December 2, 2010
As a "doesn't hurt to check" test I tested the Foxconn G9657MA-8EKRS2H board's
CMOS battery after dusting it off over the 3 years of use.
1.8 volts!!!
Hmm... a CR2032 should not be 1.8V. I plugged in another battery and tried to
power it up...
Fan came on!
Then it shut off... doh...
Pressed the power button again... fan came on again! And a beep!
Hmm... maybe it's working again! Connected a monitor and keyboard and quickly
got back to the command prompt once again. It seems to power up again!!!
Well, glad I have spare CR2032's on hand to test. And perhaps it was just
a bad battery that crippled the old board that was RMA'ed.
Now off to update Ouka's dilapidated Gentoo install.
November 29, 2010
Well, it looks like my Foxconn G9657MA-8EKRS2H motherboard broke.
Seems like the exact same symptoms as the board I RMA'ed three years ago --
looks like the power on circuitry was poorly
designed. I guess this is yet another project to work on... too bad, it was
my third fastest single thread machine and second fastest dual thread machine
... (Q9550S@3GHz > E6700@2.67GHz > P4-3.2GHz > Q6600@2.4GHz (in MD))
... This was suspicious as the failure was detected with the failure of the
PSU, perhaps the PSU went out of spec and damaged the poorly designed power on
circuitry?
Wish that my P4 board would take Core2's... much rather use the Core2.
Been trying to get my GT701-WG to accept OpenWRT. Have not been successful.
Seems it would always crash while booting the new image.
November 18, 2010
Bought some Nickel-Zinc batteries from Tuesday Morning. Bought an 8-pack of
AA's. Wanted to get some characteristics from them:
Out of the pack they were mostly around 1.3V which indicates completely
discharged. One was at 1.5V which is also basically discharged. I put it into
my flashlight and it lit up for a while then dimmed down... NOW it's discharged
just like the rest of them.
I put all 8 in series into a 8-AA holder. I didn't have a
NiZn charger so I used my homemade digital power supply.
Unfortunately the power
supply hit rail at 15.3 volts so it can't regulate anymore there. However
current regulation still works, sort of at least, as it hasn't hit rail. I
charged them around 75% based on time and current.
| Cells | Capacity | Open | Load tested | Under Load | DC Int Resistance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| pack of 8 | 2500mWH*8 | 14.72V | 0.33A | 14.54V | 545mΩ |
| Calculated Single | 2500mWH =~ 1.5AH | 1.84V | 0.33A | 1.82V | 68.2mΩ |
| one of my NiMH | 2AH =~ 2600mWH | 1.30V | 1A | 1.15V | 150mΩ |
November 15, 2010
Finished cutting holes and drilled most needed holes into the repurposed ATX
PSU case. Still need to install front binding jacks and install variable
resistor controls, as well as final wiring. Scavanged the old homemade PSU
for parts... was quite a few parts scavanged. Will be using one LM317T as a
constant current source as the primary stage, and one LM317T as the voltage
control for the second stage, hopefully it will work fine as a constant current
supply with the voltage turned up all the way...
November 13, 2010
Brought two gallons of used motor oil and two gallons of used antifreeze to
the recycling center. Wish I could actually recycle/reuse both but don't have
any way of purifying or safely burning...
November 7, 2010
Changed antifreeze in my Impreza. Started cutting out holes for two analog
meters in a repurposed ATX PSU case... The nibbling tool was a PITA.
October 19, 2010
Got a 2GB DDR2 SODIMM for my eeePC. Now no more RAM errors! Now hope all
compiles and operations are consistent, and no more random bit failures...
Also unfortunately ordered a Displayport -> VGA adaptor...except it's one
of those cursed mini displayport plugs that are only used on apple products...
what a waste... now wonder what I'll do with this trash...
October 18, 2010
Looks like first freeze of the season tonight.
October 10, 2010
In the wee hours of the morning (or late at night) I kicked off a compile for
another kernel for doujima. After getting up for the day I rebooted doujima
with the new kernel. Unfortunately serial console seemed to have failed, but
after a few tries with that and disabling ATI kernel mode setting,
I finally got libata to work with the RAID array with a new kernel. Not sure
why all those old kernels failed to detect partitions and thus the RAID.
Well, finally, the last major machine that hasn't been migrated to libata is
done. Now if Mughi could also be...
October 8, 2010
Went to a company function - celebration this evening for a milestone.
Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't have botherred going... feel like the weird
one out going alone...
October 2, 2010
... and Redeemed the HFT Flashlight Free Coupon (okay, see Sept 30 entry if
this is confusing). It's one of the black cased flashlights.
I already had an Romisen RC-G2 Cree based 1W flashlight and was eager to
compare them.
I was kind of surprised how bright it was (it has no spot, but its flood was
fairly bright), but I still
like my RC-G2 more.
The flood of the RC-G2 was dimmer than the flood of the free flashlight, but
the focused spot was much brighter.
Also the Single AA versus 3xAAA is much easier to manage.
