Rick had some insulation left over from his own workshop project (like two bundles... his workshop is the size of Fragwell Manor, swear to God) so he sold it to me for about half price. Turns out it's enough to cover like 80% of my shop.
At the moment, I'm over halfway done and destroying the big shelf. I'll use the wood for other things, but it's in the way now.
A few hours later and I'm done with the insulation now. The process was nowhere near as annoying as I had thought it would be, thanks to advances in fiberglass technology since the 1980s, I'm sure.
Equipped with my Graywhale CD Exchange hoodie I bought in 1999 but only wore for the first time this fall while replacing a hub module on my car, a filter mask and (occasionally) safety goggles, I managed to get the job done and come away from it without being all itchy.
By my calculations, I have over 300 sq ft of wall covered now and only another 120 sq ft left uninsulated. The rest will be done with foam sheets, I think.
In the process of putting things back in order without the shelving I used to have, I decided to change my target layout. Instead of my desk being at the back of the shed with my back to the door while working, it will be against the south wall so I don't have the sun bouncing off my displays during summer evenings.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Destructively Productive
I'm out in the lab tonight, experimenting with the new thermal properties the recent snowfall has given the lab. I maxed out at 55F a day ago when I checked the thermometer inside the lab after work. This was with an SGI Octane, two Indigo2s, an O2 in idle mode in IRIX and an Athlon XP system running Folding@Home under Windows XP. With the snow, I saw 46F.
So what did I do? I started up my loud IBM eServers and am now working on a Pentium 4 system that will serve as another folding node.
After giving my wife four 512MB RAM sticks for her system to replace the quartet of 256MB sticks she formerly had in there, I was left with only 512MB per system. I can't really render on half a gigabyte, but I'm not really going to be doing any rendering for like a month, maybe longer. Regardless, I got tired of hearing her computer scream in pain during her Photoshop escapades and it would seem that doubling her RAM to 2 Gigs has helped a lot. It's worth the effort.
The Pentium 4 system I'm working on right now is kind of retarded. It has bad thermal compound that flakes off at low temperatures and I'm not sure where I put my syringe of Arctic Silver compound. I need to find it because I can't even get the OS to install at the moment. O wait... found it. Hopefully that will fix it.
I have been in a bit of a quandry regarding my network. It would seem that I don't have a way to run wire from the house to the lab until the ground thaws so I need a way to connect until that happens. What better solution than WiFi? That'll work and it just so happens that I have a Linksys WRT54G router that I'm not using. Some folks don't know this, but you can have more than one router on a network. You just plug your second one into a computer port on the first one. In this case, the main one is WiFi B while the WRT54G is WiFi G and very well-documented. Perfect for me since my wife only really connects via WiFi B on her laptop and connects her desktop via copper and I tend to be curious about new configurations and don't want to interfere with her work.
While I have a router that is second to none in terms of capabilities, I didn't think I had near enough adapters for the systems I connect to it until I remembered the four USB adapters I salvaged from trashed home control boxes. They're kind of sketchy and the drivers suck, but they're a way to connect and that's all I need.
the new Pentium 4 system is having issues. It appears it has page faults where none are expected. The RAM tests out just fine so that leaves me hanging for now. I will look into it further. I have more CPUs so if that's the issue, I can solve it. Right now, though, I would rather work on gettin my former desktop system running again since I moved it out to the lab and have yet to do so.
It's all in the name of getting the lab straightened out so I can start work on the 42" plasma display I picked up broken for $10 and have my own hunches regarding fixes. I'm just glad I did my dumpster diving (minus the dumpster) at work and got a nice piece of anti-static mat that's protecting the screen right now.
I've swapped the 3GHz Pentium 4 out of the system in favor of a 2GHz model. I'm going to see real soon whether that was the problem. So far, so good. I'd rather have a bad CPU than a bad motherboard as I have so few motherboards in working form.
Next things to do:
Uninstall the video cards from the IBM servers for later installation in the main frontend system.
Uninstall Pentium 4 componenets from front-end in favor of AMD Sempron-based parts. (Reason: 2GB RAM vs 1GB and ATX vs uATX motherboard for more slots to accommodate the extra video cards)
I'm installing extra video cards in the frontend for the simple reason that I need them for my monitors. I have an ATI X800 AGP card in there right now and it's okay for one display, but I'm not about to run two off of it. I could use other video adapters, but I want the Matrox boards from the eServers because they have DVI ports and I'm not about to run analog signals to S-IPS LCDs ever again. For the record, I have a Dell 2001FP 20" panel as my center display and two Dell 1800FP panels on either side. Only one of the 1800FP panels happens to work, but I have a total of three non-working ones to mix and match from, or completely rebuild since it's generally a power supply fault anyway. I just want one perfect display when I'm done. No pressure spots or visible scratches. Odds are I have one. I just need to get it working. Based on simple power-up testing I just did, all of them have bad power supplies. Giggity. Easy fix and not too expensive.
The Pentium 4 system has managed to get into the Windows XP install screen in actual graphic mode. I reinstalled the case-back and the cooling fan.
And it's working. Proteins are folding and today is a happy day.
I just reached for something on a shelf near the ceiling and my hand became very warm. Looks like all my heat is heading toward the top, as predicted by that whole hot air rising thing. Time for a fan to move all that air.
Got it. If I'm going to freeze my ass off, I'm going to freeze my face off, too.
So what did I do? I started up my loud IBM eServers and am now working on a Pentium 4 system that will serve as another folding node.
After giving my wife four 512MB RAM sticks for her system to replace the quartet of 256MB sticks she formerly had in there, I was left with only 512MB per system. I can't really render on half a gigabyte, but I'm not really going to be doing any rendering for like a month, maybe longer. Regardless, I got tired of hearing her computer scream in pain during her Photoshop escapades and it would seem that doubling her RAM to 2 Gigs has helped a lot. It's worth the effort.
The Pentium 4 system I'm working on right now is kind of retarded. It has bad thermal compound that flakes off at low temperatures and I'm not sure where I put my syringe of Arctic Silver compound. I need to find it because I can't even get the OS to install at the moment. O wait... found it. Hopefully that will fix it.
I have been in a bit of a quandry regarding my network. It would seem that I don't have a way to run wire from the house to the lab until the ground thaws so I need a way to connect until that happens. What better solution than WiFi? That'll work and it just so happens that I have a Linksys WRT54G router that I'm not using. Some folks don't know this, but you can have more than one router on a network. You just plug your second one into a computer port on the first one. In this case, the main one is WiFi B while the WRT54G is WiFi G and very well-documented. Perfect for me since my wife only really connects via WiFi B on her laptop and connects her desktop via copper and I tend to be curious about new configurations and don't want to interfere with her work.
While I have a router that is second to none in terms of capabilities, I didn't think I had near enough adapters for the systems I connect to it until I remembered the four USB adapters I salvaged from trashed home control boxes. They're kind of sketchy and the drivers suck, but they're a way to connect and that's all I need.
the new Pentium 4 system is having issues. It appears it has page faults where none are expected. The RAM tests out just fine so that leaves me hanging for now. I will look into it further. I have more CPUs so if that's the issue, I can solve it. Right now, though, I would rather work on gettin my former desktop system running again since I moved it out to the lab and have yet to do so.
It's all in the name of getting the lab straightened out so I can start work on the 42" plasma display I picked up broken for $10 and have my own hunches regarding fixes. I'm just glad I did my dumpster diving (minus the dumpster) at work and got a nice piece of anti-static mat that's protecting the screen right now.
I've swapped the 3GHz Pentium 4 out of the system in favor of a 2GHz model. I'm going to see real soon whether that was the problem. So far, so good. I'd rather have a bad CPU than a bad motherboard as I have so few motherboards in working form.
Next things to do:
Uninstall the video cards from the IBM servers for later installation in the main frontend system.
Uninstall Pentium 4 componenets from front-end in favor of AMD Sempron-based parts. (Reason: 2GB RAM vs 1GB and ATX vs uATX motherboard for more slots to accommodate the extra video cards)
I'm installing extra video cards in the frontend for the simple reason that I need them for my monitors. I have an ATI X800 AGP card in there right now and it's okay for one display, but I'm not about to run two off of it. I could use other video adapters, but I want the Matrox boards from the eServers because they have DVI ports and I'm not about to run analog signals to S-IPS LCDs ever again. For the record, I have a Dell 2001FP 20" panel as my center display and two Dell 1800FP panels on either side. Only one of the 1800FP panels happens to work, but I have a total of three non-working ones to mix and match from, or completely rebuild since it's generally a power supply fault anyway. I just want one perfect display when I'm done. No pressure spots or visible scratches. Odds are I have one. I just need to get it working. Based on simple power-up testing I just did, all of them have bad power supplies. Giggity. Easy fix and not too expensive.
The Pentium 4 system has managed to get into the Windows XP install screen in actual graphic mode. I reinstalled the case-back and the cooling fan.
And it's working. Proteins are folding and today is a happy day.
I just reached for something on a shelf near the ceiling and my hand became very warm. Looks like all my heat is heading toward the top, as predicted by that whole hot air rising thing. Time for a fan to move all that air.
Got it. If I'm going to freeze my ass off, I'm going to freeze my face off, too.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Danger Danger! High Voltage!
I've been wanting to experiment with vacuum tubes for quite a long time, but there was always the problem of proper power supplies, especially for the high voltage side. Not anymore!
At work, we throw out a bunch of SAFT LS-series "AA" 3.6 volt Lithium thionyl chloride cells that are used in crash data recorders for six months at a time. When they come back, the cells still carry 80% of their useful charge. Wasteful, I know, but that's the price of reliability. Anyway, now that the demand for the units the cells are installed in has increased so much, there are more and more cells to dispose of. True to my treehugger nature, I don't want to see Lithium enter a landfill or go to a recycler in a dangerous form. While these same cells were one commonly used for clock backup in computers, this is now rare so it's low-volume.
So what do I do with the 300 cells I already have? Use them.
The advantage with Lithium cells is they have a relatively flat discharge curve, dropping like a rock at the very end of their life. This is a good thing since a consistent supply is always helpful.
Radio Shack, and other such dealers, sell holders for 8 AA size cells at a cost of about $2 each. While normal AA cells in such a holder would result in 12VDC at the terminals, Lithiums give 28.8VDC. My plan is to build a few different supplies. The first will use four banks (32 cells total) for 115VDC output while others will be built for up to 400 volts (14 banks or 112 cells). All of these supplies will be housed in insulated cases with isolated keyswitch interlocks and .063A fuses to guard against shorts. I'm only likely to be pulling a maximum of 30mA current anyway, and that's with a lot of tubes running. Most of the time, I'll be seeing a maximum of 10mA. The cells are rated for a maximum pulse current of 270mA. Continuous drain carries a 70mA rating. I'm sure the internal resistance of so many cells in series is going to limit that.
