Home < Maseno Mission Cyber Cafe

Overview

The Maseno Mission is located in Maseno, Kenya. They host a hospital, orphan program, a school of nursing and a theological college. In conjunction with these programs, they also hope to offer a Cyber Cafe.

Hardware and Software

The main use of each computer at the Cyber Cafe is for Web browsing and E-mail and most computer users in the world are familiar with Microsoft Windows for doing these tasks. Microsoft Windows is widely supported on lots of different hardware, but it is prone to virus attacks, costs money to license and is not easily customizable, so we had to find something else.

For many reasons, we choose Ubuntu as the operating system. Ubuntu is a popular distribution of Linux (an alternative to Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX). It is updated frequently and has a large user community with good support and documentation. Though it doesn't run as seemlessly on every system, the quality of the distribution is quite good and it is free to customize and re-distribute.

Budget-wise, the goal was to come up with a system that would cost approximately $300 US for the entire system; software and hardware, so by using Ubuntu, we didn't have to buy any software licenses for the machine.

For the hardware, here's what we came up with: The box measures only 7.5" x 7.5" x 2.75". It is built around an Intel D945GCLF2 945GC ATOM330 Mini ITX mainboard. It accepts a 2GB Ram memory chip, which is what is installed.

This motherboard was chosen, because it uses a dual-core Atom processor which is speedy enough for many tasks while it draws little power. It does have a CPU fan and it would be nice to not have a CPU fan. The fanless boards that we looked at were either slower or more expensive.

You'll notice the power into the system comes from an external DC adapter. The tiny power supply that plugs into the board itself is the size of the on-board ATX connector. This was a little more expensive perhaps, but it keeps the system size small and removes the heat given off by a standard ATX power supply from the system box. You could use a standard ATX power supply if you don't care about the extra size and fan.

When you peak inside, you may wonder, "Where is the hard drive? No CD drive?". Answer: It's still in a box at the store where you didn't buy it from :)

For a machine that is used temporarily by different users, there really is no need for these components. Also, by eliminating these parts, you have fewer parts to fail, lower total cost, lower power use, less heat output to deal with.

The addition of a USB cable to the system could make a port available for the user to plugin their own USB flash drive where they can access their personal files.


Now you are wondering, "How does that cute little box boot?" We've taken advantage of Ubuntu's ability to boot and run from a USB flash drive. This small, thin (pink) USB flash memory drive is all the system needs to boot and run. This one is a 4GB drive the size of my pinky tip, but the system requires only a 1GB USB flash drive. This was just an extra we had lying around.

Or, if you want more of a closed-box system, a 1 GB IDE Flash drive can be used and is not much bigger than an IDE connector. These are a little more expensive than the USB flash drives.



It boots a version of the Ubuntu Live CD that is customized according to what the users might want to do. The full set of standard Ubuntu applications are there and we've added things like MP3 and video codecs as well as Adobe Flash, so users should have what they need to do most of their Internet tasks.

In this screen shot, you see the Mini USA site running Flash, the Rhythmbox Music Player playing an MP3 downloaded from Amazon.com and Open Office with a sample MSWord doc. Ubuntu also includes some games like chess.



Since everything runs in RAM. A user cannot corrupt or infect the system and leave it in a bad state for the next user, a logout will re-initialize the users session from the flash drive (which is read-only).

Adobe Flash is a CPU hog, but the system still has headroom. Only 377MB is used with all these apps running.

Cost

Here's a rundown on the cost of the components for the system. Ok, so what about the box itself? At some cyber cafe's, you will see the motherboard and components dangling behind the monitor connected by their cables. That's about the least expensive solution you can get! Given this system consists of a motherboard and that's about it, it may be ok to fasten the motherboard to something non-conductive and be done with it.

But if you are worried about dust, you'll want an enclosure. Since we wanted the minimum desktop footprint, there were no enclosures out there that worked. They were all too big and expensive.

The box pictured here was made by cutting up some pegboard, gluing it together and fastening the motherboard with screws and some nylon spacers. Materials cost about $5. If you make your own, consider the need for heat dissipation. Even though it's small, it does put out some heat.



These are retail prices and are changing all the time, but as you can see we've come very close to our $300 target price.

Other options

This prototype falls into what is being called a "nettop". Nettops usually have a hard drive and CD drive (since it's intended for personal use). They are intended for Internet tasks - not heavy duty processing and graphics. Here are a few other nettop systems that might be good options. They all use a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, but they are the older, single core model. This may or may not matter depending on what you want to do. You can see performance benchmark comparisons here.

June 2009