer wanted two different GPIO devices and they had to use the pins on that motherboard connector. They would either need a custom cable, or use individual jumper wires going on to the right pins. That sounds like a customer support nightmare.
@@hamjudo now that you mention it. We used to service outdoor menu boards for a popular food chain, and it used a weight sensor to detect vehicles pulling in which hooked up to a little circuit board.
We used USB instead of GPIO, but on the circuit board it connected to gpio pins.
We only supported the USB cable, a 3rd party vendor supported the rest.
Unplug the USB and plug it back in to power cycle, if data wasn't received then we called the vendor to send someone out to repair it.
@@franticpanic4036 Thanks for sharing all of this information. This seems like a pretty interesting gig. I'll keep it in my mind for future employment opps.
Man 4 HDMI ports? Dual NICs? That'd make a helluva battlestation KVM with quad screens for ALL the terminals and dashboards! Talk about being locked in :D
Right? I don't need 4k h.265 decode on every screen, I just need SHITLOADS OF XTERMS. It'd be nice to find out the max hdmi res of each port, though.
@@myself248 intel will usually do 4k30 on all ports, but it may cause slowdown if theres too much going on
just use containers and tmux, KVM and several moniotors is too overkill if you just want a bunch of isolated terminals
Before pulling the trigger on a BI license, give Frigate a try. I switched over a few months ago and have been pretty happy. It's got a steeper learning curve but development is much more active and the price can't be beat.
I've considered this mainly because it seems to have better Ai integration. CPAI isn't doing the best from what I've seen the last year.
I was about to say the same thing so I definitely concur. The development has been super active and they even redesigned the entire WebUI very recently with functionalities that make it a really good competitor compared to alternatives. And the AI object detection works really well with a Coral, and if your CPU has hardware video decoding (like Intel Quick Sync for example) you really don't need super fast hardware.
I third the Frigate recommendation.
That would make a great system to use for remote control of your home lab or as a home assistant PC. It might also be fun to control a home brew robot.
Home brew robot made me imagine either a coffee making robot or a craft beer brewing robot. Now I want both.
@@HardwareHaven , don't tell Jeff at Craft Computing or he will want one!
@@ewasteredux another great channel
The layout of this board is cool
Agreed
Really great mini pc and it can be used for a lot of proyects!
Also you can use any 2.5´ SATA drive if you want. 2.5´ drives only need 5V.
And the m2 slot was reinforced slot
All these for 100 dollars was amazing 😮
You can use GPIO to power the fan and control its speed. (PWM)
You need to check if gpio can provide adequate power though.
If not, use gpio just for control, and get the power from the weird SATA power port.
2,5 inch drives only need 5 volt, only 3,5 inch drive motors need 12 volts
yes thats what he said
I think that the hiding place for the mini pc isn't hidden anymore.
Well if you break into my house I guess I'm screwed... lol
@@HardwareHaven It all begins with the question: is there anything to steal uberhaupt? The avarage quick burglar crackhead would not be interested in unbolting a 4090 or lugging a 65 inch OLED. I get the idea people these days highly overrate their stuff, especially with the minimal "we do everything on our iPhone" attitude. Which leaves stealing options to be roughly equal to what we had as students: once 2 crates of beer and veggies from the fridge were stolen, en some half-rotten bicyles from the garden.
One of your better videos lately! Great creativity with the 3D printing, multimeter/GPIO, addins. Really enjoyed it.
I bought x3 of those Seneca PCs but with AMD Ryzen CPUs V1605B for $150, crazy deal. So far I have tested with OPNsense and run with no problem, except i couldn't get the working LTE module.
I bought that exact fan for cooling a 9300-8e HBA inside of a Minisforum MS-01 - it is indeed... not quiet. But it does the job pretty well.
I've used a whole lot of digital signage PCs. This is a really nice model. Back ten years ago, I was a part of a large format digital signage company (LED billboards), and we started using Logic (now OnLogic), and later switched to BrightSign because the BrightSign players had exposed GPIO ports on the back, which are typically used for syncing multiple displays, whether large billboards or smaller HDTVs. It's really cool stuff. I've actually never seen such a small GPIO header, but that's probably just because of the industry I was in.
