For the marketeer that has everything – except a CPU fan The mean streets of Birmingham in England's West Midlands are our destination today, with an entry in the bork archive reminding us of the raw power of signage. We at the bork desk often scratch our heads at why Microsoft Windows is used to power something as simple as a digital sign. While Windows itself is not at fault in …
"Far be it from us to wonder exactly what sort of software stack requires such power in order to populate that 84-inch screen"
And of course you'll still occasionally spot animated stuff running at 2fps, cos the software devs have been racing hard to keep up squandering all that hardware horsepower for the past 30 years!
Yup, been there years ago back when a 30MHz CPU was "fast enough" for set-top boxes. We, in the CPU team had discussed roadmap with the STB design team with 2 options for CPU development - a few minor upgrades + move new a new process in the 12 month timescale under consideration (think we were moving to 0.35micron - ie 350nm) - or if we got the go ahead we reconned a redesign could get near 100MHz but we'd need to startt immmediately and it might take nearer 18 than 12 months. We were assured that 60MHz was "all that would be needed" so we only needed the process port. Needless to say 9-12 months later we were told that they urgently needed 100MHz and when questioned the reason was "the GUI people are adding 3-d shadows to menu items and that needs 2x the processing power"
In magic, one hands movements cover the other hands deception....
This I7 has 3 top line GPU cards (sold to management as needed for the 84" screen) and a set of custom FPGA cards installed.. To allow the advert to be tailored with AI to accommodate eye catching details, using a fast fourier transform of attention span index calculation of the acquired target.
In reality.. it is a miner, cranking out DOGE, ETHER or some other substantial and worthwhile digital token......
The power use and impressive cost PROVE to management that this is a better product and allow its services to be sold to advertisers and investors....
Press any key to continue.
I did actually once come across an "embedded" PC (well, rack mounted, in a cupboard) that displayed and halted on that exact error message. It was controlling some digital signage (departure boards) on a railway station back in around 1988. There was a keyboard very precariously balanced ontop of the rack, with its coily cable stretched almost to breaking point, as there was no room in the locked rack for it. Problem was, if the rack door was opened/closed a few times, the keyboard plug could work loose which you wouldn't know until it rebooted.
The PC ran headless, as all the signs were strung on a 422 bus, so no chance of the error message being seen by the public. We had to haul a CRT monitor round with us for diagnostics/maintenance, which of course, also had to be precariously balanced somewhere within reach of the PC and it's 1 metre VGA cable and a power socket. Actually, it wouldn't have been VGA. Maybe CGA, or even Hercules mono graphics or something.
I always wondered why the supplier hadn't sourced a PC that wouldn't halt if no keyboard was detected at boot time.
Seems a long time ago now...... Oh, it was.
Apparently, Commodore, while suffering a lack of decent (or even sane) management decided at the end of the 80s to try and revive the Commodore 64 as a gaming console. This was after Sega and Nintendo had announced (and in the case of Sega, released) 16 bit consoles. The Commodore 64 GS.
To make matters worse, the only method of loading software was Cartridges, which due to differences in case design, were not entirely compatible with the Commodore 64. The console lacked most of the external ports of the C 64, which meant no support for cassette or disk. Also, the number of cartridge games wasn't massive (the above compatibility problems with the C 64 left publishers rather nervous of making the cartridges). It's also worth noting that the likes of Ocean and other software companies were winding down their 8 bit development efforts at the time, so probably didn't want to be saddled with the cost of developing new games, and the cost of manufacturing thousands of cartridges that they thought wouldn't sell.
The lack of a keyboard also meant that any cartridge that needed keyboard access (a lot of games used the keyboard for menu access) would not be usable.
I think, at one point, it was also bundled with the Robocop cartridge (presumably to cash in on the film), which required the user to press "enter" to start, which gives the whole console a nice "couldn't be arsed to make a decent quality gaming system" vibe.
I've gone on at length in the past about how while I feel there are a number of Single Board Computers (such as the PI) that would be ideal for running these screens, especially as it's likely all they are doing is showing a web page, which any SBC can easily handle, while costing a lot less than a full blown PC.
