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. 

Future Project, further Education

There is a little pot of money that I have talked about before, it is the proceeds from selling off older technology, making profits from thrift store finds, pin money from my hobbies. The generator is one example of a purchase that could utilize "real" money, but I chose to use accumulated "free" money and oddly, buying stuff that might not be used, or for a future project, has zero guilt when procured with the free chuckles.

Yes, it is all chuckle money, but it is just a bit of fun, a game we play.

This beauty is a Dell PowerEdge T110 II 

I bought it a week before the generator, for fifty dollars of my self-imposed pocket money. I'd like to let that sink in for a moment, fifty dollars...

Ok, moment over. The specifications on the machine are Xeon E31220 V2, 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz with two Terrabyte HDDs driven by an LSI SAS2008 Raid Controller. It is licensed for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and perhaps other operating systems.

The machine is in near mint condition, even better now I have blown out the dust bunnies and given it a little polish.

It is the first server machine I have owned of this generation, and I really have no idea what I am going to do with it, I am not educated about the various nuances of RAID and twin drives or how to set up a server for that matter, at the current time in the house there appears to be no reason to have it running, but that is probably as I have no clue of the capabilities of the little box. 

It may become a Network Attached Storage, media server, or perhaps I will dabble in Red Hat Enterprise Linux if I can get my hands on a copy, but what it does present for me are opportunities in the New Year to further my computer education in different directions than I am versed in.

I will certainly keep you posted when this one sees the light of day once more.

All I want for Christmas...

As the parents are no longer around, it falls on our own shoulders to buy Christmas gifts, and as we had a power cut several weeks back, the thoughts of a Christmas generator have been in my mind. 

Last Monday was an exciting, yet slightly stressful day, such is the nature of the Facebook Marketplace, as in the past I have been "sniped" after a verbal agreement to buy, usually at the listed price, and then the seller breaking the deal because someone else came along and offered more. In this case, the seller, who was about 45 minutes away honored the deal that we agreed on the previous night. I woke during the night with that trepidation of someone stealing this away from me.

The excitement was quite disproportionate to the actual object, as I have been waiting for a month, and attempting negotiations with other sellers, too late many times as someone else has beaten me to a bargain, or faced with sellers who expected too much money for generators that are often relics from another age, unwilling to negotiate.

However, this was not the case and the seller was true to his word, and for one hundred Canadian dollars, we are now the owners of a Champion 1200 Watt Generator. It is the Christmas gift that we have all been waiting for and we have made sure that Tiny Tim will keep warm this year.

Merry Christmas everyone, here's hoping that 2022 will be a year full of hope and happiness.

The Five Hundred Buck Gaming Machine

It has been a month or more after the disappointment of the previos aborted attempt at a Ryzen build and I subsequently purchased a brand new MSI motherboard for the project, and as I had decided to build my "most modern" computer for my own daily driver, I wanted to use a larger, obsolete, used Antec case I had been saving which of course immediately goes against the most modern label.

I believe the project was completed today, I say that as I will know better when I've done some stress testing over the next week or so and monitored temperatures, memory timings, etc. I know now that at times, when a project appears to be finished, there may still be a few hurdles to vault before the end.

I'm interested in the total build cost, so without further ado, the new motherboard is an MSI Proseries, B450M at $83.99, the boot drive, a 500GB NVME M.2 Western Digital, was $53.75 and they were both from Amazon and include taxes and shipping. Interestingly, the M.2 was "open box" from Amazon Warehouse deals and arrived in perfect shape, twenty percent lower than their already low price.

The used items were the Ryzen 3 1200 and heatsink, at $70.49 and the 16GB G-Skill DDR4 at $61.96 and the Power supply, a new Corsair CX450M at 59.49 although it could be a used CX450M that I bought for just $15, however, I will record the higher price.

Additional items, the used Antec case with DVD and a Gigabyte WiFi card. I would estimate conservatively at $30 and that Asus Nvidia GTX 960 Mini 2GB graphics card was the most expensive item at $140 which I believe to be the most I have paid for a graphics card in the last year or so.

The Antec case included a couple of 120mm fans which I may add back in to this build, however, as I want a quiet computer, I will wait and see. They will not represent extra cost. It was apparent that one more system fan was rquired to keep the GPU temperature at a reasonable level.

I think that's it, so total cost for my "most modern" computer is $499.68 which I think is quite the bargain in these days of rapidly accelerating GPU prices, the GTX 960 is a native DirectX 12 card and it will easily handle the games I will be playing. In addition, the motherboard will handle several CPU upgrades over the next couple of years, when prices inevitably drop.

All prices in Canadian dollars.

Note. I added a single 120mm cooling fan to exhaust from the back of the case, it is a 4 pin PWM fan that is controlled via the motherboard, it is quiet and the overall sound level from the PC is very good.