Cool video! Liked and subscribed.
Ahoy, Great video on a subject I love: Industrial computers. A couple years ago I almost bought a Seneca with an older AMD CPU. Instead I bought an Onyx MedPC (used for Kiosks in hospitals) for $50.00 total. It had a lowly J1900 4-core Baytrail CPU. I installed Batocera and used it as my Retro Gaming system until last month when I got a Pandoras Box type system for half price on Prime Days. Still keeping my MedPC though! Thanks again and cheers, daveyb
Banger video man. Appreciate your efforts and curiosity
You keep teasing us with the sd card slot. Bro, this is a travel router dream!
It's perfect for a tech company to take to trade shows. Can be configured to simultaneously be a mobile router with VPN, server for file share/database/web, and also product demonstration/digital signage.
did you cover the friendlyelec cm3588? im just gonna watch all your videos to check
While I LOVE your strategy, I have not haha
I bought the most powerful pc i could with the money at my desposal, and I use it to watch RUclips. So I think it is really cool thaat there are people out there making the most of what they have and finding new ways to use tech. :3 I planned on Playing games on my PC but most of the time it is a Social Media machine.
5:19 For the two different NICs, the I219 is built into the PCH for Intel 11th gen, but it only supports a single port. The I211 is functionally identical but a fully stand-alone NIC + PHY in one.
I was actually guessing one was for vPro OOBM, but this makes more sense
Probably also because it's (i219-v) a bundled deal when you get the PCH from Intel and will be cheaper than separately purchasing another i210/ i211 and PCH.
@@ckbwtf You're actually REALLY close: the V219 can support vPro (only NICs built into the PCH can), but the -V model in this computer has it disabled. The V219-LM found in the Q and W series PCHs does have vPro though.
The i210/i211 can actually do more at the playground of PTP and GPIO-based timing antics. Those 217/219 LOM's do have some HW timestamping capability for packets (ethernet traffic) but in my practical experience they tend to be inferior to a discrete i210 (of which the i211 is a sibling, stripped of some features that are irrelevant in this context). The LOMs' timestamping tends to be quirky (the driver throws a timeout waiting for a timestamp every now and then), and their residual jitter tends to be worse. There's also the i225 which is even more capable, at least on paper, and has had its childhood maladies sorted out by now hopefully, but is short on the technical documentation front. As far as I'm concerned, long live the i210 :-)
@@xrysf03 Actually the most important thing they stripped from the 211 that the 210 has is: Server OS drivers support.
That type of PC + BlueIris is what is currently running 47 camera channels on my home NVR system. (I have microwave network bridge links to my other houses in the area) . No tenant has problems with the CCTV coverage and the fact that it has centralised recording. If anybody has not heard of BlueIris, I would very strongly recommend it as it has an incredible amount of functionality built-in as standard. Its not free, but it is by far not the not most expensive NVR software you could buy.
As for mini PCs in general, they really are fun little boxes. I got my HP mini for something like $75, and it can potentially go as low as 9.1 W (though it's more like 35 W typical, which is a cost of about $75/year assuming it's running 24/7). If you can consolidate all of the little services that you run "because there's room for it" on it, you could find yourself running idle/sleep mode or even outright shutting stuff down when unneeded much more often. I've been consolidating my setup over the past year, so much so that I can now switch most of my machines off when I'm not actively using them for something - which _did_ see a reflection on my power bill...
If small physical size is required, that is a good deal. I created some touchscreen info kiosks at an observatory. Had a hidden PC driving a touchscreen monitor. Only external requirement was power. Used a desktop PC inside a custom cabinet.
I always like finding little gems like this and seeing what I can do with them.
On Ali-express, I have seen HDMI display "combiner" or "aggregators" to take 4x HDMI 1080p signals and break them out into 4x quadrants of a 4k screen.
This seems useful for a cheap 4k TV that doesn't have 4x picture by picture option to be used for monitoring server hardware OR possibly for surveillance. Although, to be fair, you could likely just use some type of tool designed to snap desktop windows to specific locations... I guess the advantage of the aggregator is... it's cheap ands you can connect separate signals to each quadrant.