At work, we throw out a bunch of SAFT LS-series "AA" 3.6 volt Lithium thionyl chloride cells that are used in crash data recorders for six months at a time. When they come back, the cells still carry 80% of their useful charge. Wasteful, I know, but that's the price of reliability. Anyway, now that the demand for the units the cells are installed in has increased so much, there are more and more cells to dispose of. True to my treehugger nature, I don't want to see Lithium enter a landfill or go to a recycler in a dangerous form. While these same cells were one commonly used for clock backup in computers, this is now rare so it's low-volume.
So what do I do with the 300 cells I already have? Use them.
The advantage with Lithium cells is they have a relatively flat discharge curve, dropping like a rock at the very end of their life. This is a good thing since a consistent supply is always helpful.
Radio Shack, and other such dealers, sell holders for 8 AA size cells at a cost of about $2 each. While normal AA cells in such a holder would result in 12VDC at the terminals, Lithiums give 28.8VDC. My plan is to build a few different supplies. The first will use four banks (32 cells total) for 115VDC output while others will be built for up to 400 volts (14 banks or 112 cells). All of these supplies will be housed in insulated cases with isolated keyswitch interlocks and .063A fuses to guard against shorts. I'm only likely to be pulling a maximum of 30mA current anyway, and that's with a lot of tubes running. Most of the time, I'll be seeing a maximum of 10mA. The cells are rated for a maximum pulse current of 270mA. Continuous drain carries a 70mA rating. I'm sure the internal resistance of so many cells in series is going to limit that.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Productively Destructive
I started work yesterday on getting Fragwell Lab in order. I had originally planned to insulate and drywall the building before putting it to use. That's not a good idea. In my experience, better planning for large projects like that is to be had from a variety of dress rehearsal where you're actually doing what you set out to do, but without the finish work.
Essentially this amounts to having no insulation in the lab while I'm still using it. This is not ideal by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a good way to get a feel for things. Right now, the lab is sitting at 47.6F with myself, the overhead fluorescent lamp, my laptop and the small stereo as the only heat sources. The door is shut and the only major heat escape points are the vents at either end up top. With hot air rising, I'm sure I'm losing a lot of heat.
I've assembled the desk I picked up at the Logan DI store back on October 4 (almost two months ago? Jeez.) and I have to say I'm pleased with the outcome. The desk cost me $30 and it's a 250lb 30x72" Herman Miller (as in Herman Miller Aeron chairs) beast with a 1" top and a base bent and welded from 3mm sheet steel. $30 wouldn't have bought me an X-mart crapdesk new.
I've added Rule #2 to my Rules of Heavy-ass Gear:
1. If the wall-plug doesn't look weird, it's not a real computer.
2. If I can assemble a desk with a screwdriver and Allen wrench, it's crap.
I have to admit I'm glad the spiders I've run into so far in my clean-up project are dead. There have been some real keepers. I'm not scared of spiders or anything, I just hate them with a fury. I've found a few dozen spider skeletons and trashed a few egg sacs. Hopefully the population will be reduced next spring. The last thing I need is actual bugs in my systems.
The workshop had some shelves installed at some point. With the plan of insulation and drywall, they were no longer necessary so I removed them. I gained quite a few screws during the process. I'll be putting those to use, for sure.
One of the first things I added to get the shop put to work was a stereo. I need music while I work. I bought a pair of Mission 734 loudspeakers from the Logan DI about a month ago, paying $16 for the pair. They weren't in good shape, with one woofer cone missing the center cap and another cone cracked all the way out from center to the surround. Having had no luck tracking replacements down via eBay, I decided to check with Mission across the pond to see what they had to say... and their spares email address was dead. Great.
So I was stuck having to find a way to repair polypropylene, which is notoriously difficult. Time was on my side, however. The oils and such that polypropylene products emit over time are pretty much gone after more than a decade so standard super glue, applied in several coats over the course of three days managed to fix the problem. With the woofers being same for both Bass and Mid sections, I put the repaired driver in the Mid position in one tower and it has turned out to be fine.
The missing center cap on the remaining damaged driver will need replacing, but it's not a huge issue since I'm not running the speakers at high wattage and the air is quite cold. Based on what I see from the design, the voice coil is cooled by the moving air. There's also the airtight thing, which isn't as important since the driver in question is mounted in the Bass segment, which is ported.
Upon first listen, I noticed the highs were missing from the same tower the formerly broken driver was in. Pulling the tweeter and checking resistance revealed that the thing was blown. The cool thing was the coil and dome were separate from the rest of it so I could pull it apart and see what was wrong. Forensice analysis showed that the tweeter had been pushed inward at some point and one of the small wires connecting to voice coil to the outside world had suffered a break. The center of the dome was still pushed in. Couldn't see this without disassembly because there's a wire mesh grating covering the dome. Since the wire was coated with the usual enamel and the dome was metal-coated plastic, I just globbed solder and flux over the broken ends and left it to burn away the enamel. It worked and the joint was smooth. I figure at such high frequencies it won't be seeing all that high of stress anyway so it works and that's what matters. So that's a $900 pair of speakers for $16 and a couple hours of labor. The cabinets are nice and they sound fine. I will count that as a win.
I'm sure there are audiosnobs who scoff at my solutions, but they're the same guys who swear on their mother's grave that a CD rewinder improves their listening experience.
I'm driving the Mission 734s with a small Hitachi bookshelf stereo from the mid-80s. I bought it back in like 2002 because it was one hell of a performer for $8 and the small size was crazy. When I opened it one day to give it a cleaning, I saw that the transformer in the amplifier was toroidal. For those who don't know, this basically means donut-shaped. Winding these transformers is difficult and they are really only seen in high-grade industrial gear or professional music equipment. Often, they were the only way to get anything AC-powered into a 1U rackmount case without using a switch-mode power supply, something you just can't use in certain situations--even today.
So I basically ended up with a treasure. It's the only example I have of a small receiver kit that sounds truly great. The AM/FM module uses the older-style tuning capacitor, something I swear by.
But I don't think it will be enough. I'm going for 5.1 channel surround sound so I need to go further. Likely, I'll be using a separate decoder and feeding the outputs to separate amplifiers for that. The Hitachi unit would be running the rear channels while a very nice Philips 7851 from 1977 is perfect for the front channel and has switchable speaker banks to allow the use of smaller speakers when I don't want to run the Mission units.
Essentially this amounts to having no insulation in the lab while I'm still using it. This is not ideal by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a good way to get a feel for things. Right now, the lab is sitting at 47.6F with myself, the overhead fluorescent lamp, my laptop and the small stereo as the only heat sources. The door is shut and the only major heat escape points are the vents at either end up top. With hot air rising, I'm sure I'm losing a lot of heat.
I've assembled the desk I picked up at the Logan DI store back on October 4 (almost two months ago? Jeez.) and I have to say I'm pleased with the outcome. The desk cost me $30 and it's a 250lb 30x72" Herman Miller (as in Herman Miller Aeron chairs) beast with a 1" top and a base bent and welded from 3mm sheet steel. $30 wouldn't have bought me an X-mart crapdesk new.
I've added Rule #2 to my Rules of Heavy-ass Gear:
1. If the wall-plug doesn't look weird, it's not a real computer.
2. If I can assemble a desk with a screwdriver and Allen wrench, it's crap.
I have to admit I'm glad the spiders I've run into so far in my clean-up project are dead. There have been some real keepers. I'm not scared of spiders or anything, I just hate them with a fury. I've found a few dozen spider skeletons and trashed a few egg sacs. Hopefully the population will be reduced next spring. The last thing I need is actual bugs in my systems.
The workshop had some shelves installed at some point. With the plan of insulation and drywall, they were no longer necessary so I removed them. I gained quite a few screws during the process. I'll be putting those to use, for sure.
One of the first things I added to get the shop put to work was a stereo. I need music while I work. I bought a pair of Mission 734 loudspeakers from the Logan DI about a month ago, paying $16 for the pair. They weren't in good shape, with one woofer cone missing the center cap and another cone cracked all the way out from center to the surround. Having had no luck tracking replacements down via eBay, I decided to check with Mission across the pond to see what they had to say... and their spares email address was dead. Great.
So I was stuck having to find a way to repair polypropylene, which is notoriously difficult. Time was on my side, however. The oils and such that polypropylene products emit over time are pretty much gone after more than a decade so standard super glue, applied in several coats over the course of three days managed to fix the problem. With the woofers being same for both Bass and Mid sections, I put the repaired driver in the Mid position in one tower and it has turned out to be fine.
The missing center cap on the remaining damaged driver will need replacing, but it's not a huge issue since I'm not running the speakers at high wattage and the air is quite cold. Based on what I see from the design, the voice coil is cooled by the moving air. There's also the airtight thing, which isn't as important since the driver in question is mounted in the Bass segment, which is ported.
Upon first listen, I noticed the highs were missing from the same tower the formerly broken driver was in. Pulling the tweeter and checking resistance revealed that the thing was blown. The cool thing was the coil and dome were separate from the rest of it so I could pull it apart and see what was wrong. Forensice analysis showed that the tweeter had been pushed inward at some point and one of the small wires connecting to voice coil to the outside world had suffered a break. The center of the dome was still pushed in. Couldn't see this without disassembly because there's a wire mesh grating covering the dome. Since the wire was coated with the usual enamel and the dome was metal-coated plastic, I just globbed solder and flux over the broken ends and left it to burn away the enamel. It worked and the joint was smooth. I figure at such high frequencies it won't be seeing all that high of stress anyway so it works and that's what matters. So that's a $900 pair of speakers for $16 and a couple hours of labor. The cabinets are nice and they sound fine. I will count that as a win.
I'm sure there are audiosnobs who scoff at my solutions, but they're the same guys who swear on their mother's grave that a CD rewinder improves their listening experience.
I'm driving the Mission 734s with a small Hitachi bookshelf stereo from the mid-80s. I bought it back in like 2002 because it was one hell of a performer for $8 and the small size was crazy. When I opened it one day to give it a cleaning, I saw that the transformer in the amplifier was toroidal. For those who don't know, this basically means donut-shaped. Winding these transformers is difficult and they are really only seen in high-grade industrial gear or professional music equipment. Often, they were the only way to get anything AC-powered into a 1U rackmount case without using a switch-mode power supply, something you just can't use in certain situations--even today.
So I basically ended up with a treasure. It's the only example I have of a small receiver kit that sounds truly great. The AM/FM module uses the older-style tuning capacitor, something I swear by.
But I don't think it will be enough. I'm going for 5.1 channel surround sound so I need to go further. Likely, I'll be using a separate decoder and feeding the outputs to separate amplifiers for that. The Hitachi unit would be running the rear channels while a very nice Philips 7851 from 1977 is perfect for the front channel and has switchable speaker banks to allow the use of smaller speakers when I don't want to run the Mission units.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Can't do it Captain. I don't have the power!
I look at the standard American 115VAC 15A circuit and laugh. Not because I'm always maxing them out, but because when I do exceed their limits, I REALLY exceed those limits.
Fragwell Lab, I just discovered last night, has a dedicated 20A circuit on Fragwell Manor's 100A load center. I had thought I would need to upgrade the load center to be able to handle a stronger circuit for the lab, but after doing the math, no. Even with everything running, including the electric dryer, we're still not touching half of capacity. So the logical thing, then, is to run a bigger line to the lab.
