[sfriswolker] sent in his progressing black keyboard lighting mod. The first version used a CCFL. When that burnt out, he rebuilt it with LEDs. [google english transations – part 1 and part 2]
computer hacks1402 Articles
computer hacks
Linux On Obsolete Displays
[bryan chafy] has been hacking away to get older non VGA displays running on VGA hardware without using a scan converter. You can pick these old grayscales up for cheap or even free. The tricky part is modifying the BIOS to reprogram the VGA card to output a sync and scanrate that is NTSC compliant. He’s managed to do this with a WYSE Winterm thin-client. Another clever trick is the poor man’s triple head display which stores a different image in each portion of the RGB signal.
Hard Drive Oscilloscope
[hackgadgets.com is back up… maybe]
[Alan] put together a list of the Top 5 Dead Hard Drive Projects. He suggested we post about the hard drive laser oscilloscope, since he couldn’t find the project anywhere else. I actually saw a similar project during dorkbot-sf‘s presentation at Maker Faire. A laser is mounted to the drive case. The beam is bounced off of a mirror connected to the read/write head. He’s got a video of it in action on his site. Have a look at the other hard drive projects as well.
Phase Change Cooling System
Chris Morrell has an impressive write up on all the ins and outs of building a phase change cooling system. Vapor refrigeration moves heat from one area to another by changing the phase of the working fluid. Chris used propane as the working fluid in his system. He’s got instructions covering all of the work involved from brazing the copper tubes, to building and lapping the evaporator blocks, to the final tuning. With no load it’s can hit -45DegC.
This story reminded me to check back on extremecorvette’s cascading cooler from last fall. He started receiving parts last month for a brand new design. I can’t wait to see how that turns out.
[via Paul Stamatiou]
Fan Controller
Unhappy with commercial fan controllers Jos van Eijndhoven decided to build his own. The circuit supports three LM60 temperature sensors with pots to adjust the turn on temp. A PIC 16F676 microcontroller reads the temps and controls three groups of fans. A potentiometer is also supplied to control the minimum fan speed. To prevent oscillation the fan speed is reduced slowly in response to temperature drop.
[thanks Alan]
Pentium M Overclocking
Laptops based on the Intel 915 chipset have a 533MHz front side bus and ship with a matching Sonoma processor. Dothan laptops only have a 400MHz FSB. If you pull the BSEL[0] pin on a 400MHz FSB Dothan CPU to low you can trick the 915 into thinking it has a 533MHz FSB CPU. This will gain you 33% more processor speed. Almost every other pin on the CPU is a ground so you just insert a U-shaped piece of wire into the processor socket to connect the two pins. If the system becomes unstable you may have to bump up the processor voltage (which involves another piece of wire). In the article, Dan Zhang is able to take a 1.8GHz Pentium M to 2.4GHz. It’s a pretty simple mod, but you have to go out of your way to do it since Sonoma laptops never shipped with a 400MHz FSB CPU.
[thanks jodathmorr]
Replacing Motherboard Chips
While most users aren’t going to attempt to replace a single failed chip on a motherboard, [joeboy] felt that it’s definitely something the Hack-A-Day audience would try. Project Oxcart details the process he and his coworkers went through to replace the Firewire chip in a laptop. It had failed during a power surge and Dell wanted $1100 for a replacement motherboard. They opted to buy the $5 chip from Digikey and install it. The write up details the many steps involved in the replacement of the chip, which took the entire day.
