Fail Of The Week: How Not To Watercool A PC

June 17, 2020 by Dan Maloney 50 Comments

To those who choose to overclock their PCs, it’s often a “no expense spared” deal. Fancy heat sinks, complicated liquid cooling setups, and cool clear cases to show off all the expensive guts are all part of the charm. But not everyone’s pockets are deep enough for off-the-shelf parts, so experimentation with cheaper, alternatives, like using an automotive fuel pump to move the cooling liquid, seems like a good idea. In practice — not so much.

The first thing we thought of when we saw the title of [BoltzBrain]’s video was a long-ago warning from a mechanic to never run out of gas in a fuel-injected car. It turns out that the gasoline acts as a coolant and lubricant for the electric pump, and running the tank dry with the power still applied to the pump quickly burns it out. So while [BoltzBrain] expected to see corrosion on the brushes from his use of water as a working fluid, we expected to see seized bearings as the root cause failure. Looks like we were wrong: at about the 6:30 mark, you can see clear signs of corrosion on the copper wires connecting to the brushes. It almost looks like the Dremel tool cut the wire, but that green copper oxide is the giveaway. We suspect the bearings aren’t in great shape, either, but that’s probably secondary to the wires corroding.

Whatever the root cause, it’s an interesting tour inside a common part, and the level of engineering needed to build a brushed motor that runs bathed in a highly flammable fluid is pretty impressive. We liked the axial arrangement of the brushes and commutator especially. We wonder if fuel pumps could still serve as a PC cooler — perhaps changing to a dielectric fluid would do the trick.

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Mini Computer Brings Starfleet To Your Desk

June 14, 2020 by Jenny List 20 Comments

It could be said that there are two types of people: those for whom the actor LeVar Burton is the host of Reading Rainbow, and those for whom he is Geordi LaForge, Chief Engineer of Star Trek TNG‘s Enterprise NCC1701-D. For those of us engineers who lie in the second camp, we can at least feel a little closer to the action thanks to a project from [Darian Johnson], a Star Trek TNG mini-computer which functions as a desktop information display.

Inside the 3D-printed case is an ESP32 version of the Adafruit Feather, talking to cloud services to pull in and aggregate the information on the TFT screen. It combines weather data, environmental sensor readings, his fitness tracker readings, and his schedule, with two useful applications. There’s a resistor colour code chart, and an LED series resistor calculator. He’s made a video showing it in operation which we’ve placed below the break, and in it, he’s captured the aesthetic of the LCARS interface perfectly. We can’t speak for a fictional future spacecraft officer, but we suspect that Geordi would be right at home with it.

We may not be able to bring you Geordi LaForge, but we can bring you a real Starfleet officer. She even shares something with LeVar Burton, in that she’s (much more) famous for something else.

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64-bit And A Display: Minecraft Computers 10 Years Later

June 6, 2020 by Sven Gregori 6 Comments

Some people build their own computer to play games, while others play games to build their own computer. Minecraft is the prime candidate for the latter, and while you can certainly arrange the blocks to make them look like a computer, we’re of course talking about replicating the actual functionality of a CPU or parts thereof, and/or external components within the game. Many such creations have spawned in the decade since the first Minecraft-built ALU surfaced, and [Rockfarmor] built a 64-bit specimen to add to that list — and made a video to showcase it.

Instead of emulating a common architecture, [Rockfarmor] went for a more home-made approach, and re-used the architecture from an old school assignment (in Swedish) as basis. The result is a simple yet fully functional 64-bit CPU with 32 registers, 32kB main memory and a separate 16kB stack. The instruction set mostly contains ALU and branching operations, but also a few special opcodes to control an additional 64×64 ~~pixel~~ blocks, 64-color display — including drawing circles, lines, and color fills.

More details on the architecture can be found in its documentation and in an older video (with subpar audio circumstances unfortunately). An additional time-lapse video of the initial build is also available, and you will find all of them after break. To simplify development, [Rockfarmor] also wrote a desktop app to program the computer in assembly and upload it straight to the Minecraft version.

As with all computers built in Minecraft, the driving force is redstone, which essentially allows circuit design within the game, and [Rockfarmor]’s is no difference here. He also uses command blocks to avoid the laboriously and slow “wiring” required otherwise, turning it more into a “wireless redstone” circuit.

No doubt, purists will consider this cheating, but another angle would be to see it as Moore’s Law applied to Minecraft computers, considering the computer’s size and speed compared to the first Minecraft ALU. Or maybe as the equivalent of microcode in real-world CPUs? Or then, maybe we should just accept and embrace different options and preferences.

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Original Xbox Gets The Steam Overhaul

June 2, 2020 by Tom Nardi 28 Comments

When Microsoft released the original Xbox, it deviated from the design of traditional game consoles in that it used several off-the-shelf computer components. The fact that Microsoft would want their game console to resemble a PC isn’t particularly surprising in hindsight, but we doubt anyone at Redmond ever imagined folks like [Ryan Walmsley] would be cramming in full-fledged computers nearly 20 years later.

