Keep Tabs On PC Use With Custom Analog Voltmeter

April 26, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

With the demands of modern computing, from video editing, streaming, and gaming, many of us will turn to a monitoring system of some point to keep tabs on CPU usage, temperatures, memory, and other physical states of our machines. Most are going to simply display on the screen but this data can be sent to external CPU monitors as well. This retro-styled monitor built on analog voltmeters does a great job of this and adds some flair to a modern workstation as well.

The build, known as bbMonitor, is based on the ESP32 platform which controls an array of voltmeters via PWM. The voltmeters have been modified with a percentage display to show things like CPU use percentage. Software running on the computers sends this data in real time to the ESP32 so the computer’s behavior can be viewed at a glance. Each voltmeter is also augmented with RGB LEDs that change color from green to red as use increases as well. The project’s creator, [Corebb], also notes that the gauges will bounce around if the computer is under heavy load but act more linearly when under constant load, also helping to keep an eye on computer status.

While the build does seem to rely on a Windows machine to run the software for export to the monitor, all of the code is open-sourced and available on the project’s GitHub page and could potentially be adapted for other operating systems. And, as far as the voltmeters themselves go, there have been similar projects in the past that use stepper motors as a CPU usage monitor instead.

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Slicing And Dicing The Bits: CPU Design The Old Fashioned Way

April 22, 2024 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Writing for Hackaday can be somewhat hazardous. Sure, we don’t often have to hide from angry spies or corporate thugs. But we do often write about something and then want to buy it. Expensive? Hard to find? Not needed? Doesn’t really matter. My latest experience with this effect was due to a recent article I wrote about the AM2900 bitslice family of chips. Many vintage computers and video games have them inside, and, as I explained before, they are like a building block you use to build a CPU with the capabilities you need. I had read about these back in the 1970s but never had a chance to work with them.

As I was writing, I wondered if there was anything left for sale with these chips. Turns out you can still get the chips — most of them — pretty readily. But I also found an eBay listing for an AM2900 “learning and evaluation kit.” How many people would want such a thing? Apparently enough that I had to bid a fair bit of coin to take possession of it, but I did. The board looked like it was probably never used. It had the warranty card and all the paperwork. It looked in pristine condition. Powering it up, it seemed to work well.

What Is It?

The board hardly looks at least 40 years old.

The board is a bit larger than a letter-sized sheet of paper. Along the top, there are three banks of four LEDs. The bottom edge has three banks of switches. One bank has three switches, and the other two each have four switches. Two more switches control the board’s operation, and two momentary pushbutton switches.

The heart of the device, though, is the AM2901, a 4-bit “slice.” It isn’t quite a CPU but more just the ALU for a CPU. There’s also an AM2909, which controls the microcode memory. In addition, there’s a small amount of memory spread out over several chips.

A real computer would probably have many slices that work together. It would also have a lot more microprogram memory and then more memory to store the actual program. Microcode is a very simple program that knows how to execute instructions for the CPU. Continue reading “Slicing And Dicing The Bits: CPU Design The Old Fashioned Way” →

PC Watercooling Prototype Is Pumpless

April 18, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

Watercooling is usually more efficient than air cooling for the same volume of equipment, and — important for many people — it is generally quieter. However, you still have water pump noises to deal with. [Der8auer] got a Wieland prototype cooler that doesn’t use a pump. Instead, it relies on the thermosiphon effect. In simple terms, the heat moves water — possibly boiling it — upwards to a radiator. Once the water is cool, it falls down back to the heat exchanger again.

It looks like any other AIO, but the block is extremely flat compared to normal coolers, which have the pump on top of the plate. As you might expect, orientation matters, and you can’t have tight bends in the hoses. The system also has to be totally airtight to function properly. The test was meant to be against a commercial AIO unit with the same number of fans. However, there was a problem, and the final test was done with a larger radiator with one of its three fans removed.

The prototype performed fine and was quiet. It didn’t do as well as the commercial cooler, but it wasn’t bad. Of course, this is a prototype. Maybe a final product will do better. Around the ten-minute mark, the IR camera came out, and it didn’t show any major unexpected hot spots.

