An open top of a black PC case. Inside we can see an aluminum extruded mini PC case inside the 5" optical drive bay. A Samsung SSD sits along the back wall of the case and a flash drive sits between the front of the 3D printed "drive" and the actual mini PC.

Outdated HP Microserver Gets A New Brain

March 3, 2024 by 6 Comments

What to do if you have a really cool old HP MicroServer that just can’t keep up with the demands of today? [jacksonliam] decided to restomod it by installing a mini PC into the drive bay.

The HP N54L MicroServer was still running, but its soldered CPU and non-standard motherboard made a simple upgrade impossible. Evaluating the different options, [jacksonliam] decided to save the case and PSU by transplanting an Intel Alder Lake mini PC into the drive bay with 3D printed brackets and heat set inserts.

Selecting a fanless “router” model to increase reliability, he was able to find an M.2 to mini-SAS adapter to attach the four drive cage to the NVME slot on the new PC. Power is supplied via the 12 V line on the ATX power supply and one of the mini PC’s Ethernet lines was broken out to a 3D printed PCI slot cover.

Looking for more ways to rejuvenate an old computer? How about putting a Mac mini inside an old iMac or a Raspberry Pi inside an Apple ][?

Hackaday Podcast Episode 260: KiCad 8, Two Weather Stations, And Multiple I2Cs

March 1, 2024 by 1 Comment

It’s a leap year, so Elliot and Dan put the extra day to good use tracking down all the hottest hacks from the past week and dorking out about them. There’s big news in the KiCad community, and we talked about all the new features along with some old woes. Great minds think alike, apparently, since two different e-ink weather stations made the cut this week, as did a floating oscilloscope, an automated film-developing tank, and some DIY solar panels.

We talked about a hacker who figured out that water makes a pretty good solar storage medium, and it’s cheaper than lithium, another who knows that a crappy lathe is better than no lathe, and what every hacker should know about Ethernet. Is there a future for room-temperature superconductors? Maybe it just depends on how cold the room is.

 

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All-Sky Camera Checks For Aurora

February 16, 2024 by 4 Comments

The aurora borealis (and its southern equivalent, the aurora australis) is a fleeting and somewhat rare phenomenon that produces vivid curtains of color in the sky at extreme latitudes. It’s a common tourist activity to travel to areas where the aurora is more prevalent in order to catch a glimpse of it. The best opportunities are in the winter though, and since most people don’t want to spend hours outside on a cold night night in high latitudes, an all-sky camera like this one from [Frank] can help notify its users when an aurora is happening.

Because of the extreme temperatures involved, this is a little more involved than simply pointing a camera at the sky and hoping for the best. The enclosure and all electronics need to be able to withstand -50°C and operate at at least -30. For the enclosure, [Frank] is going with PVC tubing with a clear dome glued into a top fits to the end of the pipe, providing a water-resistant enclosure. A Raspberry Pi with a wide-angle lens camera sits on a 3D printed carriage so it can easily slide inside. The electronics use power-over-ethernet (PoE) rather than a battery due to the temperature extremes, which conveniently provides networking capabilities for viewing the images.

This is only part one of this build — in part two [Frank] is planning to build a system which can use this camera assembly to detect the aurora automatically and send out notifications when it sees it. Watching the night sky from the comfort of a warm house or sauna isn’t the only reason for putting an all-sky camera to use, either. They can also be used to observe meteors as they fall and then triangulate the position of the meteorites on the ground.

Overview of the Gwyscope SPM controller.

Low-Cost DSP For Scanning Probe Microscopy

January 31, 2024 by 3 Comments

A scanning probe microscope comes in a wide variety of flavors, they all produce a set of data points containing the measurements at each location. Usually these data points form a regular 2D grid, but it can be more beneficial to change the density of measurements at certain locations, or even the height, which creates a much more complex probing path and subsequent (XYZ) data set.

Yet this should not deter anyone, as [Miroslav Valtr] and colleagues demonstrate in a July 2023 article in Hardware X where they use a Red Pitaya SBC along with custom Eurocard-format PCBs to create a low-cost-ish (<1,500 USD) open hardware Digital Signal Processor (DSP) they call Gwyscope.

