And another demo – ChipPC
We have really been getting into demoing hardware as of late. I have been enlightened by our recent purchases that most of our vendors are willing to let us try out their hardware, its just simply asking.
We are starting a new project in our atrium to build a hospitality center… it should be a really nice place for new people to get information or ask questions… the cool part specifically for IT is the fact that it will give us some more room for our public Kiosks. We have been working over the past few months to bring online registration among other items to our public website. Along with that push, we want to do away with the paper process in the building of registering someone for something…. thus the need for Kiosks.
Simple enough, pick up a few workstations and let Jermie and Jim do some magic… or not. We decided this might be best served with a Thin Client rather than a traditional workstation… and we really started thinking about it when we came across ChipPC’s JackPC.
ChipPC is a thin client that is about the size of your fist.
It mounts in the wall in a single gang wall box. It can be powered PoE or externally powered. It runs a Citrix client or RDP client for terminal services and runs on WindowsCE. It has two versions VGA or DVI and has 4 USB ports in addition to audio out and mic inputs.
We are currently demoing their VGA flavor, but they also have a DVI dual monitor flavor too.
While we are still working out the costs, this seems like a very good solution for a Kiosk that won’t move around.
Anyone have any experience with Thin Clients in this application and have some pros and cons? Some items we need to address is how to configure the RDP session so a user can’t ‘get’ out of the session or disconnect from the server. And how to manage multiple devices around the building… more to come…
I have seen ChipPC somewhere before – and will be interested to know how your demo goes! We use thin clients and this would be a really nice way to eliminate the ‘little box’ sitting around.
Could this type of thin client be used for digital signage? If it was just running a powerpoint loop i’m sure it would work but what about video/audio? If we have 5 different zones of diplays getting different information would it tax the server too much? Really excited about the possibility though. Thanks for the info.
That’s a cool gadget. We’re using HP thin clients for check-in and one Narthex (lobby) kiosk.