Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client | Power Mod, Teardown, UEFI/BIOS Quirks | Homelab Operations Center
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 มิ.ย. 2024
- Casually tearing down the Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client that I bought because clearly I don't have enough thin clients already. Hopefully someone finds this useful, since these machines show up for sale on eBay all the time. It's not nearly as powerful as the 5060 I played with before, and it feels sluggish to use (the 5060 was perfectly usable as a web browsing machine). It didn't come with a power supply, and although it only needs 5V/3A, it doesn't use any common sized barrel jacks that I could find, so I soldered a USB lead to it. I underestimated the voltage drop at 3A, so you definitely need to use a beefier or much shorter USB cable than I did, or reduce your power consumption (less USB, less DisplayPort, and/or less GPU usage).
Blog Link w/ lscpu, lspci, vainfo results for the curious:
www.apalrd.net/posts/2022/wys...
tl;dr the CPU supports VT-x and AES-NI (not that you really have enough RAM to think about virtualization), the GPU supports H264 transcode, and it has a Realtek NIC
If you want to buy one, check out this eBay search:
ebay.us/xXE5kw
This Thin Client would still make a good home server or Home Assistant host, but it's a pain to find the power supply if it isn't included. Make sure you know what you're buying in a thin client (CPU, RAM, Storage, power supply included?) and if it's sufficient for your use case. The deals on eBay change all the time, and although the 3040 is usually available for around the price of a Raspberry Pi, you can occasionally get deals on much better units.
All of that said, I'm going to be using this as my go-to Raspberry Pi equivalent in all of my Pi videos going forward, since you can usually find them on ebay, power mod them, and get them functional for about the same price as a mid tier Pi 4 (which you can't find anyways).
My Discord server:
/ discord
If you find my content useful and would like to support me, feel free to here: ko-fi.com/apalrd
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:26 - Teardown
01:26 - USB Power Mod
03:58 - Reassembly
04:53 - BIOS Configuration
06:24 - Trying Xubuntu
08:02 - Install Home Assistant
09:21 - UEFI Boot Errors
12:12 - My Thoughts
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#ThinClient
#Linux
#Teardown
#Homelab - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![Little Guys: Episode 2 [Wyse 3040]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LADsGBvB_ns/mqdefault.jpg)
![Little Guys: Episode 2 [Wyse 3040]](/img/tr.png)
Power cable connector is 1.7 x 4.0mm and are super cheap. No need to open this up, just get the right connector
I think it was on AliExpress but I found an adapter to go USB-C to that barrel jack, and the power supplies for Xfinity Xi5 (I think) cable boxes are precisely 5V, 3A USB-C.
Thank you! I have been struggling getting Debian on this thing for a few days now🎉
Thank you, very helpful in getting my 3040 to install home assistant.
Glad it helped
I have no idea what I'm doing, but I couldn't figure out why Ubuntu wasn't booting from USB and just seeing your screens was helpful. I have progress!
I have a Wyse3040 that I thought would be a great media box on the family TV - Netflix, and checking out documents on Google Drive, etc. No memory needed - But certainly needs a OS
Thanks for the help with the UEFI!😄
Happy to help!
Just a note for anyone confused about the 12V version of the Wyse 3040. They seem to be dual voltage and accept 5V as well. I have the model N10D001 and it only says 12V on the bottom but the quick start guide I found online for it says that it's 12V/5V and it runs just fine on 5V even under a stress test. While running the mprime stress test on all cores it uses exactly 1A@5V with a single display connected (booted into Debian tty) and about 0.8A@5V without a display connected. adding a bidirectional iperf3 on top of the CPU stress test brings it back to 1A@5V without a display. It will probably need more if you plan to use the GPU for something but for CPU-only loads a good 2A 5V adapter should be more than sufficient.
Note that this doesn't go the other way, you will fry a 5V version with 12V power
@@deelan_ yep, forgot to mention this because I thought it was obvious. What I meant to say is that you can buy a 5V power supply and not worry about it not working in case you get the 12V model.
Thanks a lot for the Debian boot fix
I'm sat here wondering if you could run Samsung DEX fully on this to utilise all the inputs and get it functioning as a DEX dock? Tried searching TH-cam and nobody has thought of doing this or its not possible. Whats your thoughts? Thanks for the video.
If we ignore the lack of GPIO support (ofc thin client), it is the best price performance alternative to Atomic Pi.
Finally found a use for the $5.00 Wyse 3040 I got at the Goodwill. Installed Home Assistant on using your videos.
