You might remember [Janne]’s IKEA cluster. Now he’s got a couple of dream rigs in mind, so he started doing 3D renderings of them. Helmer 2 is designed to contain 24 video cards attached to six motherboards with quad core CPUs. (AMD has even taken enough interest to send him some cpus to get started) The rendering really comes in handy for designing the custom copper heat pipes and the aluminum cooling fin enclosure. Still bored, he put together a rendering of a 4 PetaFLOP machine using 2160 video cards.
Update: The Helmer 2 link is fixed.
classic hacks2768 Articles
12 Channel LiFe Battery Management System
With fuel prices rising, EVs are becoming more an more stylish. This bit of floor tile wrapped hardware is actually a 12 channel battery management system designed to handle Lithium Iron battery packs. It’s designed to take power from a standard lead acid charger and supply the batteries with their maximum charge current. The cost and complexity of the BMS has been a major stumbling block in the past, so it’s interesting to see these come around. If you need more than 12 cells, multiple boards can be used.
Ardupilot: Arduino Based UAV Autopilot
A short while back, [Chris Anderson] released an Arduino based autopilot. It rings in fairly cheap and being open source, you can tweak away. To add more functionality, he’s releasing a dual core version. Thanks to the second processor, it no longer requires an external hardware co-pilot. It uses an on-board GPS and features an ATtiny based fail safe. It’s still under development, but he’s made the design files available.
Metasploit On The IPhone
[muts] went through some trials, but managed to get metasploit running on his iPhone. Later he found out that it comes with the Cyida installer that he used on his journal to manually install it. Still, it’s interesting to see these tools showing up on the platform.
External CD-ROM Turned Class A Headphone Amp
[Gio] sent in this slick Class A headphone amp. An old CD-ROM case was gutted to hold the goods. The design is fairly simple. Cost can be kept fairly low although the capacitors can add up if you’re a fanatic about quality. If you’ve ever lost any of your headphone gear to sticky fingers, you know that having it blending in to the background can be a great feature.
How To Build An Arctic Web Cam
This particular unit has been de-commissioned since 2005, but it’s still interesting. JACARA set up a webcam on Antarctica. They used an off the shelf Axis NetEye200 camera, mounted it inside a pair of hemispherical plastic domes along with a small electric heater and thermostat to keep the device from freezing.
On-board Focus Confirmation For The Canon Digital Rebel
We’ve seen plenty of lens hacks, but [Koray] took things in a new direction. Rather than buy lens chips for modding all of his manual lenses, he added a lens chip inside his Digital Rebel 300D (aka XT). Most of us might cringe at gutting their Rebel, but he performed this bit of soldering surgery on a unit he picked up for £40 and repaired. Excellent work!
Update: yeah yeah, the 300D is the original Digital Rebel.