Could be a nice NVR box with a Google Coral and some dedicated storage.
Maybe as a complete remote setup running Proxmox with pfSense and Frigate.
I just bought the uGreen 15W. Its lists as 69.95, as a prime member it was 48.95. Wicked deal. Thanks.
I have camera's at my house. I run my DVR at my girl friends house. Neat!! If someone breaks into my house, there is no way to steal the DVR. I also run BlueIris.
for the half size cards we built little extenders to make them bolt nice into the full slot - after a while suppliers started making them so we could just buy them off the shelf. that was a while ago so you'll have to check on your own but they're only like 5 bucks or so.
i actually used to build these for work! pretty powerful little things
I219 is built into the chipset, I211 is on the PCIe bus. The chipset does not offer dual Ethernet, hence the need to add one. Adding one is cheaper than adding two just so they're identical chipsets.
You are literally the only other commenter to get this right. Everyone else keeps coming up with other reasons about drivers or compatibility, but you are 100% correct.
Thank you.
You emailed, they replied fairly quickly with correct information. Somehow that surprises me positively. Nice little computer!
12 pin but only 8 as gpio means that 2 of them are ground and 2 are vcc 5v or 3.3v
Exactly what I thought.
You would need a floppy controller however most 3.5" floppy drives only use 5v not 12v.
Nice little thingie. Could be useful as a NDI codec for webcams and monitors. The CPU should handle a few simultaneous feeds.
Then just use a PC to do all the recording and editing, and it can be in a different location than the filming setup.
Oh wow I actually had a summer job with them in college back in the early 00s (looks like they got bought by a larger company since)
2.5" drives don't need 12v, they only require 5v. (both ssds and hdds) hence the usb adapters you can find
The Dual NIC controller setup with there exact two model is standard for embedded systems, where you want the maximum compatibility with most OS’es and hypervisors.
@@OPM_Viking Not quite correct. The I219 is an integrated NIC, part of the PCH, but the PCH only supports a single port.
The I211 is a standalone NIC. Feature-wise it's identical to the 219, but it's fully self-contained.
@@SpencerN.C.Ok. But this is the config the enterprise manufactures stick to. You’ll find this on most Supermicro boards for embedded applications - so you’ll be fine with this combo 😊
@@OPM_Viking Yes, that is mostly correct, most embedded or workstation boards do use this combo of the I219 with a second stand-alone NIC (although sometimes swapping the I211 for a I210), but I've found the I219-LM variant (with vPro) to be the more common one in commercial and industrial enironments (included in C/W/X/Q series PCHs).
The system in the video must be using a consumer-grade PCH (B/H/Z series).
But also, while lots of workstation and embeded boards do use the built in I219-LM a lot of server boards you'll find a pair of I210's alongside a dedicated IPMI port instead of a vPro-enabled 219.
I used to build networks for corporate and industrial clients.
Thanks 👍 Now you mentioned it, I got it wrong. I DO remember now that the 219-V had issues with ESXi 6.x. - and it is the LM I have on the two SuperMicro boards I am using.
Love your videos man, keep up the good work and please keep making videos about mini pcs
Not sure why this video was recommended to me but I'm really glad it was. Good stuff--that mini-PC was a sick find on ebay.
Nice video!
Yellow wires normally indicates 12V - a safe bet at least
The 2 different ethernet interfaces is likely the I219 being integrated into the chipset, and the I211 being an external controller linked via PCIe.
Hi, note that it could easily become a NAS by adding dual 3"1/2 HDD docks stations on USB 3.0 w/ external power supply (12V/3A), 4× USB 3.0 ports = 8× HDD, so up to 192 TB raw capacity. (NB : works like a charm without any speed reduction under Linux w/ ZFS :)
imagine running custom realtime computer vision AI on it and have it control lights or motors or devices through GPIO. This mini PC is sick
Very cool and great video! These are used at my job to run radio station automation software. Very nice little machines.
