It's actually suprising that people think they're not "normal" computers. I provisioned a few of them and they're little beasts. Most in use are I7, 16-32gb ram, Dual NVME. The Skulltrail nucs are extremely powerfull and on the lower end the atom based units are solid too. I also ran a nuc in my car for a while, mostly stumbling radio / wifi spectrum as I drove around, but it was perfect with its relatively low power requirements.

This is Brian -- I wrote the article. Super cool use for a NUC! I'm going to follow the links and check out what you did some more.

But is it real, 6-core 3GHz+ i7? Or is it this mobile crap Intel has been pushing lately?

What is it running in your car?

I have a custom piece of software that powers a display in the car, syncs and plays my music, and logs GPS. It also can manage audio and video recording and is intended to handle some future features[1] I have planned, so I wanted to over-spec rather than under-spec.

[1] It's the same software that runs my home automation system, so an inevitable feature is my car and home units interacting, I wrote half of a piece of navigation software before I stopped, and the entire interface is intended for voice control so I need to throw that in there at some point too. I intend to work on a CAN interface to connect to the car, but I've had a few roadblocks to getting started on that project.

Have you documented any of this or written on your home automation endeavors? I'm looking to "Tony Stark" my house up a bit (i.e. voice control, some touch enabled panes in the kitchen/office) but want a bit more control than something purpose built, off-the-shelf while also being a bit more insulated than Alexa or Echo. The NUC has been on my radar as a device that I may go with as the brains of the operation, and I'm just curious to read what design and implementation patterns others have taken.

I get asked to do more of a "write-up" a lot, but it's hard to figure out how to format or frame it. I have a fairly large pile of opinions about how one should go about doing this, but it's hard to concisely organize my thoughts on it into a coherent write-up.

The code is here: https://github.com/ocdtrekkie/HAController but I don't know if I'd really recommend others use it. The main perk to me is that it's designed around what I want and use (I tried a lot of alternative options before rolling my own), so unless you also really like Visual Basic code and have a brain ordered bizarrely similarly to mine, you may want to start somewhere else.

I'd love to chat about what I've learned along the way or what ideas you have (because I might borrow them!), if you want to chat elsewhere hit me up at inbox (at) jacobweisz (dot) com

What's the power draw like?

I once left the reading lights on; car was supposed to have turned it off when the doors locked, but somehow didn't. I found myself calling AAA in the morning to get a jumpstart.

Also curious, does GP have some way to shutdown gracefully when the car turns off, and reboot fast when it turns on? You could potentially handle this with a laptop and some battery-settings but not aware of an external battery solution for the NUC.

I currently use a laptop power adapter for the cigarette lighter, which is only on when the car is. The NUC's BIOS is set to turn it on when the power comes on, but I power it off manually before turning off the car. This is not ideal.

There is an external battery solution for the NUC, and I bought it! http://www.mini-box.com/NUC-UPS But I haven't switched to it yet. The big upside is that it will gracefully shutdown my NUC after I power off the car. But if I use the cigarette lighter for power, it will lose the ability to turn itself on when power is present, because the batteries are always present. NUC UPS supports using a different power connector which can turn on the PC on ignition, but I haven't had it installed in my car as of yet as that's a little bit more work, and I'd need some help from someone who knows more about the car's electrical system.

As far as fast power-on, it's a pretty high end i5 NUC with an NVMe SSD. It boots pretty darn fast, and my software takes less than a second to load once the OS is up. The slowest part of boot is that I don't want my location history easily steal-able, so it's encrypted, and I have to key in the code to unlock the machine. (I'm looking at a security key or similar to replace this step in the future.)

As a note, I'm more or less specced out what's involved in a solar power setup on the roof of my car to independently power my computer all/most of the time when the car is off and otherwise charge a secondary battery off the car's inverter, but there's no reasonable or sane reason to do it. ...But I thought about it.

Thanks. Curious, where do you stash the NUC in your car? I imagine it's insulated and not exposed -- otherwise a hot day or a very cold day might kill it.

You don't want insulated and hidden, you want perforated and airy (while still being discreet).

The NUC-like hardware that goes into tanks have chassis consisting of a mesh cage to allow maximum airflow since the cabin temperature alone can exceed 100F.

Actually, it's pretty important for the NUC to get good airflow so it doesn't overheat; insulating it would be a bad idea! I haven't had any temperature-based issues with it, in part because most of the time the car is running I am in it, so I keep the temperature at temperatures I am comfortable in. And the NUC's temperature range is pretty wide as well, which is good, because weather here ranges from -10 F to 110 F.

Probably the only real concern I'm afraid of is condensation when heating up the car on a cold day, but it hasn't been an issue so far, perhaps because the computer is not near a window.

It should be pretty easy to hook up a microcontroller (think Arduino nano) to "press" the power button when the power from the lighter comes on.

Since I'm not a hardware guy, I try to avoid assembling my own gadgetry as much as possible on this project. I use consumer grade home automation modules, standard computer parts where possible. (Everything in my car is largely interconnected with USB.) And generally, experimenting with the NUC UPS aside, I try to avoid parts that may be hard to replace. Which is to say, I don't have time to build, test, and fix a random Arduino gadget. ;)

I've been planning to make some custom-cut USB cables and a 3D printed part just to make the setup of my display a lot cleaner... and I haven't done either of those and it's been a year or so since I planned to.

Nice machines, fast enough, VESA mount to the back of a monitor, and easy to upgrade. They've basically replaced Mac minis and iMacs in our labs. Have not had one bit of trouble with any of them.

If they had OOBM of some kind I would ditch all my hardware at home and replace it with them.

Why do you have one in your car?

Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17822015

they've kind of a pain in the butt for us... For example, it would be nice for them to have remote admin, more than one NIC, not freak out when the HDMI is not plugged in, etc.

I use my NUC without HDMI plugged in, and I assume Chick-fil-A does as well. ;)

They do actually make a dual NIC NUC, but it's a little overkill for most uses: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Machine-NUC8i7HVK-Radeon-Graphi...

On the other hand, my NUC has plenty of USB 3 ports, and an Ethernet dongle will run you about $7.

Hmm we did buy NUCs about two years ago so I suppose it's possible things have improved