I also prefer the whiteness of the RC-G2 as the HFT 9-LED light is notably
blue-purple.
September 30, 2010
Got a HFT Flashlight Free Coupon...
September 29, 2010
Added a few resistors to the two analog panel meters to make them into
a 20V (20Kohm) voltmeter and a 3.5A (0.5ohm) ammeter. Kind of funny, why
analog? Because I then don't need a battery to run a digital one...
Built a 8mA current source and attached it to a low voltage transformer PSU
and used it as a charge maintainer for NiCd/NiMH batteries... Tired
of batteries that self-discharged....
September 26, 2010
hmm... no updates in a while.. Guess I'll have to add one.
Went to the Boulder Amateur Radio Club hamfest. Not way too much, but the
junk lootfest. Ended up grabbing a whole boatload of bits and pieces including
lots of parts, transformers, an 320x240 mono LCD graphic display, a large LED
clock (not exactly great but I was about to spend $5 on one for the guest
room), bunch of 1MB/2MB EPROMs (why? I don't know), a 0-20V variable
transformer (was broken due to abuse, fixed), a 8x SCSI portable CDROM reader,
two analog panel meters, and some more crap I can't remember
and will add later...
Also got a 5.25" 3.5" SATA HDD hotswap bay to complement the RAID array
(for the hot spare).
August 23, 2010
Changed login.cgi a bit, now puts an additiona <a href=""> around the
subtitle for each iconview entry... which allows for the context menu to work
on them...
August 22, 2010
Went to Denver Radio Club's hamfest. Nothing really interesting there, but
ended up getting about 200 dual 7-segment LCD displays, not sure what I'd do
with them but it opens possibilities for low power ideas.
Was thinking about a $20 NV 8500GT PCIe graphics board but decided against it.
August 10, 2010
Went to Boondocks with coworkers for team event. Bored there.
Lost power/blackout at home
at around 12:10PM today for less than 30 minutes and everything went down...
Was too lazy to reconnect to UPS so it was out for a while. Bad.
August 9, 2010
Finally got around to building the new battery pack. I decided not to weld as
getting another cap was going to be risky, so I bought some 16 gauge wire
and soldered the batteries together. I cut the tabs that were on the sub-c
batteries short enough so they won't short... So supposedly now I have a 2.3
ampere-hour 9.6V battery pack for my cordless drill, up from 1.8 AH. Hopefully
it won't go kaplut like it did before with a bit more knowledge about how to
work with NiCd batteries.
July 17, 2010
Changed the brake pads (all 4 wheels) of my Impreza WRX. Used Wearever Golds
all around. Kind of weird, the bigger, thicker fronts were cheaper than the
rears. The rears were also supposed to be ceramics but they look like
semimetallics to me. At least they all fit. The rears were the ones that were
squealing on me, the fronts still had a little life on them but decided to
swap them anyway, just so I know when I swapped them. 61000 miles on the
original pads, seems a little more than I thought I should get out of them.
The original stock fronts dust like a semi-metallic so I doubt they were
ceramics. At least the car still stops about as well as it did before, just
need to bleed/swap the brake fluid now.
Interesting, downloaded a bittorrent client for my Nokia. The 3G seems very
bursty, sometimes it deluges a lot of data fast, up to 110KB/sec, but sometimes
it just trickles or stops...
July 11, 2010
Finally got tired this recent ssh attack round, so I added the new set of hosts
to my hosts.deny... Also changed the "crap back" script to perl instead of bash,
increasing security a bit.
Also did the change from AT&T wireless to T-Mobile. Think the policy
for T-Mobile is better despite a bit more to pay per month, but I cancelled
Comcast, which ends tomorrow
(which is also the day they force all analog stragglers
to use digital set-top-boxes. If I *have* to use a STB I might well get
cheaper service than cable.)
In any case I figure I'd use internet on my phone than watch TV,
but the original intent of having Cable TV was for guests to watch...
That will be fixed soon enough,
next month will subscribe to the cheaper satellite option: Dish Network.
The Internet-on-phone already warded me off a purchase mistake, was thinking
about getting a cable modem to dissect. Found one -- but a web search
indicated it was an obsolete DOCSIS 1.1.
July 5, 2010
Fixed weblogin cookie expirations. I figure wpicture has same problem. This
allows the Nokia default web browser to login.
July 4, 2010
Happy Birthday, USA. This year I was cramped in front of my work laptop fixing
an emergency bug instead of viewing. Oh well. rss-glx Skyrocket had to do...
July 2, 2010
I got a Nokia 5230 Nuron phone. Here comes the 3G...
June 20, 2010
This is sort of a backlog but finally got my Z520A to be a bluetooth GPRS
modem for my eee.
June 11, 2010
Decided to join the wireless internet movement. Orderred one month of T-Mobile
service to experiment on my Sony Ericsson Z520A, which only supports GPRS...
June 6, 2010
Another battery kicked the bucket in my UPS. Once again removed from UPS.