For 3,5" HDD's, try to solder a wire, from the barrol jack pin, to the 12V pin of the Sata Power connector, and maby connect the two ground pins in the middle with an solder tin blob. 👍
i really enjoy how many videos you publish, and also the great quality! keep up the amazing work
Thanks! I really appreciate it
One of the great features of Blue Iris is that you can automatically upload alert videos and images to a remote server via SFTP. So even if someone does steal your NAS and the Blue Iris server, you can still have a copy of the video in a remote location.
This thinking is amusing. Steal your NAS? Who does that? Are you in sight of the mossad? Do you have a 1M Van Gogh sketch on the wall? Do you have police that actually cares about surveillance footage for your own beer burglar? Maybe if you are bycatch for a bigger case, but not for some laptop/phone theft, which is highly unatractive anyway thanks to bitlocker, findMy and bottom low second hand prices.
You know I think it never hurts to replace the thermal paste when you get a machine like that.
True!
time to break in finally we know where the little $100 minipc is hidden!
12V can hurt if you have drives connected. Don't under volt your system. It causes the power chips to have to boost the current. That i3-1115 is dope. Lenovo ThinkEdge SE30 is another similar gem to check out.
Indeed a cool little PC, thx for the review!
We need PCs with:
1. Good dust filters on the air intake.
2. Low noise thanks to large air intakes, large slow turning efficient fans and large heatsinks.
3. High quality ball bearings on those slow turning fans.
4. SUPER IMPORTANT: No Tantalum Capacitors and preferably not Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors. Just properly derated ceramic caps and/or film caps.
5. Enterprise grade solid state drives.
Been a PC gamer for 10 years, Gaming PC builder for 5, but this year is the year I got into homelab stuff because of you, Colten!
Great content that you crush everytime. Keep it up, my guy
Last time I looked for a micro-PC with 2x Ethernet adaptors there simply wasn't any such device available (not where I live, anyway, and importing from the US can easily double the cost of something like this, so definitely not worth it). Even today, they are super scarce. The closest I have yet come is a "Giada" box with a pre-installed WiFi card in the m.2 slot - I removed that and fitted a 2nd Gbit Ethernet card, and it works, but if I'm going to install it in this configuration I'll have to drill & file a hole in the chassis for it. Which will involve completely stripping the computer (including doing the squeaky clean CPU thing, which I'm not keen on because... well, because I'm tired of that job). So my laziness means I'm still running a full-size 200W PC as my Internet router / firewall, which is... wasteful) 😭😭
Picked up myself a little fanless Seneca system earlier this year on ebay. its 5th gen intel nuc based machine that I got for £20 cheaper than the comparible standard nuc but came with the fully fanless case and an integrated psu as well as all the accessories and such. Threw in a network card and its now my router.
6:59 powertop's auto-tune function
niice :)
How come you use blue Iris over other nvr software such a frigate?
Great Video! However per the usual.
Step 1: youtuber finds killer deal on a cool bit of tech.
Step 2: youtuber makes video about cool bit of tech
Step 3: subscribers rush to ebay to swoop up good deal driving price of cool bit of tech to crazy numbers.
Results:
Before video: Seneca Element MP was won from auction for $85.00
After video: Seneca ElementMP going for Buy it now price $349.99-$499.99
OR
I'm way wrong and said youtuber just got super lucky with the deal they scored.
I'm not mad, just bummed. Several projects I can think of using this cool little box for. but not for the now price.
Alwell maybe next time😃
13:21 :O How do you stream your PC to the TV? I guess you connect the PC to the Seneca via WIFI somehow.
As for a server application the *28W power consumption of i3 11 Gen CPU* is the greatest concern as it makes the system running cost 2 - 2.5 times higher that let's say the similar system based on N100 CPU.
Nice small factor pc. Relatively good CPU and the GPIO is extremely useful pro projects. Perfect! 🙂
And the miniscule power consumption (for x86 pc) is just a dream.