A thin client with a quad core CPU and 2GB of RAM and 8GB of storage? That's a fat client in my dictionary 🙂 Please, continue the VDI series (Raspberry Pi + Proxmox). I'm already using it and it rocks 🙂
I'm basically out of Pi's, so this is going to be my new 'thin client' box. I do have at least one more VDI video coming, in the next week or two.
@@apalrdsadventures I'm looking forward to that. Keep up the great work.
4.0x1.7mm barrel connector is what the power supply uses.
I got a POE adapter to 5v and have one running of my Poe switch for a pihole client. I got the plug from a muti plug kit off Amazon.
That WIFI slot would be great for a Tensor Flow card for some machine learning for vision recognition.
It doesn't work with PCIe devices though, only SDIO
Thanks, nice video
I bought this a couple of weeks ago as it was under $25 with a pouwer supply, to run as an octoprint server for my 3D printer (as Pi's are nowhere to be found), but got stymied at getting it to boot to something other than the preinstalled thinlinux. Fingers crossed your walkthru will get me booted and I can install some light version of linux on it!
The UEFI is really awful. HA OS and xubuntu both just worked, Debian did not, so it's hit or miss depending on how your distro configures GRUB by default (since it must be in the fallback path / removable media path).
@@apalrdsadventures i really dosnt know this fallback thing on uefi. Thank you!
@@apalrdsadventures I successfully installed Lubuntu on it last nite! Now when I get the time, I need to figure out how to get Octoprint onto it - thanks again for the heads up on what my issue was (Archlinux was my issue)
Can I install a pfsense on this for pfsense router@@apalrdsadventures
We have so many of these at work all being decommissioned currently. They work great for PXE and remote client based systems.
I'm amazed how useful they are, this one has already been cast for roles in several future videos.
I cant seem to get the USB bios boot option :( any help?
That’s what we use them for, and they are just terrible, I think it’s likely the fact our main client is in 🇺🇸 and our think clients in 🇬🇧
@@apalrdsadventures They might also be fun if someone wants to experiment with a low power server cluster
Do you know if there’s a way to do a hard reset on these? I see mine have two buttons by on either side of the CMOS battery.
I used PSP power supply fits perfectly and its 5v great vid im just doing some research for a neighbour who want me to check it out for him gave me a 3030 and 3040 to look at
Hello sir, do you have a video of this installing klipper? Im new to 3d printing and looking for tutorial about installing klipper
What power supply do you use? Mine boots only with original one and on other ones it just blinks.
Alot of different Linux OSes don't seem to support the onboard sound in this one. I have the 3040 8GB version. It's annoying trying to find something to play youtube music in a browser and have sound working and not being laggy, and not having the emmc end up being full at the same time.
Does Wifi not come standard in the device? (You stated there’s a M.2 slot for a Wifi card). Can the M.2 slot be used for storage?
It's a factory option, but it doesn't look common on eBay. As to using it for storage, it's not the correct key and (according to other posts, I haven't tested it) the port only includes SDIO out of the possible signals with the WiFi key (PCIe x1, USB2, SDIO, I2C, ...)
I'm using one as proxmox backup server, base Debian install, added PBS repository and attached a 5TB 2.5" HDD
Works really great, the only issue I have is on a reboot it goes to a blank screen, a power cut is necessary to boot up properly. It seems that a reboot won't allow it to get past the BIOS/POST check
I've found the BIOS to be .... terrible.
How have you liked PBS in general?
@@apalrdsadventures I think its the best way to backup proxmox VMs, 3rd party tools might be more efficient in some metrics, but the whole experience is pretty good, once they release other clients besides Debian you could backup physical hosts or VMs without having proxmox as hypervisor. I think that could be a gateway in Veeams domain, especially for small to medium sized businesses.
Check out learn linux TVs video about it. Its pretty informative.
I ran it for testing but I don't have a dedicated server for it. I felt like it was too narrowly focused on PVE, and having a pull-option (i.e. from NFS or SMB share) would really be a big improvement.
have you solved the reboot issue? I read some users say it does not shutdown properly too?
this would be amazing for a seeding box, just hook up a 20tb drive, load up debian+lxde, and use transmission+vpn of choice, and you got something that will seed for days
The Plug is 4,0 x 1,7 (mm)
Great overview! Can this be used for home pfsense (USB NIC no VLANS)?
In theory both pfsense and opnsense support uefi boot, but I'm not sure if they'd have the same fallback path issue that Debian had.
Try the Fujitsu s920, they're dirt cheap and they have a pcie slot
cool vid.
What I would have done is not use a default USB cable.
But a 100W USB type C male to female extension cable. and cut off the male plug. so you have a better cable to power the thin client, than a flimsy standard USB cable.
It is also future proof, as usb cables often get bend quite a lot.