I'd like to have the ability to run an EV charger one day if the opportunity arises, but that would be a pretty big load itself so I need to think big. A 230VAC circuit with a 30A rating it basically the minimum for me. I'm looking more toward 50A. That's like 11KW at full load. I'll certainly be running my own load center in the lab to break that out.
The loads:
Climate control:
15A 1 phase dedicated circuit
This will be for the A/C unit and, in the event the computers aren't providing enough heat during the winter, a ceramic heater. The cooler will be using the whole circuit when in cool mode. I doubt the heater will be needed.
Legacy Supercomputer:
20A 2-phase dedicated circuit
Legacy is my planned eight-node render farm. The systems I have in mind don't come close to maxing even one phase line, but that's only with eight nodes. I could scale up or use systems that use a lot more energy at some point. The average stripped system will draw around 2A at full load. That's including the loss from the power supply, a basic video card, full memory slots, high speed LAN card and a hard drive. I mentioned heat output previously. You can see why I don't think the heater will ever turn on.
Legacy front-end:
15A 1 phase dedicated circuit
This is just where the main computer where I do my work will be set up. It won't come close to maxing the circuit.
Lights:
15A 1phase circuit
All lighting will be connected to this one.
DC rails:
20A 1 phase circuit
The DC center will be connected to this one. The plan is to have a 115VAC to 48VDC converter which will branch out to several sockets for use with DC-DC converters to drop the voltage to lower voltages such as 12VDC and 5VDC.
Fragwell Lab, I just discovered last night, has a dedicated 20A circuit on Fragwell Manor's 100A load center. I had thought I would need to upgrade the load center to be able to handle a stronger circuit for the lab, but after doing the math, no. Even with everything running, including the electric dryer, we're still not touching half of capacity. So the logical thing, then, is to run a bigger line to the lab.
I'd like to have the ability to run an EV charger one day if the opportunity arises, but that would be a pretty big load itself so I need to think big. A 230VAC circuit with a 30A rating it basically the minimum for me. I'm looking more toward 50A. That's like 11KW at full load. I'll certainly be running my own load center in the lab to break that out.
The loads:
Climate control:
15A 1 phase dedicated circuit
This will be for the A/C unit and, in the event the computers aren't providing enough heat during the winter, a ceramic heater. The cooler will be using the whole circuit when in cool mode. I doubt the heater will be needed.
Legacy Supercomputer:
20A 2-phase dedicated circuit
Legacy is my planned eight-node render farm. The systems I have in mind don't come close to maxing even one phase line, but that's only with eight nodes. I could scale up or use systems that use a lot more energy at some point. The average stripped system will draw around 2A at full load. That's including the loss from the power supply, a basic video card, full memory slots, high speed LAN card and a hard drive. I mentioned heat output previously. You can see why I don't think the heater will ever turn on.
Legacy front-end:
15A 1 phase dedicated circuit
This is just where the main computer where I do my work will be set up. It won't come close to maxing the circuit.
Lights:
15A 1phase circuit
All lighting will be connected to this one.
DC rails:
20A 1 phase circuit
The DC center will be connected to this one. The plan is to have a 115VAC to 48VDC converter which will branch out to several sockets for use with DC-DC converters to drop the voltage to lower voltages such as 12VDC and 5VDC.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
History Lesson
I ran across a page that was supposed to be about 100 battery types, but had a lot more information that that on it. Over the course of a week at work, I still didn't finish reading it during my downtime. At the moment, I'm only up to World War II. It's kind of Euro-centric, but that's a desired change of pace. There are even humorous side-notes about inventors.
Here's a link: http://www.mpoweruk.com/history.htm
It's a lot of information in a small space. I'll be saving a copy for my daughter to read later on down the line when she's ready. Maybe I'll make storytime out of it in a while.
Here's a link: http://www.mpoweruk.com/history.htm
It's a lot of information in a small space. I'll be saving a copy for my daughter to read later on down the line when she's ready. Maybe I'll make storytime out of it in a while.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Ooooo that smell....
I've rebuilt Lithium Ion battery packs before, but I've never used the technique I tried with this most recent one. At work, we have more than a few Li-Ion packs that are unable to be shipped for various defects. It's sad to let these cells go to waste, but it's sometimes unavoidable. My most recent project required five bad packs to complete. Two would die.
When I rebuild Lithium-Ion packs, I have the luxury of new cells. This is a requirement, in my mind, since there's no practical way around the 2-3 year design life of the cells before the internal resistance goes too high for most applications. If I'm going to go to the trouble of it all, it has to be a long-term thing.
Normally, when rebuilding battery packs, I would leave the welded tabs attached and just solder them together in the proper configuration. This works in most cases, but it takes a long time to make everything fit just right. For this rebuild, I tried a new technique I'll explain in the main part of this write-up. Also, when I rebuilt packs in the past, I made sure the parallel cells are matched, but left the series side of things to the charge circuitry. It worked for the Dell and Apple systems I've done rebuilds on, but not for the Toshiba. Here's the story.
I knew I was getting into uncharted territory when I decided I was going to solder directly to the cells I was using for the rebuild. This is risky business since high temperatures are the mortal enemy of most battery types, more-so for Li-Ion technology as evidenced by the rash of recent recalls (that "r" shit was unavoidable).
To remove the tabs from the old cells, I used an X-acto razor. I went through two blades for this. Removing the strips from the new cells used another blade. the positive ends didn't require much dwell time as they aren't in full contact with the guts of the battery. The negative cans, however, require efficiency and a lot of flux. I found a multi-point approach works best, tinning a few small spots with a bit of cooling time between them. With about six small spots completed, I add more flux and scratch the battery can with the tip in a circular motion until the entire contact area is tinned. Then, I quickly press the battery can against something metal to drain the heat. It worked four out of five times. The fifth time, I ended up with an internal short and hot cells that I quenched under a drinking fountain and took outside.
With my new cells prepared, I desoldered the original strips from the control board and tinned them for attachment. I taped the banks together and quickly soldered them by holding my iron against the straps to melt the solder. The resulting joint wasn't smooth, but it was a good joint. I used the razor knife to cut the excess solder off the top of the connection to avoid fit and finish problems.
With the pack rebuilt and totally not RoHS compliant at this point, I put the whole thing back together and let it charge. Charge it did. And I ran it down that night, charged it up and ran it down again. I noticed the next day that the system would disown the battery pack during charging, but still would run off of it. Leaving the system on standby overnight would normally be easy for such a system, but I found that it was dead the following morning. I took it to work and found that the center bank was reading about .1VDC and had some fluid leaking out that smelled like a combination of alcohol and acetone. Okay, time to replace the cells in that bank.
I found another suitable donor and cannibalized the cells, once again leaving charge balancing up to the system. Didn't work. The end banks charged fully and the system disowned the battery pack again. Opening the pack, I found that the center bank was reading 3.5VDC while the end banks were around 4.2VDC. Not good. I left it like this for a day while deciding what to do.
The next day at work, I used a mass of LEDs to drain the cells on all banks down to 3.2VDC and then charged the pack again. It worked, but there was more of that fluid again. I don't know what it is, but it seems only to come from the center bank. Regardless, the battery pack discharged just fine and recharged for a while before I shut my system do to head home early for lack of work.
The new 12-cell battery pack I ordered from an eBay seller arrived soon after I went home so I charged that overnight. Today, I opened the rebuilt pack to check the voltages and the center bank is hanging around 3.95VDC while the others are 4.1VDC. Given the pack only had a 30% charge, I expected it to be unbalanced, but time will tell. There was more weird-smelling fluid from the center bank again, but nowhere near as much this time. I hope it will stop coming out eventually.
I plan to use the new battery pack only when I'm going mobile while the rebuilt pack will be used when I am plugged into the wall or the new pack is warming up. The new pack will be stored in a fridge when not in use.
When I rebuild Lithium-Ion packs, I have the luxury of new cells. This is a requirement, in my mind, since there's no practical way around the 2-3 year design life of the cells before the internal resistance goes too high for most applications. If I'm going to go to the trouble of it all, it has to be a long-term thing.
Normally, when rebuilding battery packs, I would leave the welded tabs attached and just solder them together in the proper configuration. This works in most cases, but it takes a long time to make everything fit just right. For this rebuild, I tried a new technique I'll explain in the main part of this write-up. Also, when I rebuilt packs in the past, I made sure the parallel cells are matched, but left the series side of things to the charge circuitry. It worked for the Dell and Apple systems I've done rebuilds on, but not for the Toshiba. Here's the story.
I knew I was getting into uncharted territory when I decided I was going to solder directly to the cells I was using for the rebuild. This is risky business since high temperatures are the mortal enemy of most battery types, more-so for Li-Ion technology as evidenced by the rash of recent recalls (that "r" shit was unavoidable).
To remove the tabs from the old cells, I used an X-acto razor. I went through two blades for this. Removing the strips from the new cells used another blade. the positive ends didn't require much dwell time as they aren't in full contact with the guts of the battery. The negative cans, however, require efficiency and a lot of flux. I found a multi-point approach works best, tinning a few small spots with a bit of cooling time between them. With about six small spots completed, I add more flux and scratch the battery can with the tip in a circular motion until the entire contact area is tinned. Then, I quickly press the battery can against something metal to drain the heat. It worked four out of five times. The fifth time, I ended up with an internal short and hot cells that I quenched under a drinking fountain and took outside.
With my new cells prepared, I desoldered the original strips from the control board and tinned them for attachment. I taped the banks together and quickly soldered them by holding my iron against the straps to melt the solder. The resulting joint wasn't smooth, but it was a good joint. I used the razor knife to cut the excess solder off the top of the connection to avoid fit and finish problems.
With the pack rebuilt and totally not RoHS compliant at this point, I put the whole thing back together and let it charge. Charge it did. And I ran it down that night, charged it up and ran it down again. I noticed the next day that the system would disown the battery pack during charging, but still would run off of it. Leaving the system on standby overnight would normally be easy for such a system, but I found that it was dead the following morning. I took it to work and found that the center bank was reading about .1VDC and had some fluid leaking out that smelled like a combination of alcohol and acetone. Okay, time to replace the cells in that bank.
I found another suitable donor and cannibalized the cells, once again leaving charge balancing up to the system. Didn't work. The end banks charged fully and the system disowned the battery pack again. Opening the pack, I found that the center bank was reading 3.5VDC while the end banks were around 4.2VDC. Not good. I left it like this for a day while deciding what to do.
The next day at work, I used a mass of LEDs to drain the cells on all banks down to 3.2VDC and then charged the pack again. It worked, but there was more of that fluid again. I don't know what it is, but it seems only to come from the center bank. Regardless, the battery pack discharged just fine and recharged for a while before I shut my system do to head home early for lack of work.