That dual nics with wifi tells me this would be a good candidate for running opnsense as a linux router for my homelab
I like this vid. Interesting to see how you made the most of this item..
that ugreen uno actually is brilliant
personally i have all of my wifi cameras in one subnet and then i use pfsense to block that subnet from reaching out...i can still get to the cameras from the shinobi interface and the live feed from home assistant which is on the interwebz...and if i need to get to recordings, I wireguard in...but my point is i just straight up blocked them from the internet with a simple rule using that subnet without needing vlans since that's kinda excessive for my little house...works nicely....did the same for my roku TVs since they CONSTANTLY phone home
The different NIC is probably an embedded one used for vPro/AMT which would let you power it on/off remotely among other things.
I have tried to win a few of these auctions. Glad you beat me to it.😂
8 GPIO pins - especially for input - could be very useful! Just immediately, I can see putting an HD44780 on 6 of those pins to get a dual-line 40ch line display out. :D
You could ask the Senaca (or people who bought them out) what the target market was for that PC. That may tell you why it has the features it has.
The most fun part was that you are obviously one of these folks who think thermal paste gets old. Like vegetables ... like food.
That is crazy;)
Explanation: We could manufacture CPU modules and heatsinks with surface tolerances (roughness and flatness) that would make thermal paste unnecessary. The costs would of course be absurd, such as an additional $100 for modules and about twice the price for fine grinding aluminum or copper heatsinks. That's why we use pastes that cost less than a cent to apply and are therefore unbeatable in comparison. The relationships are roughly as follows: copper has a thermal conductivity of approx. 380 W/(m·K), thermal pastes from 0.8 W/(m·K) to over 10 W/(m·K) and air, in comparison, has the grotesquely poor values of 0.024 W/(m·K). You see there are magnitudes between those values and the important thing are those between air and the paste. That is what we use to mitigate surface irregularities. You have also to remember that these irregularities make up only under a percent of the whole surface ... so it is mostly to prevent micro hot-spots and not the overall thermal conductivity.
While this is all about the principle behind it, let's come to the myths and lack of knowledge you guys share. The VISCOSITY of the thermal paste is solely there to make it easier to apply. This means that when applied, it can flow easily and quickly into the micro-depressions of the surfaces and fill them completely. It has nothing to do with the thermal conductive capabilities of the filling material, the purpose of the paste itself!
Compare it visually with to paint a wall with emulsion paint or plaster the wall ... This also dries and retains the property afterwards: SO TO STAY SMOOTH!:) If the thermal paste has filled out the surface irregularities ... its job is DONE! It doesn't get magically moved away over time or gets "bad" like food. Well, there is one thing of course: IF YOU DESTROY THE BOND BETWEEN HEAT-SINK AND HEAT-SOURCE .... hehehe. Then ... of course!!! ... you have to renew the bond.
In your defense: You can never know if the previous owner or the manufacturer applied the thermal paste correctly. But you could also believe in a CIA conspiracy. In any case, you can usually tell if there are problems by looking at the CPU temperatures and comparing them with the specifications: RTFM!
This side-note is not meant serious, no offense and no obligation to do it THE CORRECT and PROFESSIONAL WAY or give up the half-knowledge and myths you guys obviously transport and share. At the end it is your time and your money (which is really not worth mentioning in the case of thermal paste as stated above) and your faith in the "wetness of the magic paste". Who cares about specs, material-physics and reality? Computer-Nerds? Naaaah!
Thanks for the video and sharing your thoughts and experience with this nice little curiosity:)
That's one solid little machine!
Some thing like that may be _designed_ for a single purpose but that they are usually good for more than one thing. One guy had some sort of video conferencing thing based on Chrome and you would think it is only good for one thing. The fact is that it really is a computer with an Intel Processor. It is just more similar to a Chrome box but looks like a router. I forget what they call them but they are not that cheap pricewise.
Lots of ways to use the GPIO, heck it would definitely run Raspbian Desktop so you could fake out a much faster Pi, you can bit bang the GPIO to fake loads of chip interfaces and don't forget the I stands for Input so you could trigger actions from all sorts of external sensors and chances are that board also exposes a 'true' I2C somewhere.
Short story, I want one.
The front panle also have a HDD/Storage LED.