[Ryan] tells us he was looking for a way to play some older games from the early 2000s, and thought it was a good opportunity to put together a quiet set-top computer. The final hardware is more than capable of running older titles, and can even be used with Steam Link to stream newer content from his primary gaming computer.

Even with a diminutive Gigabyte GA-H81N Mini ITX motherboard, things are pretty tight inside the Xbox. Fairly tight wire management was required to prevent any airflow obstructions, especially since [Ryan] decided to put the system’s 80 watt laptop-style power supply inside the case. While this made the build a bit more complicated, it does make the final product a lot cleaner and makes it feel just that much more like a proper game console.

Benchmarks show the machine has decent performance, all things considered. [Ryan] says there are some potential upgrades down the line, but as with most gaming PC builds, cost is the limiting factor. Until he’s ready to spend the cash on revamping the internals, he says that streaming newer games over the the network has been working great.

For those looking for a slightly more modern alternative to this project, we’ve also seen a gaming PC shoehorned into an Xbox 360 with similarly impressive results.

The Descendants Of Ancient Computers

May 31, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

Building computers from discrete components is a fairly common hobby project, but it used to be the only way to build a computer until integrated circuits came on the scene. If you’re living in the modern times, however, you can get a computer like this running easily enough, but if you want to dive deep into high performance you’ll need to understand how those components work on a fundamental level.

[Tim] and [Yann] have been working on replicating circuitry found in the CDC6600, the first Cray supercomputer built in the 1960s. Part of what made this computer remarkable was its insane (for the time) clock speed of 10 MHz. This was achieved by using bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) that were capable of switching much more quickly than typical transistors, and by making sure that the support circuitry of resistors and capacitors were tuned to get everything working as efficiently as possible.

The duo found that not only are the BJTs used in the original Cray supercomputer long out of production, but the successors to those transistors are also out of production. Luckily they were able to find one that meets their needs, but it doesn’t seem like there is much demand for a BJT with these characteristics anymore.

[Tim] also posted an interesting discussion about some other methods of speeding up circuitry like this, namely by using reach-through capacitors and Baker clamps. It’s worth a read in its own right, but if you want to see some highlights be sure to check out this 16-bit computer built from individual transistors.

Breathing New Life Into Old School ThinkPad Keyboards

May 26, 2020 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

The ThinkPad is generally considered the unofficial laptop of hackerdom, so it’s no surprise that we see plenty of projects focused on repairing and modifying these reliable workhorses. But while we usually see folks working on relatively modern incarnations of this iconic line of computers, this project by [Frank Adams] and [Brian Chan] shows that the hacker’s love affair with the ThinkPad stretches back farther than many might realize.

As explained on the project’s Hackaday.io page, the duo have produced an open hardware board that will allow you to take the keyboard and trackpoint from a late ’90s ThinkPad 380ED and use it as a standard USB input device on a modern computer. According to [Frank], the keyboards on these machines are notable for having full-size keys rather than the “chicklet” boards that are so common today.

Now you may be wondering why this is significant. After all, we’ve seen plenty of projects that hook up an old keyboard to a USB-equipped microcontroller to get them speaking the lingua franca. Well, the trick here is that the trackpoint on these older ThinkPads actually required additional circuitry on the motherboard to function. The keyboard features three separate FPC connections for the matrix, the trackpoint buttons, and the analog strain gauges in the trackpoint itself.

After a considerable amount of reverse engineering, [Frank] and [Brian] have developed a board that uses the Teensy 3.2 to turn this plethora of pins into something useful. In the video after the break, you can see the new composite USB device working perfectly on a modern Windows computer.

It will probably come as little surprise to find that [Frank] is no stranger to hacking ThinkPad keyboards. In 2018 we covered a similar adapter he built for the far more modern T61, which was an absolute cakewalk by comparison.

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A 4-bit Random Number Generator

May 23, 2020 by Jenny List 43 Comments

Randomness is a pursuit in a similar vein to metrology or time and frequency, in that inordinate quantities of effort can be expended in pursuit of its purest form. The Holy Grail is a source of completely unpredictable randomness, and the search for entropy so pure has taken experimenters into the sampling of lava lamps, noise sources, unpredictable timings of user actions in computer systems, and even into sampling radioactive decay. It’s a field that need not be expensive or difficult to work in, as [Henk Mulder] shows us with his 4-bit analogue random number generator.

One of the simplest circuits for generating random analogue noise involves a reverse biased diode in either Zener or avalanche breakdown, and it is a variation on this that he’s using. A reverse biased emitter junction of a transistor produces noise which is amplified by another transistor and then converted to a digital on-off stream of ones and zeroes by a third. Instead of a shift register to create his four bits he’s using four identical circuits, with no clock their outputs randomly change state at will.

A large part of his post is an examination of randomness and what makes a random source. He finds this source to be flawed because it has a bias towards logic one in its output, but we wonder whether the culprit might be the two-transistor circuit and its biasing rather than the noise itself. It also produces a sampling frequency of about 100 kbps, which is a little slow when sampling with he Teensy he’s using.

An understanding of random number generation is both a fascinating and important skill to have. We’ve featured so many RNGs over the years, here’s one powered by memes, and another by a fish tank.