When time goes by...

The post office is suitably clogged up at this time of the year, so I decided while I was waiting for the i5-3230M CPU to unclog itself I would remove the heat sink from one of the mini-ITX boards and show the process and reveal the G2 socket here on the blog.

However, that is not how my bench session panned out, as I decided that it would be wise that I should test various aspects of the elected motherboard before the heart transplant process, while impatiently waiting for the new heart to arrive.

Thus time slipped by as I tested WiFi, SATA function and RAM and I am sure before I do remove that tricky heatsink, I will find something else to test. It gives me a chance to be confident with the hardware before I assemble it back into a case to become my daily driver.

I find it odd that they call this size of ITX motherboard a mini-ITX because the 170mm x 170mm form factor is the original ITX size developed in 2001 by VIA technologies. The industry calling this a mini-ITX sort of indicating that there is an ITX motherboard bigger than that, which there is not.

The heatsink is retained with light spring pressure by five nylon pins. I have dealt with these type of pins before and I am a little wary of the removal process, but we will leave that until the next blog entry and that may mean that the new CPU will have arrived and I can complete the procedure.

Happy Holidays

A quick post for Christmas Day 2022, here we are in the house, the turkey and sausage meat are in the oven and that smell is permeating the air as I type. This is our thirty-fifth Christmas since being married back in 1987 and we have our own little ritual today, food of course, drink yes a bit, relaxing away from the crowds and all the daft stuff on the planet.

There is a present winging it's way to me from an eBay seller in Vancouver, a third generation CPU for one of the fanless boxes, an i5-3230M that was just twenty-one dollars, I will blog an entry when it arrives and I install it, along with some other things, it will be reported here. I also spent a whopping $2.45 on a vintage game on Steam yesterday, to run on my Linux Mint box, it is "Total Annihilation" from twenty years ago, a fantastic RTS, Real Time Strategy and I have already played a couple of games and beaten it once.

The year has been quite special for this Old Tech Geezer and I hope next year will be the same, or perhaps better, but here are the trends I am seeing from my bunker.

Graphics cards, GPUs, have finally become affordable again, ok let me rephrase that, some perfectly adequate GPUs have become affordable again, there will always be the leading edge hardware that most people will never consider throwing their money at, because we are wise, we are special, we know that we should not spend extra on redundant horsepower, because those extra dollars can be used to buy beer.

Seventh generation motherboards and CPUs from the ex-leasing environment have become very cheap, although it is a pity that most of the big guns, Dell, HP and Lenovo, insist on being proprietary on everything from peculiar motherboard form factors to not standard power supplies and connectors. In that respect though, the culled socketed processors are bargain priced while the motherboards, cases and those odd shaped power supplies, end up as e-waste. Sad.

Here, in my world, things can be exciting even down to third and fourth generation hardware, there is a certain wonder about "kicking the trend" of buying everything new and shiny, and old is good, not too old of course, but nevertheless, tech that is over half a decade old is still highly functional.

That's it then for now, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, when the nice postman delivers my "new" CPU I shall show how it is fitted into one of those industrial units from last month.

Cheers!

The five hundred buck gaming machine, part deux

This follows on from a post in October 2021 about my gaming machine and in the last few weeks there have been a couple of significant upgrades. 

The first was a much improved graphics card, or GPU, as due to the recent crash in crypto, prices have dropped somewhat, so in October, for $130 on marketplace, I purchased an ASUS GeForce GTX 1660 Super. In comparison to the original build GTX 960 the new card has 6GB GDDR6 memory versus 2GB GDDR5 and benchmarks about twice as fast. It also runs a lot cooler and quieter, rather pleased about that as those are two qualities I aim for in my daily driver computer.

The second upgrade was two weeks ago, I replaced the Ryzen 3 1200 CPU with a higher rated Ryzen 7 1700x, improving from a 4 core, 4 thread processor to an 8 core, 16 thread unit. In terms of benchmark, it is about 2.5 times as fast. The CPU was $75 with a brand new wraith cooler.

This is my way. A year had gone by and it was logical to upgrade, so in reality, some would argue that we should call the computer the seven hundred buck gaming machine, however, I will keep the proven ASUS Gefore GTX 960 and Ryzen 3 1200 to one side, which can be used to build, perhaps, a better computer for Karen if she needs it, although she is very happy with the one she currently has.

I will continue to call this the five hundred bucker, perhaps renamed to the 500B MkII this year, and if in future months or years I improve it again, I will report on the progress here.

Logic Supply LGX ML250 Fanless Industrial PC

The LGX ML250 is a Socket G2 based high-performance commercial computing unit in a silent, compact, fanless chassis. There, I said it, launched the sales pitch right from the off. The small box had two of these units, brand new, so those will probably be sold to finance this endeavour, I say probably in a reluctant way, because they are very shiny and new, lovely.

In the big box there were nine more of them, so a total of eleven, plus two other smaller units, a control unit and a dozen new enclosures. Each one of the eleven units has a Jetway NG9F-QM77 mini-ITX motherboard installed, most have a wide input M2-ATX-HV power supply, many have various RAM and mSATA units and three have RFID readers. There are few marked parts only, so I will see what the final tally will be over time.