You should have gone to Ceneca and try to buy the missing parts, or at least check which ones should come and buy them from other sources
A Colten video means it's finally weekend!
Great video and an interesting machine. The device looks like something Cathode Ray Dude would be interested in under his "little guys" series hes been running
to me, it seems like its more of a CCTV box, to monitor many things on several displays. As it uses the onboard gpu rather than having a dedicated one, which is more common for digital signage if im not wrong
Btw the Tiger Lake series is great for power efficiency and CPU features and has become a budget option.
i have an 1135-G7 cpu laptop w/ 16GB RAM (soldered) that I got for $110 with no ssd drive (Lenovo model 14ITL05)
the 1115 is the cutdown cpu version. I am very interested if they have more of these for $100, but I would really like the better CPU for my uses. The case and form factor is great! Good io
Great as always, Colten!
ASRock Jupiter X600 has an AM5 socket and isn't much bigger than that little computer.
I've used the ITX tower version DeskMeet X600 as a comically fast NAS, normally I have a 2x10gbit NIC in it but I once had a spare 100gbit NIC in it, got 48gbit transfer speeds.
This would be a nice home server, or nav computer for a yacht.
Thanks for the coverage! Unfortunately, Arrow Electronics discontinued the Seneca line earlier this year (2024) but hopefully there’s still old stock available for some time. Do you know if some other company bought the product family from Arrow?
Great Video As Always!!!
If you need something tiny, powerfull, latest generation, for NAS, media server, iOT, signage, brand new and powered with either POE or USB PD, etc. Minisforum S100 is your best choice!
@HardwareHaven - I am in a similar situation and starting to set up an NVR with ~10-ish (mostly Reolink) cameras - including their Wired doorbell. I might be getting couple Odyssey Blue (v2) computers that you are using for your router for this purpose as well as the Coral TPUs.
Have you compared Blue Iris with Frigate for NVR duties? Is one easier to set up / maintain than the other? In watching few videos (Apalrd(?) - thanks for reference to his channel in previous video), ti appears Frigate has good built-in support for the Coral TPUs (as well as other hardware - like Nvidia GPUs, OpenVINO, etc. for object detection). Not sure how easy or hard it might (relatively) in Blue Iris to setup some of the same functionality.
Great video regardless. Keep it up.👍
I haven't spent enough time with either to really provide much feedback. Frigate seems to be missing some functionality I like, such as recording schedules and a timeline viewer. BI has those and also seems to have a ton of other features in an easier to use interface. Getting object detection was a bit odd as I had never used BI or Code Project AI, but once I got it working it seemed to do just about as well as Frigate. Once again, very little experience with both.
I might do a video on BI here soon.
@@HardwareHaven Frigate's new timeline viewer seems pretty nice to me!
Oooh I'll have to check it out
@@HardwareHaven I was under the impression that Frigate did allow recording schedules. But you are right, it does not have that functionality built in; the person I saw using schedules with Frigate had created the recording schedules in Home Assistant.
And yes, BI is likely a more mature product - I was hoping though to keep the NVR bit more 'lightweight' without needing to install full fledged bloated install of Windows on the Odyssey. Perhaps, it might not be too bad if it uses a lighter / "Tiny" version of Windows as the base OS.
Anyway, look forward to video if you decide to move forward with it. I know Rob (The Hook Up) had done a video on BI and even one with setting up AI based detection but that was a while back - so yours might have updated / more current information.
It looks like the side of an old car stereo. That being said, can I put it in place of my car stereo? Do I just fold the little tabs out?
If you deside to upgrade the cpu on the Senica would you make the video of you doing that, also the easy way to access the components?
I love small PCs like this Seneca and could see using it to replace my, comparatively, huge HTPC! You tested it against the RPi4 but am wondering how it stacks up against the RPi5?
5:28 I was told that there are ways of setting up the different nics that makes it easier to have 2 different ones for driver support and network configuration. Most of my workstation will have 2 intel that are the same and a different model nic for the other 2
i need something like this. i have a mini pc for security, i like that gpio though, you could wire it to lights, alarm triggers, motion detectors, etc