The new 12-cell battery pack I ordered from an eBay seller arrived soon after I went home so I charged that overnight. Today, I opened the rebuilt pack to check the voltages and the center bank is hanging around 3.95VDC while the others are 4.1VDC. Given the pack only had a 30% charge, I expected it to be unbalanced, but time will tell. There was more weird-smelling fluid from the center bank again, but nowhere near as much this time. I hope it will stop coming out eventually.
I plan to use the new battery pack only when I'm going mobile while the rebuilt pack will be used when I am plugged into the wall or the new pack is warming up. The new pack will be stored in a fridge when not in use.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Frankenstein.
I hit another sale recently and hauled a lot of fun stuff away with me. I was lucky to get all that I did. I was only there for one particular item, which I got. Everything else was a bonus.
I was about 20th in line so I knew my chances were great. I hoped that nothing had been messed with overnight and, to my delight, my target was on the table where I left it. I grabbed it and headed over to the broken laptop table to scavenge. I picked up two Fujitsu Lifebook S7010D systems and a Gateway Solo at $1 each. I headed toward the back to stake my gathering spot.
On the way, I saw a Dell 1800FP in broken form that was worth the $1 asking price. I grabbed that. On the way further back, I saw what appeared to be a 17" iMac G4 and grabbed that, too. My arms were full. And I was stuck, but I found my spot. From my base, I spied two IBM servers I thought would be snapped up quickly at $5 each. They were still there. With my eyes always on my haul, I made the move to get the servers and ended up carrying both back to join the rest of the group. Interesting I found out later that the minimum weight for each server is 85lbs.
With my claim ticket and all my stuff taped off, I looked around for more goodies, grabbing an 8-port KVM switch with seven cable sets for $10, a VXA tape drive for $1, a few AC adapters for Toshiba laptops at $1 each and a VGA to 5 BNC adapter cable (rarely useful, but when you need one, there's no substitute). As I made the rounds to check out the Apple airports, I saw another 1800FP that had been left behind, likely due to the scrape down the front of the display. I grabbed it. It can be a lot of fun waiting for people to change their minds about things.
While looking around, I saw the guy who grabbed the huge plasma TV pushing it around in a cart with stuff stacked on the display panel. "More power to him if he wants it shattered," I thought.
The iMac G5 I had seen hiding under a table while I looked at servers and pulled out to look at was nowhere to be seen. It wasn't all that big, anyway. But well worth the price.
It took two hours to get out of there, but I was very pleased with the results.
My target:
Toshiba Tecra M2 (display not working)
Pentium M 1.5GHz Dothan CPU
512MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM
80GB 5400RPM hard disk (Right on!)
DVD-RW drive (hell yes!)
Nvidia GeForce FX5200 Go GPU (nice!)
14.1" SXGA+ LCD (Sweet!)
adapter included (Excellent!)
battery that will actually work for an hour or more (w00t!)
I turned it on while waiting in the checkout line and found that the display did work, but had the telltale red tint of a backlight tube that was long gone. I replaced it with one that I had had sitting around in a cracked display for two years. The display issue was fixed. I wished the panel had been a 15" so I could swap the dead-sexy S-IPS panel from my excess Dell laptop into it, but no such luck.
Looking at the Fujitsu laptops, I was able to decipher that the CPUs were 1.7GHz units. It was then that I had the bright idea to upgrade the CPU in the Tecra M2. It didn't work like I had expected it to. Turns out I had to run a configuration program to get the thing to recognize properly. And, when that was done, I realized that the CPU was a Banias Pentium M with half the L2 cache of the Dothan and higher power consumption at full load. After debating for a while whether I should give up cache and battery life in favor of a faster clock rate, I looked at the other Lifebook and saw that I had swapped the wrong CPU. One had a 1.7GHz Banias while the other had a 1.7GHz Dothan. I took that out and put it in the Tecra. It worked just fine. I replaced the nasty factory thermal compound with Arctic Silver Ceramique, put the system back together and did a full OS wipe to reinstall Windows XP Pro.
I couldn't get the Lifebooks to work. This was a shame since one was showing promise as a possible journal system due to the white keyboard with black lettering and the fact that, between the two systems, I had two battery packs, a DVD-RW drive and a drive bay secondary battery. It's just a shame that the S7010D model of Lifebooks is built like ass. Even after heatgun reflow of the motherboard I couldn't get the better of the two systems to play nice. I'm sure I'll have another shot at it soon. Oh well.
I sat the iMac on my desk at home and realized it wasn't a 17" model when I compared it to my 20" 4:3 aspect Dell display. It turned out to be a 20" model that was merely missing the memory, the internal drives and the carrier bracket they are mounted to. I was able to test the system, at least, by running my Powerbook G4 Ti in Firewire Target Disk mode to act as an optical drive and installing OSX Panther to a spare 160GB disk I had sitting free in the system with two receipts acting as insulation between the drive and the motherboard. It worked.
With an external CD drive connected (can't boot, but will work one in the OS), I attempted a World of Warcraft install. Didn't work. Oh well. Blender ran fine.
The KVM will be used for a later project involving a renderfarm I've been wanting to build. I have access to a lot of computers and, with an 8-port KVM, I won't be flying blind when a system needs special attention. I've already got an 8-port PDU that I can control from the network. I need a big network switch, a dedicated queue manager and a few cheap computers to have my renderfarm. Sounds like a fall project to me.
With two more 1800FP panels, I have a decent collection of matching S-IPS displays. I will have to get them working and see what kind of damage they have, if any. I have seen more than a few with dark spots from pressure points. The working one I have doesn't suffer from those. If I were really lucky, both of the new additions would be as pristine as the working one.
I was about 20th in line so I knew my chances were great. I hoped that nothing had been messed with overnight and, to my delight, my target was on the table where I left it. I grabbed it and headed over to the broken laptop table to scavenge. I picked up two Fujitsu Lifebook S7010D systems and a Gateway Solo at $1 each. I headed toward the back to stake my gathering spot.
On the way, I saw a Dell 1800FP in broken form that was worth the $1 asking price. I grabbed that. On the way further back, I saw what appeared to be a 17" iMac G4 and grabbed that, too. My arms were full. And I was stuck, but I found my spot. From my base, I spied two IBM servers I thought would be snapped up quickly at $5 each. They were still there. With my eyes always on my haul, I made the move to get the servers and ended up carrying both back to join the rest of the group. Interesting I found out later that the minimum weight for each server is 85lbs.
With my claim ticket and all my stuff taped off, I looked around for more goodies, grabbing an 8-port KVM switch with seven cable sets for $10, a VXA tape drive for $1, a few AC adapters for Toshiba laptops at $1 each and a VGA to 5 BNC adapter cable (rarely useful, but when you need one, there's no substitute). As I made the rounds to check out the Apple airports, I saw another 1800FP that had been left behind, likely due to the scrape down the front of the display. I grabbed it. It can be a lot of fun waiting for people to change their minds about things.
While looking around, I saw the guy who grabbed the huge plasma TV pushing it around in a cart with stuff stacked on the display panel. "More power to him if he wants it shattered," I thought.
The iMac G5 I had seen hiding under a table while I looked at servers and pulled out to look at was nowhere to be seen. It wasn't all that big, anyway. But well worth the price.
It took two hours to get out of there, but I was very pleased with the results.
My target:
Toshiba Tecra M2 (display not working)
Pentium M 1.5GHz Dothan CPU
512MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM
80GB 5400RPM hard disk (Right on!)
DVD-RW drive (hell yes!)
Nvidia GeForce FX5200 Go GPU (nice!)
14.1" SXGA+ LCD (Sweet!)
adapter included (Excellent!)
battery that will actually work for an hour or more (w00t!)
I turned it on while waiting in the checkout line and found that the display did work, but had the telltale red tint of a backlight tube that was long gone. I replaced it with one that I had had sitting around in a cracked display for two years. The display issue was fixed. I wished the panel had been a 15" so I could swap the dead-sexy S-IPS panel from my excess Dell laptop into it, but no such luck.
Looking at the Fujitsu laptops, I was able to decipher that the CPUs were 1.7GHz units. It was then that I had the bright idea to upgrade the CPU in the Tecra M2. It didn't work like I had expected it to. Turns out I had to run a configuration program to get the thing to recognize properly. And, when that was done, I realized that the CPU was a Banias Pentium M with half the L2 cache of the Dothan and higher power consumption at full load. After debating for a while whether I should give up cache and battery life in favor of a faster clock rate, I looked at the other Lifebook and saw that I had swapped the wrong CPU. One had a 1.7GHz Banias while the other had a 1.7GHz Dothan. I took that out and put it in the Tecra. It worked just fine. I replaced the nasty factory thermal compound with Arctic Silver Ceramique, put the system back together and did a full OS wipe to reinstall Windows XP Pro.
I couldn't get the Lifebooks to work. This was a shame since one was showing promise as a possible journal system due to the white keyboard with black lettering and the fact that, between the two systems, I had two battery packs, a DVD-RW drive and a drive bay secondary battery. It's just a shame that the S7010D model of Lifebooks is built like ass. Even after heatgun reflow of the motherboard I couldn't get the better of the two systems to play nice. I'm sure I'll have another shot at it soon. Oh well.
I sat the iMac on my desk at home and realized it wasn't a 17" model when I compared it to my 20" 4:3 aspect Dell display. It turned out to be a 20" model that was merely missing the memory, the internal drives and the carrier bracket they are mounted to. I was able to test the system, at least, by running my Powerbook G4 Ti in Firewire Target Disk mode to act as an optical drive and installing OSX Panther to a spare 160GB disk I had sitting free in the system with two receipts acting as insulation between the drive and the motherboard. It worked.
With an external CD drive connected (can't boot, but will work one in the OS), I attempted a World of Warcraft install. Didn't work. Oh well. Blender ran fine.
The KVM will be used for a later project involving a renderfarm I've been wanting to build. I have access to a lot of computers and, with an 8-port KVM, I won't be flying blind when a system needs special attention. I've already got an 8-port PDU that I can control from the network. I need a big network switch, a dedicated queue manager and a few cheap computers to have my renderfarm. Sounds like a fall project to me.
With two more 1800FP panels, I have a decent collection of matching S-IPS displays. I will have to get them working and see what kind of damage they have, if any. I have seen more than a few with dark spots from pressure points. The working one I have doesn't suffer from those. If I were really lucky, both of the new additions would be as pristine as the working one.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Hi. Die!
So my wife's Neon has been having aches and pains lately. Ever since some asstriscuit in a Civic rear-ended us on our way to a visit with her folks (Idiot: "You started moving and then stopped again." Us: "Not our fault you weren't watching the road and didn't leave enough room for that error." Nevermind the fact stick shift cars tend to move a bit after you let off the brake before you engage the clutch.), the coolant temp gauge has been having seizures. Her theory was the accident caused the fault. Mine was it was merely the proverbial anti-camel straw.
I looked under the hood after finding out where the sensor was located and found that the sensor wire insulation had severely deteriorated. I didn't know how far up the harness branch the effect had gone, but I knew that was the problem. After riding around for a couple of hours and having the sensor cause the car chime to warn of no temperature reading and then go into a seizure thinking the car was overheating, I had had enough. It was time to do something about it.
