As you can tell from my Raspberry Pi addiction, I’ve always been fascinated by “mini” PCs (i.e. very inexpensive computers in tiny packages). My latest foray into this world was triggered by the hope that I could set up my living room TV as a Zoom/Webex/Skype/Hangouts space for family get togethers.
I tried using a Pi for this, but it was a struggle, with a mix of failures from missing features to inability to recognize the camera to performance problems, etc. I think if I was only using one service, I probably could have fought to make it work, but it felt like it was going to be too hard to get all of the services going.
This led me to wonder whether I could find a cheap “actual” PC to do the job and coincidentally (or at least I hope it was a coincidence), Amazon decided to point me at a sale on these…
Terryza Mini PC
In typical Amazon fashion, this is called
On sale, I was able to pick one up for less than 200 $CDN. This is a surprisingly powerful little beast at that price point. It’s about 13cm on a side, making it only a bit larger than a Pi in an Argon ONE case. It’s quiet, it drives my 4K TV fine, it even has an internal slot to add a SATA drive that I filled with a 1TB SSD I had lying around.
Now, I will say it’s not fast. It just barely has enough horsepower to display 4K video, but that did work for the YouTube and Netflix examples I tried.
As to the reason why I bought the box, since it’s running Windows, all of the standard teleconferencing services worked OOTB using a Logitech C920 video camera. I was even able to do a video call through my home NextCloud instance, which surprised me.
Overall I’m quite happy.
And yes, I wrote this post using the Terryza. I’m actually in front of my Mac downstairs, using Windows Remote Desktop to talk to it where it sits under the TV upstairs. I did ending up getting a wireless keyboard/trackpad which I can use to run the UI during web conferences, but it’s just as easy to do it over the local network if I’m not watching TV.