First post, by CelGen
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This was found at a used construction supply and demolition salvage center last time I was in Vancouver. They labelled it a "Home Automation Computer" and they said it and a bunch of other stuff was pulled from a house they demolished in West Vancouver. I couldn't find anything else that might be related to it.
Some searching found the case was sold by Arise who specialize in industrial computers. There's no hard drive but the machine has a 3.5" floppy and a ZIP drive.
The SBC computer within is a Teknor Applicom T946. 500mhz Celeron, IDE, Networking, VGA etc.
Some of the pin headers are labelled but the rest are not. The cabling for the front power/HDD led and the reset button were not plugged in so I have no idea where to connect those and I can't find any sort of manual for the SBC. That paddleboard (next to that hilarious CMOS battery hack) was found bouncing around inside the case and looks like you put a Compact Flash card in there. I guess they pulled the card and threw that back in but it means I don't know what OS this used to run, or what the automation software was.
Has an Award BIOS however with the LOGO option. 😀
The rest of the cards in the machine are as follows:
Equinox Megaport 8CS (I have one of these already. It's an 8-port RS-232 board and all the ports are RJ11)
Creative Sound Blaster CT4170 (A fairly typical Vibra chipset sound card with a cable running from the TAD port to the modem)
Aplha Elite V32 (dual VGA video card with a Nvidia Geforce FX5200)
US Robotics 56K modem (Seems to support data, fax and voice which I guess explains the TAD audio cable)
There's also one open PCI slot. No idea what might of been there.
There's two fans in the case and everything is otherwise passively cooled. It's also really quiet. I guess it was installed in a closet somewhere and ran 24/7.
It's an OEM something using parts from a number of vendors. I'm finding absolutely nothing here in regards to it being used in home automation but I've been proven wrong before. By off chance has anyone here ever come across something similar? Does anyone know where I could find the manual for the SBC?
It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to use it again so long as the original OS was something built around DOS or Windows. Before Linux was a thing there were a number of such systems being sold or proposed in the 90's. Remember this?
"It's science. I ain't gotta explain sh*t" 