First thing I did was buy a new set of tools. I have several small sets, but they are of dubious quality and seem to be missing most of the stuff I actually use so I decided spending the money on a good set was better than tracking down sockets and such that may no longer be around. With that accomplished, I hit Auto Zone.
At Auto Zone, I tried to figure out how best to divide my purchases up to get maximum points on my card. I have two more now after buying a bottle of Seafoam, a can of white lithium spray grease, a set of Allen wrench style torx wrenches (for tomorrow's project of fixing the damned passenger side power window in my car), a new set of plugs for Alli's car, a plug gapper, anti-seize, plug boot dielectric and a roll of 3M molding tape for both cars, but mostly to reattach the piece of trim that came off of my car in like February and put the GTP emblem back on the driver's side after I refinish it.
The first thing I did was get down to work replacing the spark plugs. Oh dear God was that new territory. I had never seen spark plugs sitting six inches into the engine. Must be an overhead cam thing. Good thing I did have a six inch extender from an old tool kit because my new kit only had a 3" one. The second cylinder from the left was a weird one in my book. There was what looked like oil down in the pocket where the plug was. I don't know why it was there, but it was clean like straight from the bottle so I didn't figure a leak was to blame.
The old plugs were obviously done for. The two right plugs had the center electrode worn almost down to the insulator while the ground electrodes were worn back pretty far as well. The gap was probably .07" where .035" is said to be normal for that car. The two plugs that weren't so bad were still due for replacement for sure.
The new plugs are Bosch Platinums. I noticed that the plug wire for the second cylinder from the left didn't "click" into place on top of the plug. This concerns me a bit. I'm going to buy a new wireset just to be safe. The two left plugs probably weren't as worn out because they weren't getting as strong a spark to begin with.
After the plugs were replaced, I started work on digging out everything that needed to come out in order to reach the sensor. That was interesting. I had been thinking that the heater core pipes would have to come off, but that was not the case. I could reach everything well enough by removing the bolts that held the heater core pipes to the engine block and taking out the battery. I got chemical burns from that. There was a lot of electrolyte in the area of the battery. I neutralized that with baking soda water, rinsed, neutralized again and rinsed again. I will do another neutralize and rinse tomorrow before I put it all back together.
I was able to get the coolant temp sensor wire out and cutting the covering sleeve away confirmed my suspicions. The insulation had been completely eaten away. Not melted, eaten. There was no solid plastic left that I could see for most of the length of that branch of the harness. Maybe half and inch remained. The rest was shiny copper. Whatever had eaten the insulation wasn't corrosive to copper. I didn't see much of the telltale green corrosion anywhere on the wire. It's not going to be a fun wire to repair. I'll have to figure out how to reuse the same connector and jack the new wiring into the large harness trunk. Protecting the new wires is going to be difficult since heat and whatever dissolved the previous insulation needs to be avoided.
I looked under the hood after finding out where the sensor was located and found that the sensor wire insulation had severely deteriorated. I didn't know how far up the harness branch the effect had gone, but I knew that was the problem. After riding around for a couple of hours and having the sensor cause the car chime to warn of no temperature reading and then go into a seizure thinking the car was overheating, I had had enough. It was time to do something about it.
First thing I did was buy a new set of tools. I have several small sets, but they are of dubious quality and seem to be missing most of the stuff I actually use so I decided spending the money on a good set was better than tracking down sockets and such that may no longer be around. With that accomplished, I hit Auto Zone.
At Auto Zone, I tried to figure out how best to divide my purchases up to get maximum points on my card. I have two more now after buying a bottle of Seafoam, a can of white lithium spray grease, a set of Allen wrench style torx wrenches (for tomorrow's project of fixing the damned passenger side power window in my car), a new set of plugs for Alli's car, a plug gapper, anti-seize, plug boot dielectric and a roll of 3M molding tape for both cars, but mostly to reattach the piece of trim that came off of my car in like February and put the GTP emblem back on the driver's side after I refinish it.
The first thing I did was get down to work replacing the spark plugs. Oh dear God was that new territory. I had never seen spark plugs sitting six inches into the engine. Must be an overhead cam thing. Good thing I did have a six inch extender from an old tool kit because my new kit only had a 3" one. The second cylinder from the left was a weird one in my book. There was what looked like oil down in the pocket where the plug was. I don't know why it was there, but it was clean like straight from the bottle so I didn't figure a leak was to blame.
The old plugs were obviously done for. The two right plugs had the center electrode worn almost down to the insulator while the ground electrodes were worn back pretty far as well. The gap was probably .07" where .035" is said to be normal for that car. The two plugs that weren't so bad were still due for replacement for sure.
The new plugs are Bosch Platinums. I noticed that the plug wire for the second cylinder from the left didn't "click" into place on top of the plug. This concerns me a bit. I'm going to buy a new wireset just to be safe. The two left plugs probably weren't as worn out because they weren't getting as strong a spark to begin with.
After the plugs were replaced, I started work on digging out everything that needed to come out in order to reach the sensor. That was interesting. I had been thinking that the heater core pipes would have to come off, but that was not the case. I could reach everything well enough by removing the bolts that held the heater core pipes to the engine block and taking out the battery. I got chemical burns from that. There was a lot of electrolyte in the area of the battery. I neutralized that with baking soda water, rinsed, neutralized again and rinsed again. I will do another neutralize and rinse tomorrow before I put it all back together.
I was able to get the coolant temp sensor wire out and cutting the covering sleeve away confirmed my suspicions. The insulation had been completely eaten away. Not melted, eaten. There was no solid plastic left that I could see for most of the length of that branch of the harness. Maybe half and inch remained. The rest was shiny copper. Whatever had eaten the insulation wasn't corrosive to copper. I didn't see much of the telltale green corrosion anywhere on the wire. It's not going to be a fun wire to repair. I'll have to figure out how to reuse the same connector and jack the new wiring into the large harness trunk. Protecting the new wires is going to be difficult since heat and whatever dissolved the previous insulation needs to be avoided.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
[singing] Bicycle, bicycle
For years now, I've wanted an electric bike. I guess it's like the whole Power Wheels phenomenon from when I was a kid. It's just fun to make something move under power that's not your own.
Now that I'm doing for a living what I've been obsessed with since the age of eight, I can get into my craft a lot more without it being a pastime. Hence, my new project.
I'm kind of a treehugger at heart so I try to be environmentally conscious as much as possible without being penny wise and pound foolish. When I saw that a bunch of defunct big rig data recorder boxen were going to scrap, I jumped at the chance for salvage. The expensive satellite modems and venerable flash drives were saved, which was a good thing, but that's not what I was after.
Those particular units used a backup battery inside, one that's rated at 9.6VDC with a capacity of 2100mAh and uses the wonderful nickel metal-hydride technology in AA cells. Interesting to think that such a capacity would have required rather exceptional C cells, were it nickel-cadmium technology like most rechargeable cells were when I was a kid.
I've managed to salvage a total of sixty of the packs and a few charging boards. Far better they be reused than go to a recycler. I can't imagine the batteries would be easy to recycle, much less make the recycler any money.
Although it's unusual to power anything big off of so many cells, I find it kind of funny. It's like the electric cars that use hundreds or thousands of cells in their battery packs.
After careful consideration, it looks like I'll be keeping the packs as they are and just linking them up. I will be running four packs in parallel for each battery bank and three banks in series for 28.8VDC nominal with 8.4Ah capacity for each battery brick. Each brick will have a rather hilarious 96 cells inside.
Each battery brick will have a relay to disconnect each bank for charging. I will be using the charge boards I salvaged, but I need to see if I can bump the charge current up from the .5A setting they currently have. Even at four times that, I'm still in the C/4 range on charge rate, which should be fine much of the time. The charge boards, luckily, run off of a standard 12VDC supply, but appear to have a wide range of input. That's freaking easy to come by, even with solar. I'd really like to see a solar charger for this system.
The motor of the bike hasn't been decided on just yet. There's a company selling motor kits on ebay out of Seattle. I like what they have, but there's still the question of fit and whether I want to give up my three speed front gearing for a single-speed freewheeling sprocket.
In the meantime, I do have a test platform for all of this. A year ago, I bought a Pukka mini-bike for $50 and have had it in storage almost ever since, due to the lead acid batteries being expensive and the fact I look lame riding such a small bike. It will make a decent test bike since it's a 24V system and has a decent motor. I'm sure I'll be posting updates about this project a lot. Now I just need to figure out photos.
I plan to build at least five battery bricks and two charging systems. The idea is to have the ability to keep one brick torn apart for repair while one set is installed on the bike and another is charging. The two charging systems will allow two bricks to charge at the same time. Maybe I should build more than just two, in order to have a spare.
Now that I'm doing for a living what I've been obsessed with since the age of eight, I can get into my craft a lot more without it being a pastime. Hence, my new project.
I'm kind of a treehugger at heart so I try to be environmentally conscious as much as possible without being penny wise and pound foolish. When I saw that a bunch of defunct big rig data recorder boxen were going to scrap, I jumped at the chance for salvage. The expensive satellite modems and venerable flash drives were saved, which was a good thing, but that's not what I was after.
Those particular units used a backup battery inside, one that's rated at 9.6VDC with a capacity of 2100mAh and uses the wonderful nickel metal-hydride technology in AA cells. Interesting to think that such a capacity would have required rather exceptional C cells, were it nickel-cadmium technology like most rechargeable cells were when I was a kid.
I've managed to salvage a total of sixty of the packs and a few charging boards. Far better they be reused than go to a recycler. I can't imagine the batteries would be easy to recycle, much less make the recycler any money.
Although it's unusual to power anything big off of so many cells, I find it kind of funny. It's like the electric cars that use hundreds or thousands of cells in their battery packs.
After careful consideration, it looks like I'll be keeping the packs as they are and just linking them up. I will be running four packs in parallel for each battery bank and three banks in series for 28.8VDC nominal with 8.4Ah capacity for each battery brick. Each brick will have a rather hilarious 96 cells inside.
Each battery brick will have a relay to disconnect each bank for charging. I will be using the charge boards I salvaged, but I need to see if I can bump the charge current up from the .5A setting they currently have. Even at four times that, I'm still in the C/4 range on charge rate, which should be fine much of the time. The charge boards, luckily, run off of a standard 12VDC supply, but appear to have a wide range of input. That's freaking easy to come by, even with solar. I'd really like to see a solar charger for this system.
The motor of the bike hasn't been decided on just yet. There's a company selling motor kits on ebay out of Seattle. I like what they have, but there's still the question of fit and whether I want to give up my three speed front gearing for a single-speed freewheeling sprocket.
In the meantime, I do have a test platform for all of this. A year ago, I bought a Pukka mini-bike for $50 and have had it in storage almost ever since, due to the lead acid batteries being expensive and the fact I look lame riding such a small bike. It will make a decent test bike since it's a 24V system and has a decent motor. I'm sure I'll be posting updates about this project a lot. Now I just need to figure out photos.