Higher wattage USB PD runs at higher voltages, but there's also complication in USB-C expecting handshaking with the charger or assuming legacy USB power levels without it.
Does this power mod also work on the 5060/5070? I assume not.
Weird thing I found with my 3040 is that if I plugged a USB 3 hub into the USB 3 port, it would boot from almost any bootable media I would plug into the hub without having to change any settings in the BIOS or play with boot partitions. Even OSes I could not get to boot otherwise, like Ubuntu or, heck, even Windows 10 on an external SSD.
It's just some cheap 4 port hub I got on Amazon.
I also modded the power connector on mine! I added a USB-C port so I can run it off a phone charger and even a Sata power port, so I could run it from an ATX PSU if I wanted to.
Which power supply do you use when using the USB-C input? Some people speculated that the expected USB-C handshake could cause some problems.
@@arthurnunesc Because I got a 5V variant of the 3040, I just installed a dumb USB-C socket with a 10k pull-down resistor to allow up to 3A. That's pretty simple, but it only works with USB A to C cables AFAIK.
It worked with any charger or power bank I've tried. It doesn't consume more than ~1.5A at full load anyway. Even with peripherals, a hub and a USB powered 2.5" SSD connected while running a CPU stress test.
If you need C to C power to work, or have a 3040 that takes 12V, I guess simply buying a USB-C fast charge decoy online for ~2€ would be the simplest route. They often sell in 10 packs for 15€ or so, and are configurable from 5V to 20V. That's what I would've done if I didn't already have a bunch of USB-C sockets laying around.
What I did was the quick and dirty route.
Can I Install Mikrotik Router OS on Dell Wyse 3040 ?
sorry for dumb question, is 8GB for storage enough? Or definitely I should put external HDD in caddy. If I add an external HDD should I instal HA on that drive or on internal memory of 8 GB?
Thanks so much
Depends on what you’re doing but I use 8G for a lot of test systems. There are 16G models as well.
You need to remember that the factory power supply is 5v 3amps. usb plug is 5v 1.5amps
There are different USB chargers/Power supply. I have many and one of them is 5V/3A, just perfect.
I got a cheap ($18) HP T520 thin client. It has a small problem with not wanting to work headless, I can't get the bios to ignore keyboard or monitor fails (as in missing). Does the 3040 work headless (like the RPi)/
Yes, the 3040 works fine without any IO connected
Does the M.2 connector have PCIe? I have read that it doesn‘t. I‘m planning on using one of those things with a Intel BE200 card (for me personally, I only have 1 Gbps symmetrical anyways so bottlenecking because of a possible x1 interface wouldn‘t matter).
Not only does it not, it's a weird non-standard wiring (if I remember correctly) and compatible wifi cards are very difficult to source. There's a project out there to make a compatible micro SD card reader that I'll probably put in mine instead.
@@jasonsiedzik6723 thanks for confirming, to my knowledge it‘s SDIO.
I ran batocera linux on mine to play some old emulators and it works lol :)
i think but using this for nextcloud server ... should be possible or ? there is a msata slot on the board if i saw this right ...
It's an M.2 WiFi key, so not for storage. You can use USB3 though.
Nice Video! Iam trying to run pfSense on this device. Installation (amd64-iso) is fine, also there is no problems booting the device with a monitor connected. But is not booting without a monitor connected. Any idea?
I haven't tried pfSense on it, so I can't say what they might be doing weird
Hi, that's a powersave feature for thin clients. just use a dummy hdmi plug. aka virtual edid plug. they're cheap.
Somebody ever installed Windows 7 Embedded Standard on this device? This guy must be a genius...
Im wondering if this is able to load piholedns on this little machine
Adguard Home is really easy to install on Debian and had a better UI in my testing
jsut got one for a dollar + shipping of ebay 💀. still thinking on what ic an do with it for projects.
cool video btw
It's not bad, I use them in place of a raspberry pi on a lot of projects
@@apalrdsadventures can you give an example? and like what os/programmes do you run on it? Thanks :)
I usually run Ubuntu Server, and anything you can run on Linux you can probably run here, it's just not super powerful.
@@apalrdsadventures ah i see. it'll arrive in around 10 days. thanks for the reply. have a good one! :D
I've got one and I can't get it to boot to the bios F2 or boot menu F12. Any thoughts?
I don't believe F2/F12 are the correct keys. I tried all of the function keys as well as delete and escape.
It would be awesome to solder a USB-A port to it for power. Then, you don't have the wire directly connected to the board.