I think the reason the users go for Windows PCs is simple. Management. Specifically the use, maintenance and management of those PCs. A lot of technicians know Windows. Enough that even specialised technicians are relatively cheap. Active Directory, and System Center, while being based on existing multi platform concepts (such as LDAP, MDM and PXE booting) and often being nightmares do make it relatively easy to manage a fleet of devices , whether you have a couple of hundred or a couple of hundred thousand of them. Not knocking SBCs here. I had a project at work where we needed digital signage. I built quite a nice system where we had a couple of Pis just accessing a webpage. The management were interested, until someone mentioned managing the PIs. I asked (on here) for a decent MDM solution for Raspbian. Didn't get a single answer. Just a lot of downvotes. Of course, the project was cancelled, and we got a company in to deploy a load of Windows based digital signs.
Regarding the digital sign in the article, what on earth is it doing that it needs a Core i7? Are the advertising company secretly running bitcoin mining apps on their digital signs? If you have to use an Intel CPU, I would have thought a Core i3 would be fine for the foreseeable future.
You're considering the wrong type of Management.
What you mean to say is : Management decided on Windows PCs, because they can't be arsed to imagine that there's anything else in the Universe that could fit the bill.
When you've got a hammer . . .
The management were interested, until someone mentioned managing the PIs. I asked (on here) for a decent MDM solution for Raspbian. Didn't get a single answer. Just a lot of downvotes.
Shame that. Shouldn't have been too onerous to do (I appreciate you didn't get useful answers at the time) by PXE booting the PIs.
"Of course, the project was cancelled, and we got a company in to deploy a load of Windows based digital signs."
Yes there is ignorance, but that's not the only reason they choose Windows. There's some human nature involved as well.
Hardware is plentiful, and easily approved by management because for an object "that's what it costs" is a verifiable argument. Talent is scarce, and easily rejected by management because for *people* nobody wants to pay near what it costs. Money is also used to measure status, don't you know, can't have some technical person making more than the manager. (The same as you can't have some salesperson making more than the CEO.) The flip side of that is when the talented ones end up doing their own projects for free instead of someone else's projects for peanuts.
That keyboard error is about as old as PCs with POST checks.
It definitely was there in the original IBM BIOS on IBM PS/2 model 80s back in the early '90s, and might have been there in PC/ATs.
I'm not sure about the original 5150. Their BIOS was a really simple thing that did not have an RTC or battery backup for settings.
So i work for one of the companies that supply totems like this (until next week anyway... and funnily enough, based in Birmignham) and the amount of times i've seen the most overpowered machine wedged into them to run a slideshow baffles me.
We had one customer who wanted to run a simple slideshow of jpegs, nothing more. I suggested using a Raspberry Pi, which we've deployed to other places, but was shot down. Instead they got an 8th gen i7 K(!) with 16GB RAM, 256GB nvme SSD and a 1TB HDD. Pretty sure it had a 1060 GPU too. TO RUN A DAMN SLIDESHOW.
The sheer amount of waste in digital signage is staggering. It's caused by marketing departments going for the SHITTEST software known to man, or having a clueless person speccing out the PC based on what they seen to the be the latest and greatest machine. Then they're configured as a desktop machine and they wonder why things go bad.
Here we are, trying to reduce our emissions and 'go green', but you have these advertising boards whoring 10x more power than they need to, just to throw useless ads in peoples faces.
</rant>
As for the error in question, i bet this is an air-conditioned unit so the unit is running so cold that the fan doesn't need to kick in. A cold Birmingham morning + Air-con = a freezing CPU.
Actually, I bet the fan is frozen. When the BIOS displays that message, the fan should be running at full tilt. But since the fan was a cheap dodgy thing, costing less than 25p, it ran until it froze. So, like, maybe a month or so. Then the CPU overheated, rebooted the system, and there it sits.
The check for the CPU fan running seems reasonable. I would assume that all good BIOSs running with air cooled CPUs would do this check. It has nothing to do with Windows (or Intel).
Given the specs of the rig, I assume that the CPU was using a fraction of its computing power and didn't need the fan to cool it.
And the stupid thing is, the error screen tells you how to shut off or modify this check. It's a configuration error by the company that set this up.
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