I plan to build at least five battery bricks and two charging systems. The idea is to have the ability to keep one brick torn apart for repair while one set is installed on the bike and another is charging. The two charging systems will allow two bricks to charge at the same time. Maybe I should build more than just two, in order to have a spare.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Learning To Grill
No man should be without the ability to grill his food. No man should be limited to hot dogs and burgers.
Today, I learned how to grill Salmon. I learned the Cedar plank method and will be doing it again. It was easy. I soaked the plank for an hour, preheated the grill, brushed the fish with olive oil on both sides and coated both sides with Old Bay Seasoning. I had to use the training wheels of grill skill, aka: a meat thermometer, but the results spoke for themselves. Excellent.
Today, I learned how to grill Salmon. I learned the Cedar plank method and will be doing it again. It was easy. I soaked the plank for an hour, preheated the grill, brushed the fish with olive oil on both sides and coated both sides with Old Bay Seasoning. I had to use the training wheels of grill skill, aka: a meat thermometer, but the results spoke for themselves. Excellent.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Dumpster Diving? Not really...
So I dropped by the cardboard recycling dumpsters at the local walmart today on the way home from cleaning out the old apartment the rest of the way. After dumping the boxes and flipping a turn to get to the other side of walmart (needed Rockstar drinks), I saw something next to a randoms dumpster close to the recycle area.
I slowed down and looked to see what it was, thinking I was looking at a mini-fridge. On the front: "Haier"... Yup. I checked it out, noticing the box to a brand new mini fridge in the dumpster. There was a partial bottle of Lipton iced tea inside. Interesting. There was also condensation inside, making me think the fridge had recently been used. I loaded it in the car without giving it a second thought.
Upon arriving home, I plugged it in. Nothing. I felt the compressor and it was crazy hot from the sun. I decided to let it cool while looking at the hardware connected to it. It had two pieces of gear on it: A Klixon thermal protector and some strange module. I pulled the Klixon, thinking it was the problem. It clicked. Well, thermal protect was off now. Test again. Still no go.
What was the strange module? It had a number on it: p6r8mc. I looked it up and saw it was a starter. Compressor won't start without it. One datasheet later, I saw that I could disassemble it. I used a knife blade to pop the clip off. Inside, it was obvious what the problem was. One side of the PTC pill was fine, but the other was burned badly. The contact was also fried.
I scraped the oxidation off of the contact and put the starter back together with the contact on a small patch of still-functioning PTC plating. With the assembly back in place, I plugged the fridge back in to hear the compressor start back up. I had diagnosed the issue. Would the jerry rig hold? Nope.
I need to get a new starter. Not so easy, but if I can't find one, I will be able to build a circuit to perform the same function while using the original starter case as the connector for it.
Fragwell Manor needs a mini fridge for snacks. The thermo-electric one I had before the move died. It wasn't that great, anyway. This one will get cold under any ambient temperature condition and even has a freezer in it. And, it's bigger. This one will hold a lot more than 36 cans of soda.
To whomever left it behind (probably an RV traveler, from the look of things) , thank you.
I slowed down and looked to see what it was, thinking I was looking at a mini-fridge. On the front: "Haier"... Yup. I checked it out, noticing the box to a brand new mini fridge in the dumpster. There was a partial bottle of Lipton iced tea inside. Interesting. There was also condensation inside, making me think the fridge had recently been used. I loaded it in the car without giving it a second thought.
Upon arriving home, I plugged it in. Nothing. I felt the compressor and it was crazy hot from the sun. I decided to let it cool while looking at the hardware connected to it. It had two pieces of gear on it: A Klixon thermal protector and some strange module. I pulled the Klixon, thinking it was the problem. It clicked. Well, thermal protect was off now. Test again. Still no go.
What was the strange module? It had a number on it: p6r8mc. I looked it up and saw it was a starter. Compressor won't start without it. One datasheet later, I saw that I could disassemble it. I used a knife blade to pop the clip off. Inside, it was obvious what the problem was. One side of the PTC pill was fine, but the other was burned badly. The contact was also fried.
I scraped the oxidation off of the contact and put the starter back together with the contact on a small patch of still-functioning PTC plating. With the assembly back in place, I plugged the fridge back in to hear the compressor start back up. I had diagnosed the issue. Would the jerry rig hold? Nope.
I need to get a new starter. Not so easy, but if I can't find one, I will be able to build a circuit to perform the same function while using the original starter case as the connector for it.
Fragwell Manor needs a mini fridge for snacks. The thermo-electric one I had before the move died. It wasn't that great, anyway. This one will get cold under any ambient temperature condition and even has a freezer in it. And, it's bigger. This one will hold a lot more than 36 cans of soda.
To whomever left it behind (probably an RV traveler, from the look of things) , thank you.
Fragwell Manor Introduction
The original Fragwell Manor was a three-story house built in the early 1900s. The new Fragwell Manor is a 1996 Champion single-wide mobile home.
The idea with Fragwell Manor has always been ninja-stealth. The outside should look kind of plain, but nice. Inside, however, should look great. Choosing a trailer scored a lot of plainness points. What was interesting is the fact that it doesn't look like any trailer I've ever been in. It looks like a house inside.
Perfect project house, but it needs a lot of work outside. The grass isn't grass at all. It's a bunch of weeds and morning glory plants holding hands.
I have already done a bit of work. The cost so far:
a gallon of Roundup spot-killing the worst weeds and clearing the walkways
one cheapass Weed Eater trimmer. It died a horrible death with much smoke and arcing. IT didn't even last through the original trimmer line spool it came with. Piece of crap.
One can wasp and hornet killer to take out the nests on the back door and the wood frame that holds the swamp cooler up.
New swamp cooler pump. The original one was the cheap kind that you have to replace every season. The new one is a lot more robust and has a motor four times the size of the dead one.
A block of unknown... something... that you put in swamp cooler reservoirs to make them smell better and keep mineral scale off of the cooler pads.
Things to come soon:
new water line to the cooler since the one on it now is taped in five places and still leaks. At least I can recycle the copper for money. The new line will be plastic.
swamp cooler needs to be moved from the kitchen window to the living room window. It keeps blowing out the pilot lights on our gas range. Not much gas to speak of, but it's still dangerous. Other than that, the new position will allow the air to blow more evenly.
new gas range. Even with the pilot lights saved by relocation of the cooler, pilot lights still use fuel and are still an open flame. We want electric ignition.
Weeds must die. Short of taking a propane ditch torch to them all, they must be killed.
The idea with Fragwell Manor has always been ninja-stealth. The outside should look kind of plain, but nice. Inside, however, should look great. Choosing a trailer scored a lot of plainness points. What was interesting is the fact that it doesn't look like any trailer I've ever been in. It looks like a house inside.
Perfect project house, but it needs a lot of work outside. The grass isn't grass at all. It's a bunch of weeds and morning glory plants holding hands.
I have already done a bit of work. The cost so far:
a gallon of Roundup spot-killing the worst weeds and clearing the walkways
one cheapass Weed Eater trimmer. It died a horrible death with much smoke and arcing. IT didn't even last through the original trimmer line spool it came with. Piece of crap.
One can wasp and hornet killer to take out the nests on the back door and the wood frame that holds the swamp cooler up.
New swamp cooler pump. The original one was the cheap kind that you have to replace every season. The new one is a lot more robust and has a motor four times the size of the dead one.
A block of unknown... something... that you put in swamp cooler reservoirs to make them smell better and keep mineral scale off of the cooler pads.
Things to come soon:
new water line to the cooler since the one on it now is taped in five places and still leaks. At least I can recycle the copper for money. The new line will be plastic.
swamp cooler needs to be moved from the kitchen window to the living room window. It keeps blowing out the pilot lights on our gas range. Not much gas to speak of, but it's still dangerous. Other than that, the new position will allow the air to blow more evenly.
new gas range. Even with the pilot lights saved by relocation of the cooler, pilot lights still use fuel and are still an open flame. We want electric ignition.
Weeds must die. Short of taking a propane ditch torch to them all, they must be killed.
The Fragwell Project
Almost every guy has had a clubhouse of sorts when he was younger. You need a place to hang out with your friends. As you get older and grow, you need more space. Luckily, your resources grow with you.
In 1999, we had our new clubhouse. We called it Fragwell Manor. It was an investment property bought by my mother and adoptive dad. During renovation, my brother, our friends and I used this house as our clubhouse... with running water, a toilet and a big screen TV. We would cook pizzas elsewhere (no oven on-site) and haul them to the house for movie nights. The plan was to eventually host LAN Parties there, but when my half-brother, Rick, started living there, we no longer had the location available.
Flash forward to 2008.
Times have changed a lot. The original Fragwell group has spread out. Some have children of their own--myself included.
Fragwell Manor wasn't just a clubhouse. It was intended to be a place where, like Wonka, some of my dreams become realities and some of my realities become dreams. To spell it out, it was supposed to be a laboratory of sorts.
Now that my wife and I are homeowners, it can finally happen. And, in fact, needs to. My lifetime passion (addiction?) has become my career. I need to take my game to the next level.
Over the next year, Fragwell Manor will be reborn. And it's going to be an interesting journey.
I'll be starting a new blog dedicated to Fragwell progress.
In 1999, we had our new clubhouse. We called it Fragwell Manor. It was an investment property bought by my mother and adoptive dad. During renovation, my brother, our friends and I used this house as our clubhouse... with running water, a toilet and a big screen TV. We would cook pizzas elsewhere (no oven on-site) and haul them to the house for movie nights. The plan was to eventually host LAN Parties there, but when my half-brother, Rick, started living there, we no longer had the location available.
Flash forward to 2008.
Times have changed a lot. The original Fragwell group has spread out. Some have children of their own--myself included.
Fragwell Manor wasn't just a clubhouse. It was intended to be a place where, like Wonka, some of my dreams become realities and some of my realities become dreams. To spell it out, it was supposed to be a laboratory of sorts.
Now that my wife and I are homeowners, it can finally happen. And, in fact, needs to. My lifetime passion (addiction?) has become my career. I need to take my game to the next level.
Over the next year, Fragwell Manor will be reborn. And it's going to be an interesting journey.
I'll be starting a new blog dedicated to Fragwell progress.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Wow...
So I went to another sale the other day and, once again, didn't get exactly what I was after so I took my frustration out on the quintessential pile of broken laptops... by buying eight of them.
One that had caught my eye turned out to be a really good deal. It was $20 Inspiron 8200 and said the display didn't work, but would show an image on an external monitor. Cocky as I am (when I have a cache of Dell parts), I knew I'd be able to make it play nice so I snapped it up. Well, it and three other Dells ($1 each for a broken Latitude C840, Inspiron 4150 and Inspiron 5000).
As I was making my way through the line, I saw a docking station and power supply sitting on a cart. I checked the price and noticed they were $20. Checking the item number showed they were both included with my Inspiron 8200 purchase. Sweet bonus as the dock was the smaller one. I didn't have one of those.
