Gamers Rejoice: Here’s A Fix For ASUS Strix Vega 64 Thermal Issues

August 13, 2018 by 11 Comments

Every year, we demand our computers to be ever faster, capable of delivering progressively more eye-watering graphics and doing it all as reliably as ever. Unfortunately, sometimes, new designs miss the mark. [Cloakedbug] was having issues with voltage regulator temperatures on an ASUS Strix VEGA 64 — one of the latest RADEON graphics cards on the market — and decided to investigate.

Right away, issues were apparent; one of the main thermal pads was making poor contact with the FETs it was intended to carry heat for, and was poorly sized to boot. In a show of poor quality, the pad wasn’t nicely sized for the aluminium plate it was attached to, and was applied in a rather haphazard manner. Suspecting this was perhaps one of the root causes of the card running hot, the decision was made to replace the pad with something more suitable.

Specifying a thicker pad that was properly sized to the heatsink plate was the order of the day, and a couple of other smaller heatsink pads were also replaced, all with Thermal Grizzly Minus Pad 8. [Cloakedbug] reports a temperature drop of over 30 degrees C under load on the VR SOC bank, down from 115 C initially. It sounds like this will go a long way to keeping the card happy and healthy over time. Looking around the web, there’s definitely a few reports of thermal issues out there, so this could be a useful fix if you’re having trouble with the same card at home.

In the end, it’s a simple, tidy fix to an expensive piece of hardware that really should have shipped with this sorted from the factory. We’ve seen a fair few thermal fixes over the years here, like this one involving a thermal camera as a diagnosis tool.

[Thanks to Keith O for the tip!]

IBM PCjr Revived By An ATX Power Supply And Many False Starts

August 10, 2018 by 26 Comments

The IBM PCjr was a computer only the marketing geniuses of a multi-billion dollar corporation could love. On the face of it, it seemed like a great idea – a machine for the home market, meant to complement the “big boy” IBM PC in the office and compete against the likes of Apple and Commodore. What it ended up as was a universally hated, only partially PC-compatible machine which sold a mere half-million units before being mercifully killed off.

That doesn’t mean retrocomputing fans don’t still snap up the remaining machines, of course. [AkBKukU] scored a PCjr from a thrift store, but without the original external brick power supply. An eBay replacement for the 18-VAC supply would have cost more than the computer, so [AkBKukU] adapted a standard ATX power supply to run the PCjr. It looked as if it would be an easy job, since the external brick plugs into a power supply card inside the case which slots into the motherboard with a card-edge connector. Just etch up a PCB, solder on an ATX Molex connector, and plug it in, right? Well, not quite. The comedy of errors that ensued, from the backward PCB to the mysteriously conductive flux, nearly landed this one in the “Fail of the Week” bin. But [AkBKukU] soldiered on, and his hand-scratched adapter eventually prevailed; the video below tells the whole sordid tale, which thankfully ended with the sound of the machine booting from the 5-1/4″-floppy drive.

In the end, we’ve got to applaud [AkBKukU] for taking on the care and feeding of a machine so unloved as to be mentioned only a handful of times even on these pages. One of those articles marks the 25th anniversary of the PCjr, and lays out some of the reasons for its rapid disappearance from the market.

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Hands-On With New Arduino FPGA Board: MKR Vidor 4000

July 30, 2018 by 60 Comments

Hackaday brought you a first look the Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 when it announced. Arduino sent over one of the first boards so now we finally have our hands on one! It’s early and the documentation is still a bit sparse, but we did get it up and running to take the board through some hello world exercises. This article will go over what we’ve been able to figure out about the FPGA system so far to help get you up and running with the new hardware.

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Boombox made from a shelf speaker

Transforming A Bookshelf Speaker Into A Portable Boombox

July 18, 2018 by 7 Comments

There’s a lot of fun to be had in modernizing an old boombox but what about turning one of those ubiquitous shelf speakers into a portable boombox, complete with a handle for carrying? That’s what [GreatScott] did when a friend gave him a just such a shelf speaker.

These days you’d very likely use your phone as the audio source so he included a 20 watt stereo class D amplifier which could be disconnected at the throw of a switch if not needed. To power the amplifier he used 16 18650 lithium-ion batteries which were leftover from previous projects. He estimates they should give him around 100 hours of enjoyable tunes. And to make further use of the batteries, he also added a USB charger so that he could charge up his phone from it, something else which is nice to be able to do when on the road.

A battery management system (BMS), an XT60 connector for charging the batteries, his battery level indicator circuit which we talked about before, a new passive audio crossover, and some rather nice work on that case all round out the boombox. Check out his full construction in the video below and make sure to stay until the end when he gives a taste of its awesome sound (you may even swear your desk is vibrating from the bass despite wearing earbuds, like we did).

And on the subject of speaker-to-boombox conversions, here’s one from a few years ago which makes use of a car MP3 player module giving it FM, USB, and SD card support.

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XLIDAR Is A Merry-Go-Round Of Time-Of-Flight Sensors

June 29, 2018 by 38 Comments

[JRodrigo]’s xLIDAR project is one of those ideas that seemed so attractively workable that it went directly to a PCB prototype without doing much stopping along the way. The concept was to mount a trio of outward-facing VL53L0X distance sensors to a small PCB disk, and then turn that disk with a motor and belt while taking readings. As the sensors turn, their distance readings can be used to paint a picture of the immediate surroundings (at least within about 1 meter, which is the maximum range of the VL53L0X.)

The hardware is made to be accessible and has a strong element of “what you see is what you get.” The distance sensors are on small breakout boards, and the board turns the sensor disk via a DC motor and 3D printed belt drive. Even the method of encoding the disk’s movement and zero position has the same WYSIWYG straightforwardness: a spring contact and an interrupted bare copper trace on the bottom of the sensor disk acts as a physical switch. In fact, exposed copper traces in concentric circular patterns and spring pins taken from an SD card socket are what provide power and communications as the disk turns.

The prototype looks good and sounds like it should work, but how well does it hold up? We’ll find out once [JRodrigo] does some testing. Until then, the board designs are available on the project’s GitHub repository if anyone wants to take a shot at their own approach without starting from scratch.

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Refurbishing A DEC 340 Monitor

June 19, 2018 by 16 Comments

Back in the “good old days” movie theaters ran serials. Every week you’d pay some pocket change and see what happened to Buck Rogers, Superman, or Tex Granger that week. Each episode would, of course, end in a cliffhanger. [Keith Hayes] has started his own serial about restoring a DEC 340 monitor found in a scrap yard in Australia. The 340 — not a VT340 — looks like it could appear in one of those serials, with its huge cabinets and round radar-like display. [Keith] describes the restoration as “his big project of the year” and we are anxious to see how the cliffhangers resolve.

He’s been lucky, and he’s been unlucky. The lucky part is that he has the cabinet with the CRT and the deflection yoke. Those would be very difficult to replace. The unlucky part is that one entire cabinet of electronics is missing.

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Books You Should Read: Sunburst And Luminary, An Apollo Memoir

June 15, 2018 by 7 Comments

The most computationally intense part of an Apollo mission was the moon landing itself, requiring both real-time control and navigation of the Lunar Module (LM) through a sequence of programs known as the P60’s. Data from radar, inertial navigation, and optical data sighted-off by the LM commander himself were fed into the computer in what we’d call today ‘data fusion.’

The guy who wrote that code is Don Eyles and the next best thing to actually hanging out with Don is to read his book. Don’s book reads as if you are at a bar sitting across the table listening to his incredible life story. Its personal, hilarious, stressful, fascinating, and more importantly for those of us who are fans of Hackaday, it’s relatable.

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