I would expect in 2015 that the entire contents of those two boxes would have cost well over ten thousand dollars, perhaps even fifteen. It is true that electronics lose their value quickly, but with a little research I have found that my meagre two hundred dollars was well spent and I should recoup it easily with the unwilling sale of just one of the new units.

Here is one of the fully configured used units :

They have a custom IO shield that hides many of the motherboard ports, this particular unit has labelled connectors for SRA, LRA, 3G, GPS and WIFI and the power input has a broad range between 6 and 35 volts. The case is extruded aluminum and the upper part of the case makes contact with the CPU heatsink using thermal paste. In this unit, there is also a heatsink attached to an RFID unit which is also custom machined to contact the aluminum extrusion.

The above photo shows what is inside. A Jetway NG9F-QM77 motherboard with a Celeron 1020E processor running at 2.20 GHz, the heatsink for which is the big block in the middle. The circular aluminum block is heatsink for the RFID transmitter/receiver and under that is a half card mSATA WiFi card.

Upper middle of the case is the 4G and GPS unit, with SIM card mount and at the right of the photo is the M2-ATX-HV power supply which even with the small size can operate like a full ATX power supply. The two RAM sockets are hidden behind the large heatsink, but this unit has a single stick of 8GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM. Finally, hidden under the power supply is a 64GB industrial grade SSD drive.

In a nutshell, because the Jetway motherboard has HDMI output and (hidden by the IO shield) Realtek 5.1 channel Audio, WiFi, USB 3.0 and are fanless, they are perhaps a perfect media streamer candidate to be attached to a regular TV.  I will attempt to track my progress with the working units here over the next few months.

Always good to have something to do in the winter.

A box of scrap, the stuff of dreams

I spend a few hours a week looking at FB marketplace for electronic deals, usually picking up an improved CPU or GPU for our home computers which are the constant focus for incremental upgrades. In addition I buy from AliExpress and wait patiently for the postman, a recent upgrade was to the mSATA solid state drive on one of our NUCs, but making a post about that would just be repeating an older one.

A few weeks ago, I picked up two boxes of industrial grade, fanless, computers from a company who had long abandoned the intended project, computers from around 2015 that were destined for importance yet ended up being scrapped and recycled.

In my little world of fiddling, this is the sort of exciting stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning.

The large box had a bunch of fanless computers, cases and enclosures, the small box, two brand new units. I paid the company what they wanted, two hundred dollars without even knowing what I was getting into, the excitement was palpable and over the following week, every day, I delved deeper into the contents.

Still Crazy after all these weeks...

I've been following along with lessons for the Arduino, both the online videos and the printed versions, and the chap who does the videos on YouTube, Paul McWhorter, encourages his students to experiment, and to do homework. In the progress of each video, he will deliberately make mistakes, knowing that his followers will shout at the screen to correct the obvious syntax errors, a very effective way of teaching.

I've lit single LEDs, multiple LEDs, sequenced them, coupled the little buggers with switches, made active buzzers squawk, passive buzzers hum a tune, and generally been having a blast with this interesting little hobby. The last few excursions into code have been to adjust a little servo motor backwards and forwards, investigate a tilt switch, play about with a potentiometer and my face must be showing more signs of geekiness as the days pass.

Today, a little combo, use a potentiometer, analog read that input, adjust the input to suit the range of the servo motor and then move the servo into position, based on the rotary knob position. When all of that was done, I had a little shiver down the spine as the little plan had come together, that the code is not as intimidating any longer, that I have created some little bit of programming that could be useful.

To others, it may seem rudimentary, and if I stick at this hobby, in future years I will probably smile at these baby steps, little building blocks towards something.

Time will tell.

How hard can arduino be...

It's the start of another month, in another year, at home and looking for things to do, and one of the hobbies I have been long wanting to start, has started. 

In 1978 the powers that be required the young Ford apprentices to make a critical decision after the two year training point, two years in those of us that passed the ONC in mechanical and electrical engineering, at the heady age of 18, needed to make a decision as they moved on for the HNC and the next two years of our lives.

Mechanical or Electrical.

I chose mechanical engineering for my life at a time when I was hardly able to choose what trousers to wear.

Enough history though, I've long wished to refresh my knowledge of electrical things and have bought a few text books along the way, but have realised with time, simply owning text books do not make you smarter. In the last few years I have been watching "Big Clive" on youtube and his various projects have stirred me to purchase a breadboard kit and an arduino or two.

At the left a simple breadboard, run via a nine volt battery and a five volt converter, it has taught me once again about Ohms law, V=IR, and I have obtained a rudimentary understanding of how to light an LED, and the understanding that an LED is not a bulb, it is in fact, a light emitting diode...

At the right, an Arduino UNO board, which is an amazing little programmable microcontroller, and after running the BLINK program that blinks an onboard LED, I have today modified that program to transmit SOS and then, as shown above, modified the program further, to transmit SOS on an external blue LED on a small breadboard.

I am actually very excited about these baby steps towards understanding electronics a little more, it has been a long time since choosing the wrong trousers, and of course, pretending to be a mechanical engineer during my career did not do me any harm whatsoever, but it will be a nice pastime to make LEDs blink, stepper motors step and sensors sense.

And I don't know where it will end up, but I believe it will be fun trying.