Set up the all-in-one PC for the Centroid Acorn system

The new-to-me "all-in-one" PC arrived yesterday just before noon. Was supposed to arrive the day before but DPD screwed up. Anyway, it seems to be a decent looking thing. I bought this through a shop that sells refurbished gaming machines for 400 beer tokens. I managed to offset much of that by selling some Tektronix scope probes I've had in the garage for the best part of 15 years to a guy on the ME forum. 

It's just been jammed in the (original) box, although to be fair it was also ram packed full of bubble wrap. This monitor stand isn't shown in the brochure - it may have been an option.

It also came with a (German) keyboard and wired mouse. Neither had been used.

It has an external 19V / 120W PSU, with UK and German (Schuko) plugs. The quick start guide etc are in German, which seems to confirm its original country of sale. There's a DVD containing (old) drivers and a user manual in English, among other languages.

Worked straight out of the box, although it had to go through the usual setup rigmarole:

This one is an "MSI Pro 24 6M" ie 

• 24" touch screen PC 
• i3-6100 processor. This gives a single thread benchmark score of 2108, which exceeds the requirement of >1500.
• 128GB SSD and 4GB of memory. 
• Windows 10 Pro
• Loads of USB3, one Ethernet port, wifi, BT, DVD drive, speakers, mike etc.

That should meet the minimum performance recommendations given by Centroid.

No visible marks or even signs of use. Seems to have had an easy life.

It had been reset, so it was a "clean" installation. First thing to do before installing the Centroid software is to make sure W10 is fully up to date. Problem here - this machine seems to date from early 2017, so the version of W10 (1511) can be a problem to update to a supported version. Sure enough, it got stuck at 99% and refused to budge.

Of course, there is all sorts of noise out there trying and failing to identify and fix the issue. It seems that trying to get W10 to upgrade itself all the way from 1511 to today's version is simply a bit of an ambitious goal. I can't be fucked to rub my stomach, spin round several times and keep reinstalling, so powered it down and called it a night.

Luckily, I'd obtained a used activation key last week before I'd bought the MSI thing. It’s not a well publicised fact but it’s perfectly legal to sell used copies of Windows and the going price is only a few quid - I paid £3.49 from an ebay shop here in the UK. Obviously Microsoft and ebay aren't going to tolerate illegal activity, so you can be pretty certain it's above board, even if Microsoft almost certainly don't like it.

You download the bootable W10 Pro ISO image from Microsoft onto a USB flash drive (UFD) and off you go. Of course, all you have bought is a valid activation code from a dead PC - they are clearly harvested from PCs that are getting scrapped.. Obviously it’s helpful to have the various drivers, so I also downloaded the latest drivers from the MSI website.

I was using RealVNC last night to watch for any signs of progress from the comfort of the lounge. It’s a lot easier to use than the old VNC of 10+ years ago. There are various forms of VNC around, after Oracle etc in Cambridge abandoned the product. RealVNC seems to have the original team as their directors. As ever, you install the Real VNC Connect server as a Windows service so that it runs at startup, then you can run the RealVNC Viewer from any other device. There are also apps for your iPhone or Android device which seem to work well. On a laptop, you almost feel you are actually on the remote device. Pretty neat and certainly slicker than I recall from some years back. Being a service started at startup, you can even reboot remotely and connect up to it again once it’s booted.

So this morning I went out there and set about a complete reinstall using a modern copy of W10 Pro.

Of course, at this point I fell for the old chestnut again – you know the one - go into BIOS (F11 on this machine) and set the UFD as boot device #1. Mistake!! – when the install program restarts during installation, it re-reboots from the UFD and will loop round and restart the whole process. If you are not careful, you can end up with several partial installations. The correct method is to the UFD the #2 boot device and your HDD / SSD the #1 boot device. Duh. Of course it came up with Cortana assistant when it woke up and I was able to complete the setup by voice with no hands or mice involved. Quite bizarre but no harm in it. Obviously I turned that off later….

I'd made a copy of all the downloads I did yesterday so I could reinstall them quickly from the USB, plus the drivers from the MSI (manufacturer) site. That took a couple of hours. Once it was all updated, I installed some essential(?) programs, removed a lot of the bloatware, disabled a lot of the firewall stuff as required, cleaned up with CCleaner (including registry etc) and finally created a system restore point.

As W10 comes installed, there is loads of capware that needs to come off, much of it just unnecessary:

And some of it just ridiculous:

Also installed a few programs that I will find useful. I may not want to run them at the same time as the machine but being able to open, edit and repost CAD and CAM files may be handy.

• Fusion 360
• Acrobat Reader
• RealVNC viewer
• Chrome browser
• etc

Finally I installed the Centroid M12 software. It’s all there – up and running! As I said – the GUI is a bit clunky but clearly well developed. This is version 12 of their s/w, so you can see they have many years’ experience.

The written installation guidance claims to be good for "W7/10" but it was clearly written around the time of W7 and there are some quite obvious differences. Certainly, trying to follow this procedure with W10 didn't work out too well for me. Somebody must have simply inserted "W10" into the description in the glib belief that W7 and W10 are almost the same....

The best approach seems to be to run this video from Martyscncgarage on your machine, stopping and starting as you proceed. By the time you get to the end, you are up and running.

Here's a screenshot of the Shizuoka / Centroid PC from the warmth of the lounge, taken using RealVNC. As long as the Acorn is left powered up, I can start and stop the program and operate the controls from in here. Obviously I haven't got any real hardware connected to the Acorn - it's in "bench test" mode.

I also bought a monitor arm so that I can position the PC where it's needed. This "Multibrackets M Deskmount" one is from CPC and claims to be able to support up to 9kg. 

The PC claims to be about 12kg, so the question is - can it be adjusted or modified to accommodate the PC? 

Sure enough, the PC seems to come in around 12kg. This is it sitting on my 50kg postal scales:

And by adjusting the arm somewhere near its maximum preload, I seem to be able to exceed that slightly. Here, I'm pushing down on the arm to the point where it starts to give way. The scale reads 14kg, so it looks possible:

That funny diecast foot won't be much use, so I'll probably need to replace it with something else. And come up with a means of mounting the arm onto the machine or the side of the cabinet. Let's take it apart, see how the swivel works and do some measurements with a view to making something up later. There are 2 Belville washers, a couple of plastic bushes and a hex bolt / washer:

Looks as if I should be able to machine up a fairly simple steel bush. I could then weld or clamp it to a solid bracket or tubular arm:

Good. So now I have a controller, a bastard great pile of bits and an empty cabinet. It just needs putting together....