That would require the dremel, something I didn't want to deal with, although I agree a USB-C power input would be ideal. It's also a really tiny area to work with, being so close to the DP connectors
htt ps://a.aliexpres s.com/_mKu2amm well, I found a usb C port with power lines only, so I guess you have a topic for a new video?
Not having any luck with 8 different versions of xubuntu including the build you used. It always comes up with an error during install. Did you install on a VM and move it over as thats the only way I can see gettign around it :/ Any help is appreciated I was hoping to install k40 laser cutter program as my garage runs on solar so the low power of this computer would be ideal.
Cheers,
Kevin :)
Do you have an 8G or 16G eMMC version? I have one of each, and Ubuntu refuses to install on the 8G version.
Debian doesn't seem to have trouble on the 8G version though. Which K40 program are you using? I setup cnc.js on one of these for a 3040 cnc (and have a video on that).
@@apalrdsadventures I have the 8GB version I got 3 of them for £25 ($32) and that seems to be a decent price in the UK for them. I tried different versions of Ubuntu but with no success as of yet. I got an error saying there was no free space for some reason even though from what I could see it should have installed fine strange. I got your reply when I was at work so just got home to install Linux mint but the installer is hitting me with this error:UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x92 in position 74: invalid start byte. I believe its been talked about before somewhere with no one being able to help fix it. Seems I'm stuck with 3 seems 3040s for now haha :(
I was going to install K40 whisperer I have the smaller CNC 3020? It's an awesome wee machine not used it for any projects yet. I got my 3020 years ago and it was all serial com port based so I need to use a old PC with XP on it and Mach3 software to use it.
Just about to watch your new vid :D
I've been able to use all of my dell 3040s without issue, although I didn't install a desktop environment on any of them and that does take a decent amount of space. CNC.js runs as a web server, so I can run it on the 3040 with the machine connected over USB (and no monitor/keyboard/mouse) and then actually control the machine from my laptop over the network.
I don't have a laser cutter to try with, but you could try installing Debian with LXDE instead of GNOME for space savings. That *should* be enough to fit in the 8G of space.
My router is an upgraded '3018' machine, just with a bed extension kit but the same motion hardware. Mine has a USB serial chip built-in, so it's USB to the 3040 thin client but shows up as a serial port in Linux.
@@apalrdsadventures Ahh yeah I guess the desktop environment then all the bulk that goes with is probably what was doing it as I just installed Sparky with watching the storage fill up as it was installing. Once complete I had around 1.7GB free space I then installed Inkscape and the k40 whisperer and uninstalled office programs and a few other apps that I don't need and got it to 2GB. I didn't need to mess around with UEFI it just booted straight in so that was nice lol. Thanks for mentioning about the storage I thought 8GB was tight but doable for I guess once all the apps that come with are added it starts to fill things up quick. Ohh that's interesting tbh a big reason I have not used the CNC much is the noise level is crazy loud. I will let you know how the K40 laser works out. I'm not sure what to do with the other 2 I was going to make one into a "slow" NAS but I just bought a WD NAS (not the best things lol). Amazing little devices for how much power they use I think it was pulling around 3W of power almost maxed out very impressive. I did need to drop the desktop res I have a 4k UWHD screen and ever the mouse cursor was skipping / jumping as I was moving it over the screen lol dropped it to a more useable res and all seems good even TH-cam was working only at 480p though :P
Thanks for the vids btw I'm a new sub and backtracked through them all :D made for some good viewing as my 3040 was slapping me in the face with every install lol
I just finished watching and when I'm at a terminal window and do a sudo reboot, the device shuts down and needs to be power cycled to restart. I'm planning on having this device in a remote location where power cycling is not an option. Any suggestions?
BIOS power-on setting? I don't think I've had this issue, but the BIOS is pretty awful to work with
@@apalrdsadventures Yes it is set to boot when power is applied and that works to restart, but that means I need to do a power cycle to bring the machine back up after every reboot. If I reboot from any terminal window or restart from the desktop the 3040 will not restart without a power cycle.
Could you do that same power mod with an ethernet cable for PoE?
probably not, an ethernet cable will have a very considerable voltage drop. But you can run 12-48V Passive POE and a step down to 5V, or if you're lucky and the deice is 12V it should compensate for the voltage drop, going at about 500mA
I've bought this thin client too. I've also found some 5V/3A pover supply with USB-C plug. Do you think it will be better to solder on the main board a USB-C female plug or directly the wires as you did in the video?
Soldering a USB-C female plug will be challenging, the pads won't align. They do make power-only USB-C connectors with less pads, but it's still a challenge. Plus the case won't have a big enough hole size.
I have been working with these 3040's for months now, they are finicky and weird at best. Sometimes the need Secure boot with EUFI, sometimes turning it of it works. They are flaky.