How the Gwyscope controller fits into an example of a scanning probe microscope setup. (Credit: Miroslav Valtr et al., 2023)
How the Gwyscope controller fits into an example of a scanning probe microscope setup. (Credit: Miroslav Valtr et al., 2023)

The Red Pitaya itself is used as a convenient hybrid FPGA-based module with on-board signal processing hardware, with its Xilinx Zynq ARM-FPGA chip providing both an FPGA section to implement the feedback loop module in Verilog, as well as the means to run a Linux instance with the C-based software that connects via Ethernet to a remote workstation. This communication is based around the GwyFile library, which is part of the Gwyddion project. The scanning paths are generated using libgwyscan (see this presentation for an introduction).

The resulting scan data is saved as an XYZ data file, which can be read with the Gwyddion visualization and analysis program. Although far from a quick & easy afternoon project for the casual hobbyist, it could be a boon for universities and laboratories.

Thanks to [Nicolae Irimia] for the tip.

Android-Powered Rigol Scopes Go Wireless

January 18, 2024 by 9 Comments

The Rigol DHO800 and DHO900 series use Android underneath, and as you might expect, this makes them easier to hack. A case in point: [VoltLog] demonstrates that you can add WiFi to the scope using a cheap USB WiFi adapter. This might seem like a no-brainer on the surface, but because the software doesn’t know about WiFi, there are a few minor hoops to jump through.

The first issue is that you need a WiFi adapter the built-in OS already knows how to handle. The community has identified at least one RTL chipset that works and it happens to be in the TP-Link TL-WN725N. These are old 2.4 GHz only units, so they are widely available for $10 or less.

But even with the correct hardware, the scope doesn’t have any menus to configure the WiFi interface. To solve that, you need to temporarily use a USB hub and a USB keyboard. Once you have everything plugged in, you can use the Super + N keyboard shortcut to open up the Android notification bar, which is normally hidden. Once you’ve setup the network connection, you won’t need the keyboard anymore.

Or maybe not — it turns out the keyboard does allow you to change a few other things. For example, [VoltLog] used it to increase the screen brightness more than the default maximum setting.

The only other issue appears to be that the scope shows it is disconnected even when connected to WiFi. That doesn’t seem to impact operation, though. Of course, you could use a WiFi to Ethernet bridge or even an old router, but now you have a cable, a box, and another power cord to deal with. This solution is neat and clean. You bet we’ve already ordered a TP-Link adapter!

WiFi scopes are nothing new. We suspect Rigol didn’t want to worry about interference and regulatory acceptance, but who knows? Besides, it is fun to add WiFi to wired devices.

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$50 10Gbps Mesh Network Uses USB4

January 16, 2024 by 30 Comments

You want to build a cluster of computers, but you need a high-speed network fabric that can connect anything to anything. Big bucks, right? [Fang-Pen] developed a 10 Gbps full-mesh network using USB4 that cost him under $50. The first part of the post is about selecting a low-power mini PC, but if you skip down to the “Networking” section, you’ll find the details on the cluster.

The machines selected have two USB4 ports. In theory, you can transfer 40 Gbps on these ports. In reality, the cluster only hit 11 Gbps, but that’s still well above common Ethernet speeds. [Fang-Pen] has yet to determine why he isn’t getting even faster speeds.

Since Linux is Linux, there is a module for networking over Thunderbolt, so the rest is basically set up. There are, of course, some limitations. First, it is only fully connected because the cluster has three computers. More computers would need more USB4 ports or more hardware.

In addition, the standard says you can only count on full speed with cables 0.8 meters or shorter. However, that’s the 40 Gbps number. We wondered if a 2 m cable, rated at 20 Gbps, would have still managed 11 Gbps in this setup. A 10GBASE-T network, on the other hand, should allow 100-meter cables. But for a cluster of computers, do you really care?

We’d be interested to see this idea extended to more nodes. High-speed fabric can be useful in networked disk servers, parallel computing, and probably some other scenarios. We’ve seen 10G Ethernet on the Pi, although the PCI bus limited it to about 3.6 Gbps. For reference, we saw another three computer networks with 10GBASE-T done for about $130 with similar limitations.