new favorite computer - a celeron?
posted: Fri, Jun 16, 2023 |
tagged: | tech | electronics
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a celeron??
Yeah, an Intel Celeron. A N5105 to be precise. It isn't the Zima Board (left), it is the Lattepanda Delta 3 (right). This lean and mean little machine features a m.2 keyed to M to support NVMe, an onboard 64 GB eMMC, 8 GB RAM and Intel UHD Graphics. Oh and it has a gigiabit NIC and more.
I have this running Ubuntu Mate 22.04 LTS and the device really performs well with a full DE. GIMP loads really quickly and I can edit graphics on this unit well. I'm doing my coding work on this system along with my electronics pursuits.
This unit sits alongside my daily driver, and is trying to take over that role. The daily driver? An older Intel Core i7-7700 custom build I threw together a number of years ago. And while I'm not going to try and game on the Lattepanda, I really enjoy working with it. If I was on a tight budget, I'd consider this for a small form factor PC to get things done. I've populated the m.2 slot with a 1 TB Samsung EVO NVMe drive so I have performant disk.
One of the added bonuses of the Lattepanda is it features an ATMEGA32U4 coprocessor and has a healthy dose of GPIO pins for hardware hackability.
So while my main electronics club effort is centered around the Raspberry Pi Pico W flashed with CircuitPython, I'm also working on a little something on the side that right now is featuring the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect which I recently flashed with CircuitPython. I wanted more ADCs, and I got them on this board.
so not using the zima board?
Not yet. Many a YouTube vlogger talk of the praises of the Zima Board. I just picked it up to experiment with, but haven't powered it up just yet. But I am looking forward to building a 3-node cluster which may run K3S or possibly KVM virtualization with a few Lattepanda boards. I can build this up and tear it down regularly and experiment. Given the shortage of Raspberry Pi devices, a full Celeron makes for a great alternative. Plus I have access to a bunch of software by running a standard x86 instruction set.
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