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Low power usage Mini-ITX board that works with a 7.2v 3000ma battery?

Hello,

I'm looking for a mini-ITX motherboard that would work with a 7.2v 3000ma battery, that is very conservative on power (for a robot project).

Would one of the "fanless" boards be a good choice, since

How about the mobile boards (e.g. - mini-itx P4-M)?

If someone could recommend a vendor and model, and give me a URL if you have one, that would be appreciated. If you have any opinions on the board, good or bad, please share.

Thanks.

Reply to
Robert Oschler
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I'm in the process of designing an ATX power supply (with some extras) for that exact purpose. You can see some preliminary schematics and PCBs at

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Note that D3 and D6 are connected to the wrong end of the bootstrap capacitors on this version.

Regards, Andras Tantos

Reply to
Andras Tantos

I'd look at

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D. Jay Newman

Reply to
D. Jay Newman

Does it have to be mini-ITX, or can it be smaller? What are your performance requirements (CPU wise)?

Biscuit PCs typically work on only 5V. I did the initial electronics for my robot sub with an Advantech PCM-5820, which is a 300MHz Geode (approx. similar to a 233MHz~266MHz P2-MMX). 1.5A at 5V (no 12V rail required), fanless, same footprint as a 3.5" floppy drive. Available in the same form factor are processors up to 667MHz (fanless) and even much faster (if a fan is OK).

The specific board I used has 2 serial (1 can be RS232/422/485), IrDA, VGA, IDE, CompactFlash slot (bootable), 2 USB (I used these for two lo-res webcams and a USB 802.11 pod), wired Ethernet, floppy port, parallel port, and direct drive for parallel LCDs. My control software was Linux-based. I just finished writing a book about the interface considerations on this board, and basic actuator/sensor applications, actually (available for pre-order from Amazon... ;)

If you need a PCI slot, there are similar boards in the 5.25" biscuit form factor, which have one PCI slot, and similar power requirements.

However, an x86 PC in general is not a good choice if power consumption is important. XScale would be better; again, Advantech sells XScale-based boards in the same 3.5" form factor. Can run ARM-Linux without problems, but they are rather pricey.

If you don't need the performance of XScale, there are a lot of ARM7 platforms that suffice for even very complex robots... look for instance at

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(not that he specifically mentions robots, but the module could be used for these applications).

Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

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