# Jetway NC9MGL-525 Dual Core Atom Motherboard



## BlueCoder (Feb 17, 2013)

Just wanted to share my find with everyone.

Highlighted Features:

Dual Core Atom 1.8 Ghz D525 Supports 64bit, NX, and hyperthreading
1 PCI
1 Mini PICE
Dual Gigabit Ethernet - Realtek
External Serial and Parallel
5 Internal comports, COM2 can be 422 or 485
Watchdog Timer

Being Atom it won't support ECC. And VT-x aka hardware visualization is a no go. I'm sure you wouldn't get full gigabit throughput though but I'm sure it's still pretty good.

The Watchdog Timer probably isn't supported yet by Freebsd yet but I'm sure I could write the drivers. And I'm not sure about the quality of the re network drivers. But it does have a pci slot so I can always throw in a dual intel nic pci card in there.

With dual nics it's an obvious firewall box, nameserver, printserver, and network syslog device. And it should have plenty enough horsepower for encrypted networking and a jailed web server.

But what I find interesting is the hardware watchdog, serial and the RS485 ports. For those that don't know: RS485 is a low speed serial bus. You daisy chain devices. Think Appletalk, SCSI, and old coaxial Ethernet.

Very useful for a project I'm planning on doing. I have an old power control console that crt monitors use to sit on. The kind with lighted switches and a master power switch. A ton of empty space inside.  My plan is to replace all the switches with a LCD display panel and soft switches and put an AVR 8 bit embedded chip inside to control the power ports. Not only can I control power from the panel switches but I can also hook up the AVR via RS485 connected by an couple RJ11 ports. I could do the same thing with a few power strips. Call it $20 to mod a power strip. Quite cheap. Or I could add wireless or electrical line transmission for more money. But I would need to control all such devices from a single computer which is where I think this motherboard would be perfect.

What this gets me is a home automation center. I can power cycle or control any device: computer, network switch or lamp. This motherboard has a watchdog timer of it own which means if it gets sluggish or stalls it automatically reboots. This computer could monitor other computers over the network and powercycle them automatically or manually over an ssh connection. It could also likely handle monitoring and recording a few web cams for an extra bonus and not even reach 50 percent capacity.

Per site I not only get a firewall/access box which I would need to install anyways per site but I can also get automation and some security monitoring on the cheap.

And lastly it just occurred to me I could also use this for for realtime voice recognition and command and control.


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## Crest (Feb 17, 2013)

iirc any intel chipset since the ICH7 includes a hardware watchdog.


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## BlueCoder (Feb 18, 2013)

Obviously that's news to me. I guess I assumed it would only be implemented on servers and embedded systems. I'm got excited over nothing. What about AMD chipsets?

It's still a good board for a small low power firewall; I'm estimating 25 watts with a switch power supply.

But now for my project I'm wondering if maybe I should just use a Ras Pi with freebsd. I guess I just like the idea of using the computing power in the firewall since it has to have it anyway rather than another computing device that consumes another 5-10 watts sitting idle once you add a power supply.


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## kpa (Feb 18, 2013)

That kind of atom mbs are good for anything that doesn't need X or any kind of graphical UI. I use two similar but slightly lower end atom boards for my fileserver and firewall. They have enough CPU power for my use that is just sharing my music and video collection using net/netatalk (I have only OS X clients) and a PF firewall/router. The only downside is that they are dog slow when compiling anything larger like FreeBSD world/kernel.


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## BlueCoder (Feb 18, 2013)

I read Intel just released a server Atom with ECC support at the end of 2012 with another refresh this year. Unfortunately I have been unable to find shipping boards using it. The 1200S.

Only board I found was the Supermicro X9SBAA-F. It will probably be a year before you can find one at a reasonable price.


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