Upon arriving home, I took the 8200 apart to find out what the deal was. The video board wasn't sitting straight so I suspected that to be the problem. With a reseat of that and the display connector (which looked more elegant than usual, I put a near-comatose battery in an started the system. I noticed that the display had a yellowish look to it while off, as well as a more glossy appearance. This was unique. I wondered what Setup would have to say about it.
Then the panel started up. I was outdoors when it happened so the difference wasn't as dramatic as it would later prove to be. In setup, I saw that the system had a 32MB Geforce4 440 Go GPU and the display was listed as UXGA Ultrasharp. Ultrasharp, eh? That's what my desktop LCD is. I thought it was some slight improvement that Dell played the marketing game with, but when I went inside and started the system again, I saw it was no ordinary notebook LCD. Additionally, UXGA isn't a common display resolution for a laptop.
When the panel was on and black, I had to look closely to see whether the backlight was even on. O RLY? Usually, I would see a horizontal band of darkness with grey at top and bottom when the screen was painted black and each eye would see a different image due to viewing angle problems. Not this time. What was going on here?
It turned out that this display was an expensive option on some of the systems which shared the same chassis, mostly because of the M50 workstation model. It was intended for the graphical design market. I will say this: It's the best laptop computer display I have ever seen. It's more bright than the display on my Alienware M9700, has the same apparent black level despite the extra brightness, and has colors that are way more rich. For a five year-old system, that's truly impressive.
My only wish is that this display was in a faster computer. The Pentium 4-M is not my favorite CPU by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd sooner have a Pentium 4 than a Pentium III. I'd rather, however, have a Pentium M.
I had to move the entire upper display assembly from the Inspiron 8200 to the $1 Latitude C840 since the 8200's fixed optical drive bay wasn't working. The casing doesn't match so I will have to change it over to the Latitude display casing. That will be where I will really have to be careful. Combining the two systems, I ended up with the following:
Dell Latitude C840:
Pentium 4 1.8GHz
1GB RAM (came with the $1 system)
30GB hard disk (came in the Inspiron)
Geforce4 440 Go 32MB
15" Ultrasharp UXGA LCD
24/24/10x CD-RW/DVD fixed bay drive
floppy drive module
Dell Inspiron 8200
Pentium 4 1.6GHz
256MB RAM
no hard disk
Geforce4 440 Go 32MB
15" UXGA LCD
24/10/10x CD-RW/DVD fixed bay drive
floppy drive module
While I was at the sale, I also picked up a stripped Dell desktop that still had the CPU in it. Yes, it was a Pentium 4, but it wasn't for me. It was for my wife. She was running a 2GHz Pentium 4 with the old 400MHz frontside bus. The chip from the stripped rig? 3GHz with an 800MHz frontside bus and Hyperthreading support. 50% better from the start, in addition to letting dual-channel RAM make a difference at long last and allowing her to play videos on her system while loading it down with other work due to Hyperthreading making the system think it has two CPUs. It really improved her World of Warcraft experience.
One that had caught my eye turned out to be a really good deal. It was $20 Inspiron 8200 and said the display didn't work, but would show an image on an external monitor. Cocky as I am (when I have a cache of Dell parts), I knew I'd be able to make it play nice so I snapped it up. Well, it and three other Dells ($1 each for a broken Latitude C840, Inspiron 4150 and Inspiron 5000).
As I was making my way through the line, I saw a docking station and power supply sitting on a cart. I checked the price and noticed they were $20. Checking the item number showed they were both included with my Inspiron 8200 purchase. Sweet bonus as the dock was the smaller one. I didn't have one of those.
Upon arriving home, I took the 8200 apart to find out what the deal was. The video board wasn't sitting straight so I suspected that to be the problem. With a reseat of that and the display connector (which looked more elegant than usual, I put a near-comatose battery in an started the system. I noticed that the display had a yellowish look to it while off, as well as a more glossy appearance. This was unique. I wondered what Setup would have to say about it.
Then the panel started up. I was outdoors when it happened so the difference wasn't as dramatic as it would later prove to be. In setup, I saw that the system had a 32MB Geforce4 440 Go GPU and the display was listed as UXGA Ultrasharp. Ultrasharp, eh? That's what my desktop LCD is. I thought it was some slight improvement that Dell played the marketing game with, but when I went inside and started the system again, I saw it was no ordinary notebook LCD. Additionally, UXGA isn't a common display resolution for a laptop.
When the panel was on and black, I had to look closely to see whether the backlight was even on. O RLY? Usually, I would see a horizontal band of darkness with grey at top and bottom when the screen was painted black and each eye would see a different image due to viewing angle problems. Not this time. What was going on here?
It turned out that this display was an expensive option on some of the systems which shared the same chassis, mostly because of the M50 workstation model. It was intended for the graphical design market. I will say this: It's the best laptop computer display I have ever seen. It's more bright than the display on my Alienware M9700, has the same apparent black level despite the extra brightness, and has colors that are way more rich. For a five year-old system, that's truly impressive.
My only wish is that this display was in a faster computer. The Pentium 4-M is not my favorite CPU by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd sooner have a Pentium 4 than a Pentium III. I'd rather, however, have a Pentium M.
I had to move the entire upper display assembly from the Inspiron 8200 to the $1 Latitude C840 since the 8200's fixed optical drive bay wasn't working. The casing doesn't match so I will have to change it over to the Latitude display casing. That will be where I will really have to be careful. Combining the two systems, I ended up with the following:
Dell Latitude C840:
Pentium 4 1.8GHz
1GB RAM (came with the $1 system)
30GB hard disk (came in the Inspiron)
Geforce4 440 Go 32MB
15" Ultrasharp UXGA LCD
24/24/10x CD-RW/DVD fixed bay drive
floppy drive module
Dell Inspiron 8200
Pentium 4 1.6GHz
256MB RAM
no hard disk
Geforce4 440 Go 32MB
15" UXGA LCD
24/10/10x CD-RW/DVD fixed bay drive
floppy drive module
While I was at the sale, I also picked up a stripped Dell desktop that still had the CPU in it. Yes, it was a Pentium 4, but it wasn't for me. It was for my wife. She was running a 2GHz Pentium 4 with the old 400MHz frontside bus. The chip from the stripped rig? 3GHz with an 800MHz frontside bus and Hyperthreading support. 50% better from the start, in addition to letting dual-channel RAM make a difference at long last and allowing her to play videos on her system while loading it down with other work due to Hyperthreading making the system think it has two CPUs. It really improved her World of Warcraft experience.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Some of the Best Things In Life Are Cheap
A few months back, I hit up a junk sale and bought a bunch of sick laptop computers. One of them was going to be my pet project as the price was right. You can't get much for $1 these days, but I did.
The victim (at first glance):
HP Omnibook 6100
Pentium III-M CPU @ 1GHz
512MB PC-133 SDRAM
no hard disk
16MB ATI Radeon Mobility M6 GPU
cracked 14.1" XGA LCD
Magnesium Alloy rear display casing
dead battery pack
Having experienced the joy of the Pentium M CPUs, I knew that the PIII-M was the missing link between it and the previous Pentium III chips. The Mobile Pentium III wasn't an ideal mobile CPU. Even though Intel added SpeedStep technology, allowing the CPU to decrease speed to save battery power, the voltage stayed the same. This isn't necessary. With the Pentium III-M, Intel changed their approach, dropping core voltage when speed is decreased. This was a huge help.
The cracked LCD was replaced with the display from an Omnibook 6000 with a bad trackstick I picked up (also for $1). Upon replacing this and starting the system, I was greeted with a password screen. Uh oh... Denied. I tried guessing the code and got nowhere so I went searching for a solution. There used to be a guy who would crack the codes using the hash code accessible through a key combination on startup, but this was back in 2006. After giving HP a call, intending to pay their $39 asking price for an unlock, I received a runaround with the usual confusion between a BIOS password and a hard disk password. No help (though the Canadian service rep lady was very nice), but HP/Compaq has stopped supporting Omnibooks, anyway, so I didn't expect much. They aren't IBM/Lenovo, after all.
Next! A trip to eBay later, I had my solution. A company there sells the chip that holds the password. They needed to know my display panel type, as the system keeps your LCD info in the same chip, but I was able to get the right one. The chip's not worth the immediate purchase asking price for such an old system, but it was well worth the $25 I paid for it to have a working computer.
I took the system apart using the service manual HP made available and came to find that the system had a secret that made it quite unique. In addition to having on-board LAN, it was also made with WiFi as an option. Mine didn't have the WiFi gear installed, but I would fix that soon. Having WiFi optional meant the mini-PCI card slot was open, but what I didn't expect was a second mini-PCI slot housing the modem underneath the hard drive slot. Bonus! The only other system I've ever seen with two mini-PCI slots is my Alienware M9700 and it's really no challenge to fit a second mini-PCI slot in such a large system. There is potential here.
I took the motherboard to work with me off-the-clock to solder the new chip in. Five minutes and a little lead-free solder later, the chip was installed. I drove home shortly after, antsy to see if I had resurrected yet another computer. An hour and a bunch of screws later, the system started without issue, but would shut off randomly because the battery pack was just _that_ bad. No matter. $45 and two days later, I had my new pack and could now go cordless.
Testing the battery life, I found that the system wasn't actively computing power consumption. It seemed to think that the constant load on the pack was 15W, working out to a 4hr battery life. Not true. Using some shareware I downloaded, I found that the actual discharge rate in dynamic mode worked out to a 6-7 hour battery life for the work I do. Fair enough. That's between 8 and 9 watts consumption. Not much heat there, which is easier on my lap than the 25-30W my Dell P4 laptop sucks down.
Having read up on the Radeon M6 GPU, I found that it wasn't really an all-out GPU at all. It doesn't have internal Transform and Lighting units, unlike most units today. Since my goal was to run a Nintendo64 emulator, I didn't really need this capability. I had run one on my Nvidia TNT2 card back in the day and it did fine. And that system was a 550MHz overclocked Celeron rig.
For fun, I attempted to run 3DMark2001SE on the system to see what would happen. With the driver Microsoft included with XP, it wouldn't run at default resolution. Updating to the HP-supplied driver allowed it to run. I scored 1948 3DMarks. That's a little over half the speed of the Radeon 7500 GPU and good enough for me. Project64 ran perfectly when I tested it with Mario Kart 64. And the colors... wow! I didn't expect them to be so bright.
I intend to use the computer for light 3D and CAD work since the display turned out looking better than I expected. While 16MB isn't much in the way of display RAM, it's enough to drive my display with XGA resolution while leaving a few megabytes for texture RAM.
I loaded my Proxim WiFi A/B/G card into the non-hidden mini-PCI slot and ran a spare cable/panel antenna combo I had from a Toshiba Tecra 8200 up to the top of the rear display casing where I attached the panel antenna to the portion of the case that wasn't metal. This was a far better location for the antenna than the one HP used. One small antenna hidden in the hinge portion of the system isn't going to get you far.
With drivers installed and the antenna hooked to the proper connector, I had succeeded in adding WiFi to my "new" laptop.