The cell that was removed last time was put back into service, as it seemed
to have been renewed, at least appears to be able to hold charge again.
Experimenting with this new failed battery, watered it. It seems to hold some
charge though.
June 2, 2010
Returned to CO.
May 26, 2010
Flew to MD to attend friend's wedding.
May 12, 2010
It snowed 3" last night! In mid MAY! Many broken branches, and once again
my arbor vitae trees are bent over...
May 4, 2010
Got a Boss branded 2F capacitor. Tested it... WTF, it's like 0.3F! Will have
to do a full writeup on this finding, it's really a rip off.
April 21, 2010
Got some NiCd batteries to re-cell my cordless drill. 2300mAH vs original
1500mAH.
April 14, 2010
Tried my cordless drill again. One cell of one pack has *really* horrible self
discharge now (after repeated zapping to get it to work again). Probably time
to rebuild the pack, it has a large number of bad cells now.
March 31, 2010
Thinking about some wireless communication and remote control.
Decided to hack up a small LC meter to start working with inductors.
Going to try to get it all on an AVR90S2313 as I have too many of them not
being used.
March 24, 2010
Been trying to electrolyze the excess water in the SLA battery.
Got the mass of the battery down to
1895g, which means I got rid of 4mL of water, a bit over 1mL per cell... not
much at all. The battery is staying at around 6.4V which is 2.13V/cell.
Contrast to the 12V AGM battery I have, which stays around 13V charged, which
is 2.16V/cell. 30mV/cell difference?
March 15, 2010
Used my crappy adjustable switching PSU to charge 8 1.2AH NiMH batteries in
series, set at 400mA until all batteries warmed up by touch. Would be nice
to do it automatically somehow. The battery pack powers the fluorescent lamp
much better when charged up.
The crappy switching PSU seems to be fairly good at charging
batteries, nice being able to switch between CC and CV modes, and not dissapate
as much heat as the linear did.
Ugh... I still love batteries I guess...
March 11, 2010
The new Werker AGM SLA battery weighs 1720g.
The replaced PowerSonic AGM SLA battery with its added water weighs 1899g.
I think I may have put too much water... or perhaps the PowerSonic has more
lead in it...
March 3, 2010
At long last, was able to use a transistor from an obsolete VCR, a resistor
from a useless circuit board, and a transformer from a dead monitor to build
a blocking oscillator switching power supply to light a F13T5 fluorescent
tube lamp. It can even use the displaced battery to light the fluorescent
tube for a few hours. Ready for a blackout! Well, not really, the UPS still
isn't hooked back up and doujima won't properly shutdown upon power loss...
March 1, 2010
The battery seems unreliable now. Sometimes it will keep the UPS running,
sometimes not. Ugh. I ended up buying a new battery from
Batteries Plus to
replace that one bad unit. Now it seems a bit more reliable. I ended up
filling the other working batteries with a bit more water hoping to extend
their lives some more. Should weigh the new battery so I know how much
water is lost and add that much back in every once in a while to prolong
its life.
Now, I have a flaky battery. I discharged and recharged the failing unit.
Upon discharge I used around 3A of load. The battery was able to hold its
voltage despite the load, and lasted a few hours... which means the battery
should still be good and not sulfated! Hmm...why it can't power the UPS
I don't know. Unfortunately I added a little too much water in the battery
but it should be OK... It still works... not sure what to do with it, it's
still functional... maybe make a backup power supply with it...
February 28, 2010
After an overnight recharge with additional water, I was able to retest the
battery, it was able to, at least for now, hold up under several amperes of
current without dropping rapidly. Put it back into the UPS, UPS seems to be
able to stay up, for now...
February 26, 2010
I came home to a beeping UPS. It was determined a battery broke :( Hoping
that the manual was correct and it was possible to hotswap batteries I tried
to remove them but it decided to shut down anyway. Ugh. Unplanned reboot.
I narrowed it down to one of the three batteries that seems to not be able to
keep a current going. Opened it up, and added water to it. Tried to charge
it up again but so far no luck. I ended up opening all three batteries and
adding some water to them all.
February 4, 2010
Received new toner cartridge. The Laserjet IIp seems to work well, prints
just fine through CUPS using the generic HP PCL4/5 driver.
January 30, 2010
Found/bought a Laserjet IIp with 4MB for $7. Old workhorse printer 300dpi
and slow 4ppm, but it's laser quality. Bad toner cartridge (scraper)
and had a bad print darkness control board. Replaced capacitor on the board,
printer starts working fine minus toner cartridge issues. Orderred
a new toner cartridge from eBay.
January 16, 2010
Got a CY199D 19" LCD from the NCARC hamfest. Realized it may have been a
crappy buy due to QC of the monitor. Also got a wireless Actiontec with no
PSU. Time to start hacking!
January 6, 2010
More really cold weather, down to 1F tonight. Another 2" or snow fell.
January 1, 2010
Happy new decade!
Well...at least I hope it will be...
