Inebriator Servers Up All The Cocktails

The robotic bartender, lovingly named the Inebriator, is a work of mastery. We think you’ll be surprised by the simplicity and grace of its beverage dispensing system.

The most obvious part is the lineup of nine liquor bottles across the top with LED backlight for style. Each has a valve on it that is meant to be pressed on by the rim of a glass in order to dispense its payload. To dose the glass with alcohol the Inebriator drives a trolley along one axis beneath the line of bottles. When in position it has an actuator arm the rises up and depresses the bottle’s valve mechanism. Once all the liquor is in the glass it moves to the left side to be topped off with mixers. These are stored in bottles in a cooler under the table. They are pressurized with nitrogen, and an electronically actuated value lets the liquid flow. Drinks are selected on a character display, and there’s a weight sensor in the trolley to ensure that a drink isn’t mixed without a vessel to receive it.

You don’t want to miss seeing this in action after the break.

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Repurposing Server PSU For Your Charging Needs

That grey box at the top of the photo is a modular power supply unit for a rack-mounted server system. [Sebastian] decided to repurpose it as a charging source for his RC batteries. He chose this HP DPS-600PB because of its power rating, efficiency, and you can get them at a reasonable price.

This is an active power factor corrected (APFC) PSU, which he says draws 40% less current than the non-APFC variety. Since he sometimes charges batteries in the field from a generator this is a big plus. But a bit of modification is necessary before it can be used as a source.

Since this is a rack device it has a set of connectors on the back. For power there are spade connectors which mate with a fin on the rack. He soldered positive and negative leads between the spades to interface with the battery chargers. The PSU won’t fire up if it’s not in the rack, so some jumper wires also need to be added connecting three of the interface pins.

With his modding all worked out he went on to use two PSUs for a 24V source, housing them to a nice carrying case while at it.

Lightweight Web Server Using The MSP430

Need a tiny web server? [Rob] over on the 43oh forums made an Ethernet booster pack for the very popular TI MSP430 microcontroller. If that’s not enough, [Rob] also put together an all-in-one solution with a MSP430 and Ethernet controller that can be powered by a battery. Along with the web server that fits in just 5k of flash, we’re going to say [Rob] has a very good solution for remote sensing and data logging.

For his Ethernet-enabled 430, [Rob] chose to use the WIZnet W5200 Ethernet controller. This chip communicates with the 430 via and SPI interface and has a hardware TCP/IP stack that supports TCP, UDP, and PPPoE, offloading all the low-level stuff off of the 430 and onto the Ethernet controller.

After the break there are a pair of videos of [Rob] showing off his tiny web server. A few neat features include a full memory dump of the 430, as well as a reading the states of all the pins via an HTML page. If you’re looking for a way to collect data over Ethernet, we don’t think you could do better than [Rob]’s tiny 430-based web server. Also, if you’d like to control a few devices over the Internet, [Rob] included a few optoisolators  for lights or appliances.

The code is available on the 43oh forum page, but [Rob] says he’ll clean that up and put it in a Git.

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Pedal-powered 32-core ARM Linux Server

Sure, it’s probably a gimmick to [Jon Masters], but we absolutely love the pedal-powered server he built using a group of ARM chips. [Jon] is an engineer at Red Hat and put together  the project in order to show off the potential of the low-power ARM offerings.

The platform is a quad-core Calxeda EnergyCore ARM SoC. Each chip draws only 5 Watts at full load, with eight chips weighing in at just 40 Watts. The circuit to power the server started as a solar charger, which was easy to convert just by transitioning from panels to a generator that works just like a bicycle trainer (the rear wheel presses against a spin wheel which drives the generator shaft).

So, the bicycle generator powers the solar charger, which is connected to an inverter that feeds a UPS. After reading the article and watching the video after the break we’re a bit confused on the actual setup. We would think that the inverter would feed the charger but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. If you can provide some clarity on how the system is connected please feel free to do so in the comments.

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Using An Android As A Webserver

In the latest episode of XDA TV [Adam Outler] turned his Android phone into a webserver. At first this might sound comical, but the ever-increasing power of our handhelds makes it a pretty legitimate option. It’s hard to come up with concrete uses off the top of our head, but we’re sure there’s value in being able to pull the phone out of your pocket and serve some content.

The app BotBrew Basil makes the installation process nearly automatic. It gives you point-and-click access to install the lighttpd webserver package and set the daemon to run automatically at boot time. That’s it! Of course you need to supply your own HTML to be served. [Adam] used an HTML5 website template for this.

Next you also need a way to resolve the address of the phone. In this case it’s assigned a static IP from the router, and a dynamic DNS service provides a link that maps to the router’s location. But since these phones are running Linux (at least on the lowest level) it should be pretty easy to add a cron job which will send IP address updates to the service if you want to take the ‘webserver’ out in the world with you. You can watch the entire video after the break.

Ironically this is a big hardware upgrade for [Adam’s] webserver. The previous version was running from an Evalbot.

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Resurrecting A Mac LC For Server Duties

It might just be a case mod, but we love [Eduard]’s take on a modern Macintosh LC (translation). The donor motherboard came from a disused home server, and the LC came from [Eduard]’s childhood memories of playing Glider and The Incredible Machine.

The case was donated from a venerable Macintosh LC, manufactured circa 1990. The original LC had a Motorola 68020 CPU, which [Eduard] upgraded to an Intel Atom board. It was a somewhat tricky build – he adapted a 90 Watt power supply from a piece of old office equipment to power the new Intel board. With a great deal of very careful Dremel work, the old-school Apple logo was modified into a power button for the new computer.

For frequent readers of Hack a Day, it’s no surprise that we’ll grab up any old Apple or Mac build. [Kevin] built a weather station and analog joypad for his Apple IIc, We’ve seen custom Mac ROM SIMMS, and of course [Sprite_tm]’s amazing SE/30 emulation. If you’ve got something that will send our 68k senses tingling, send it on into the tip line.

Hacking Old Server Hardware For New Home Use

[Arnuschky] was looking for a network storage solution that included redundancy. He could have gone with a new NAS box, but didn’t want to shell out full price. Instead, he picked up a Dell PowerEdge 2800 and hacked it for SATA drives and quiet operation.

It’s not surprising that this hardware can be had second-hand at a low price. The backplane for it requires SCSI drives, and it’s cheaper to upgrade to new server hardware than it is to keep replacing those drives. This didn’t help out [Arnuschky’s] any, so he started out by removing the SCSI connectors. While he was at it, he soldered wires to the HDD activity light pads on the PCB. These will be connected to the RAID controller for status indication. The image above shows the server with eight SATA drives installed (but no backplane); note that all of the power connectors in each column are chained together for a total of two drive power connectors. He then applied glue to each of these connectors, then screwed the backplane in place until the glue dried. Now the device has swappable SATA drives!

His server conversion spans several posts. The link at the top is a round-up so make sure you click through to see how he did the fan speed hack in addition to the SATA conversion.

If your tolerances don’t allow you to glue the connectors like this, check out this other hack that uses shims for spacing.