As for the second Mini-PCI slot, I took the modem out since I haven't needed a modem in six years. I could replace it with something and it looks like a USB 2.0 card is the most useful option. The cards are $50 and provide four USB 2.0 ports. I intend to find a way to convert the two USB ports on the rear of the system to 2.0 and feed the data lines of the original ports to internal accessories. I'm leaning toward Bluetooth and a wireless gamepad receiver. I'll keep an eye out for the card I want.
I wish the system wasn't so large, but I can't complain there. It was meant to replace my Toshiba Portege 3490CT, which I couldn't use as well as I'd have liked, owing to the cramped keyboard, 256MB RAM limit and problem with heat dissipation to locations other than my lap. The Omnibook weighs almost twice as much, but it's worth it.
Comparison:
CPU:
Omnibook: 1GHz PIII-M, 512K L2 cache, 133MHz frontside bus speed
Portege 3490CT: 700MHz Mobile PIII, 256K L2 cache, 100MHz frontside bus speed
CPU power save:
Omnibook: throttles back to 533MHz and drops core voltage
Portege 3490CT: throttles back to 500MHz with same voltage
CPU software power saving:
Omnibook: power-on-demand throttling
Portege 3490CT: duty-cycle throttling down to 133MHz speed equivalent (where I achieved 8W load)
RAM:
Omnibook: Two open slots, standard PC133 SODIMM, 1GB limit
The victim (at first glance):
HP Omnibook 6100
Pentium III-M CPU @ 1GHz
512MB PC-133 SDRAM
no hard disk
16MB ATI Radeon Mobility M6 GPU
cracked 14.1" XGA LCD
Magnesium Alloy rear display casing
dead battery pack
Having experienced the joy of the Pentium M CPUs, I knew that the PIII-M was the missing link between it and the previous Pentium III chips. The Mobile Pentium III wasn't an ideal mobile CPU. Even though Intel added SpeedStep technology, allowing the CPU to decrease speed to save battery power, the voltage stayed the same. This isn't necessary. With the Pentium III-M, Intel changed their approach, dropping core voltage when speed is decreased. This was a huge help.
The cracked LCD was replaced with the display from an Omnibook 6000 with a bad trackstick I picked up (also for $1). Upon replacing this and starting the system, I was greeted with a password screen. Uh oh... Denied. I tried guessing the code and got nowhere so I went searching for a solution. There used to be a guy who would crack the codes using the hash code accessible through a key combination on startup, but this was back in 2006. After giving HP a call, intending to pay their $39 asking price for an unlock, I received a runaround with the usual confusion between a BIOS password and a hard disk password. No help (though the Canadian service rep lady was very nice), but HP/Compaq has stopped supporting Omnibooks, anyway, so I didn't expect much. They aren't IBM/Lenovo, after all.
Next! A trip to eBay later, I had my solution. A company there sells the chip that holds the password. They needed to know my display panel type, as the system keeps your LCD info in the same chip, but I was able to get the right one. The chip's not worth the immediate purchase asking price for such an old system, but it was well worth the $25 I paid for it to have a working computer.
I took the system apart using the service manual HP made available and came to find that the system had a secret that made it quite unique. In addition to having on-board LAN, it was also made with WiFi as an option. Mine didn't have the WiFi gear installed, but I would fix that soon. Having WiFi optional meant the mini-PCI card slot was open, but what I didn't expect was a second mini-PCI slot housing the modem underneath the hard drive slot. Bonus! The only other system I've ever seen with two mini-PCI slots is my Alienware M9700 and it's really no challenge to fit a second mini-PCI slot in such a large system. There is potential here.
I took the motherboard to work with me off-the-clock to solder the new chip in. Five minutes and a little lead-free solder later, the chip was installed. I drove home shortly after, antsy to see if I had resurrected yet another computer. An hour and a bunch of screws later, the system started without issue, but would shut off randomly because the battery pack was just _that_ bad. No matter. $45 and two days later, I had my new pack and could now go cordless.
Testing the battery life, I found that the system wasn't actively computing power consumption. It seemed to think that the constant load on the pack was 15W, working out to a 4hr battery life. Not true. Using some shareware I downloaded, I found that the actual discharge rate in dynamic mode worked out to a 6-7 hour battery life for the work I do. Fair enough. That's between 8 and 9 watts consumption. Not much heat there, which is easier on my lap than the 25-30W my Dell P4 laptop sucks down.
Having read up on the Radeon M6 GPU, I found that it wasn't really an all-out GPU at all. It doesn't have internal Transform and Lighting units, unlike most units today. Since my goal was to run a Nintendo64 emulator, I didn't really need this capability. I had run one on my Nvidia TNT2 card back in the day and it did fine. And that system was a 550MHz overclocked Celeron rig.
For fun, I attempted to run 3DMark2001SE on the system to see what would happen. With the driver Microsoft included with XP, it wouldn't run at default resolution. Updating to the HP-supplied driver allowed it to run. I scored 1948 3DMarks. That's a little over half the speed of the Radeon 7500 GPU and good enough for me. Project64 ran perfectly when I tested it with Mario Kart 64. And the colors... wow! I didn't expect them to be so bright.
I intend to use the computer for light 3D and CAD work since the display turned out looking better than I expected. While 16MB isn't much in the way of display RAM, it's enough to drive my display with XGA resolution while leaving a few megabytes for texture RAM.
I loaded my Proxim WiFi A/B/G card into the non-hidden mini-PCI slot and ran a spare cable/panel antenna combo I had from a Toshiba Tecra 8200 up to the top of the rear display casing where I attached the panel antenna to the portion of the case that wasn't metal. This was a far better location for the antenna than the one HP used. One small antenna hidden in the hinge portion of the system isn't going to get you far.
With drivers installed and the antenna hooked to the proper connector, I had succeeded in adding WiFi to my "new" laptop.
As for the second Mini-PCI slot, I took the modem out since I haven't needed a modem in six years. I could replace it with something and it looks like a USB 2.0 card is the most useful option. The cards are $50 and provide four USB 2.0 ports. I intend to find a way to convert the two USB ports on the rear of the system to 2.0 and feed the data lines of the original ports to internal accessories. I'm leaning toward Bluetooth and a wireless gamepad receiver. I'll keep an eye out for the card I want.
I wish the system wasn't so large, but I can't complain there. It was meant to replace my Toshiba Portege 3490CT, which I couldn't use as well as I'd have liked, owing to the cramped keyboard, 256MB RAM limit and problem with heat dissipation to locations other than my lap. The Omnibook weighs almost twice as much, but it's worth it.
Comparison:
CPU:
Omnibook: 1GHz PIII-M, 512K L2 cache, 133MHz frontside bus speed
Portege 3490CT: 700MHz Mobile PIII, 256K L2 cache, 100MHz frontside bus speed
CPU power save:
Omnibook: throttles back to 533MHz and drops core voltage
Portege 3490CT: throttles back to 500MHz with same voltage
CPU software power saving:
Omnibook: power-on-demand throttling
Portege 3490CT: duty-cycle throttling down to 133MHz speed equivalent (where I achieved 8W load)
RAM:
Omnibook: Two open slots, standard PC133 SODIMM, 1GB limit
Portege 3490CT: 128MB on-board, one slot open, rare micro SODIMM socket, 256MB limit
Display Chipset:
Omnibook: ATI Radeon M6 with 16MB DDR RAM
Portege 3490CT: S3 Savage IX with 8MB RAM
LCD display:
Omnibook: 14.1" XGA TFT LCD
Portege 3490CT: 11.3" Polysilicon XGA TFT LCD (better technology)
Keyboard:
Omnibook: full-size with normal-size keys; Pg keys, home, end, ins and del set up and away
Portege 3490CT: smaller keyboard with rectangle layout. R-shift same size as regular key, Pg keys and others in that group are at the far right of the keyboard; arrow keys are not offset
pointing devices:
Omnibook: pointing stick and touchpad; buttons side-by-side
Portege 3490CT: pointing stick; buttons one-over-another
scroll buttons:
Omnibook: up/down scroll rocker between left and right pointing stick buttons
Portege 3490CT: small buttons placed, well-spaced, side-by-side above left-click button
battery:
Omnibook: 14.8VDC 4000mAh main pack; unavailable drive bay secondary pack
Portege 3490CT: 10.8VDC 3000mAh main pack; 2lb unavailable 10.8VDC 5600mAh secondary pack
speakers:
Omnibook: stereo speakers mounted in sealed plastic enclosure behind keyboard
Portege 3490CT: mono speaker mounted free-air below right-click button in palmrest
Friday, March 7, 2008
I Love Hunting
I don't hunt animals. I hunt silicon.
I went to a nearby sale, intending to get like three items, but when all of the ones I had specifically come for were snapped up, I went to Plan B--engulf and devour. As I watched the laptop I had intended to buy get carried away by someone who obviously overheard me talking about it, I knew it was time to just do what came naturally. I grabbed as many laptops as I could carry. Eight. Most were of the broken variety, but one was most surely not, judging by price.
I left behind two Omnibook 800 systems in favor of an Apple system when I realized the Omnibooks only had 16MB RAM and used custom modules.
What I ended up with:
Dell Latitude C840
Dell Latitude C640
Dell Latitude C600
HP Omnibook 6000
HP Omnibook 6100
IBM ThinkPad 560X
Apple iBook G3 Dual USB
The C840 was a killer deal. It was one of two computers that came with a hard disk. The other was the Apple. It also had a docking station with it. It was revamped at home with parts I had from a previous C840. I upgraded the CD-RW drive to a DVD/CD-RW drive, added another 256MB RAM module from the C640 to it, upgraded the CPU from the 1.6GHz P4-M that was in it to the P4 1.8GHz from the C640.
The C640 is on the sidelines for right now because it's a pretty base system, really.
The Omnibooks look pretty solid. I'm sure I'll be repairing them.
I went to a nearby sale, intending to get like three items, but when all of the ones I had specifically come for were snapped up, I went to Plan B--engulf and devour. As I watched the laptop I had intended to buy get carried away by someone who obviously overheard me talking about it, I knew it was time to just do what came naturally. I grabbed as many laptops as I could carry. Eight. Most were of the broken variety, but one was most surely not, judging by price.
I left behind two Omnibook 800 systems in favor of an Apple system when I realized the Omnibooks only had 16MB RAM and used custom modules.
What I ended up with:
Dell Latitude C840
Dell Latitude C640
Dell Latitude C600
HP Omnibook 6000
HP Omnibook 6100
IBM ThinkPad 560X
Apple iBook G3 Dual USB
The C840 was a killer deal. It was one of two computers that came with a hard disk. The other was the Apple. It also had a docking station with it. It was revamped at home with parts I had from a previous C840. I upgraded the CD-RW drive to a DVD/CD-RW drive, added another 256MB RAM module from the C640 to it, upgraded the CPU from the 1.6GHz P4-M that was in it to the P4 1.8GHz from the C640.
The C640 is on the sidelines for right now because it's a pretty base system, really.
The Omnibooks look pretty solid. I'm sure I'll be repairing them.
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