We’ve seen water-cooled printer hotends, and pumping is a problem there. We wondered if this technology might work there. The whole thing reminded us of heat pipes without the internal wick to move cold working fluid. We’ve even seen a water-cooled calculator.

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Compaq Portable III Is More Than Meets The Eye

April 15, 2024 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

The Compaq Portable III hails from the 386 era — in the days before the laptop form factor was what we know today. It’s got a bit of an odd design, but a compelling one, and the keyboard is pretty nifty, too. [r0r0] found one of these old-school machines and decided it was well worth refitting it to give it some modern grunt.

The Portable III ended up scoring a mini-ITX build, with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and an AMD RX580 GPU. Cramming all this into the original shell took some work, like using a vertical riser to fit in the GPU. Hilariously, the RGB RAM sticks are a little bit wasted when the enclosure is closed.

For the purists out there, you’ll be relieved to know the machine’s original plasma display was dead. Thus, a larger modern LCD was fitted instead. However, [r0r0] did play around with software to emulate the plasma look just for fun.

It’s funny to think you could once score one of these proud machines for free at a swap meet.

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IRC Client On Bare Metal

April 6, 2024 by Al Williams 14 Comments

In the beginning, there was the BIOS, and it was good. A PC’s BIOS knows how to set up the different hardware devices, grab a fixed part of a hard drive, load it, and run it. That’s all you need. While it might be all you need, it isn’t everything people want, so a consortium developed UEFI, which can do all the things a normal BIOS can’t. Among other things, UEFI can load code for the operating system over the network instead of from the hard drive.

In true hacker fashion, [Phillip Tennen] thought, “Does it have to be an operating system?” The answer, of course, is no. It could be an IRC client. He chose Rust to implement everything. While UEFI does provide a network stack, it isn’t very easy to use, apparently. It also provides support for a mouse. [Phillip] ported his GUI toolkit library over, and then the rest is just building an IRC client.

The client isn’t the easiest to use because, after all, this is a lark. Why would you want to do this? On the other hand, we can think of reasons we might want to take control of a UEFI motherboard and use it for something. If you want to do that, this project is a great template to jump-start your endeavors.

We’ve looked at the UEFI system a few times. Or, you can use it to play DOOM.

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OSHW Framework Laptop Expansion Hides Dongles

April 1, 2024 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

If you’ve got a wireless keyboard or mouse, you’ve probably got a receiver dongle of some sort tucked away in one of your machine’s USB ports. While modern technology has allowed manufacturers to shrink them down to the point that they’re barely larger than the USB connector itself, they still stick out enough to occasionally get caught on things. Plus, let’s be honest, they’re kind of ugly.

For owners of the Framework laptop, there’s now a solution: the DongleHider+ by [LeoDJ]. This clever open source hardware project is designed to bring these little receivers, such as the Logitech Unifying Dongle, into one of the Framework’s Expansion bays. The custom PCB is designed with a large notch taken out to fit the dongle’s PCB, all you need to do is solder it in with four pieces of stiff wire.

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Homebrew GPU Tackles Quake

March 28, 2024 by Julian Scheffers 21 Comments

Have you ever wondered how a GPU works? Even better, have you ever wanted to make one? [Dylan] certainly did, because he made FuryGPU — a fully custom graphics card capable of playing Quake at over 30 frames per second.

As you might have guessed, FuryGPU isn’t in the same league as modern graphics card — those are made of thousands of cores specialized in math, which are then programmed with whatever shaders you want. FuryGPU is a more “traditional” GPU, it has dedicated hardware for all the functions the GPU needs to perform and doesn’t support “shader code” in the same way an AMD or NVIDIA GPU does. According to [Dylan], the hardest part of the whole thing was writing Windows drivers for it.

On his blog, [Dylan] tells us all about how he went from the obligatory [Ben Eater] breadboard CPU to playing with FPGAs to even larger FPGAs to bear the weight of this mighty GPU. While this project isn’t exactly revolutionary in the GPU world, it certainly is impressive and we impatiently wait to see what comes next.

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