I agree the BIOS/UEFI is terrible, but as long as the loader is installed at the 'removable media path' (which some distros do and some don't) it seems to work reliably once I get a working setup
@@apalrdsadventures Gotta find a happy medium I suppose. We are using Wyse WMS management server, and it's not very fun trying to keep things things enrolled and manageable. : /
I was able to PXE boot it without too many issues, so as the PXE project progresses eventually my goal is to have a web UI to select what to boot per client by MAC address. But for now everything gets the same remote desktop client image.
Hello, i saw someone reball Emmc menory for 128Gb. Do You know model number od compatible menory?
This thing has USB 3.0. Slack a read SSD there and you're good, it will probably give an good MMC a run for his money.
To those from the future. Do not try with latest versions. Only with versions in the video or earlier
hello I'm from the future. Versions of what?
Hello! Can you try the BIOS password reset procedure on Wyse 3040? there is a pwclr button near the battery. can u check it for me? tnx.
The default password is "Fireport"
Easier and cheaper to find than a RPi 4??? I'd love that kind of tech availability in my area. :D
Not sure where you're at, but last I checked the Pi 4 has at least a 1 year lead time from all the major distributors. Sometimes a small shop gets a batch in stock, but they're gone within minutes.
Even if this specific model isn't available in your area, used enterprise hardware is usually cheaper if you can deal with its quirks
@@apalrdsadventures There's very little used enterprise hardware that makes it onto the market cheaply in NZ unfortunately. Most of it gets resold at exorbitant prices if it makes it to resale at all. :(
Can you ship things in from AU? Maybe it's just too small of an area?
I'm trying to get my 3040 running, but i can't get it to boot at all. I'm getting a flashing amber light in a 4-2 pattern from the power LED. The statement from the documentation doesn't make any sense to me.
Generic POST Video Error-Old LED pattern 1110NA
Has anyone seen this and found a fix?
Are you using a display port adaptor? Like a lot of things these days display port is a "standard" that is all over the place. Quick and dirty hack. Unplug the adaptor, boot the computer, plug the display adaptor back in once it has booted and see what happens.
You need a Dual-Mode DisplayPort (DP++) adaptor as it isn't regular display port.
How do you install debian on a 8 GB storage? And how do you fix the rtl_nic.... driver Problem?
I have units with both 8G and 16G of storage and haven't installed the desktop environment on the 8G models. The Realtek NIC drivers aren't a problem in Linux.
@@apalrdsadventuresthank you for the fast answer👍
I only ever watch video in 360 so I have no issue there at all.
3040's are WAY better than RPi's. Perfect for Ham Radio applications
Not sure why I watched this, but it was interesting lol.
Well I'm glad you found it!
you can get a barrel plug off of Amazon for $ 2.00
Need one with the right dimensions, in terms of length, outer and inner diameter. Unless you can get that data it's gonna be really annoying.
I would love to USB-C this thing
is it possible to install windows on Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client and if yes, is there a link for the windows
No, it doesn't have enough disk space (Windows is fat)
@@apalrdsadventures hi thanx for your reply , i some how got it right , i used a program called WinToUsb to run windows directly from my 64 gig flash drive 👍
Slightly bigger office PCs from same brand will cost around or maybe $10 and have 8GB RAM and some i3 4th-6th gen CPU which is an better option in my opinion.
Thats not the point, just let him make videos.
Besides a challenge is fun sometimes!
Can i use it like NAS?
With USB drives sure
I have never had any problem with this BIOS utility, I come from a time of bare bones BIOS.
It's not the look and feel, it's that some settings do not work.
Are 5060's better for ha than 3040's???
It depends on what addons you want to run. The 3040 is perfectly fine for HA and things like MQTT and the like. If you want Frigate, it won't be a good experience on the 3040.
I hate these things, we have loads of them at work, and they are terrible for what we use them for. But then again, so are the 3 standard machines too 😂
I expect about as much as a raspberry pi, and nothing more
Best I could find cost 139...
that's cheap 189 here :/
Regional differences possibly? Here there's one for $25 with bids, and others with buy it now for $40.
@@apalrdsadventures the difference between US and EU :(
Maybe different models are popular in the EU? or you don't have businesses replacing hundreds of still functional machines regularly?
@@apalrdsadventures probably! But I'm in luck since I work in a company who has regular system replacements. But I kinda want something low powered to use as my router. I now use a udoo bolt v8, too much power consumption
amateur at best... you should have just measured the diameter of the barrel, and center post, and ordered the right cable or connector from literally any supplier. They ARE standard sized. 4.5mm.