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]

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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]

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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]

Continue reading “Pentium M Overclocking” →

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.

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First Whoppix and Auditor then Whax and now finally everything has come together to form remote-exploit’s latest Live CD project BackTrack. The very first beta of the new system was released today. I downloaded it and tested it on my 600m. It had a nice uncluttered feeling right from the beginning by not offering the scads of boot options found in Knoppix. The system came up really quick and stopped at the command prompt instead of going to a GUI which is another nice touch. The CD also doesn’t automatically bring up the network interfaces since you may have something special in mind. The default windowing environment is KDE, but Fluxbox is included if you’re on a diet. Kismet started up and set up my Intel 2200 card without any assistance. I really think the team has put together a great product and I look forward to future releases. Try it out for yourself.

[thanks steve]

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Trixter pulled off this awesome hack, proving that the demoscene is alive and well. It started as a silly joke “well, I can display video on my XT!” , but Trixter thought about it and came up with a way to do it on his Model 5150. The production needs 10MB of disk space, a Soundblaster Pro, a CGA card and monitor. Trixter notes at the end of the page that he’s had to use text mode to get 16 colors out of the CGA instead of the standard 4. Check out the video of the XT being pushed to its limits at his site. (video on Google Video)

[thanks ex-parrot]

Continue reading “Full Motion Video On An 8088” →

 
Dennis had been working on this project for over a year before recently releasing it in the Amiga.org forums (photos). The Amiga was notable for its use of unique, dedicated processor chips for tasks like real time video effects. Dennis has recreated these chips in a Xilinx Spartan-3 400K gate FPGA. His development board also features a MC68000 processor and an MMC card for storage. He’s got everything, but sound and keyboard support working. He is able to run Lemmings though, and isn’t that what’s really important?

[thanks Seantech]

Continue reading “Amiga In An FPGA” →