computer hacks

1271 Articles

computer hacks

PC Watercooling Prototype Is Pumpless

April 18, 2024 by 16 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.

Continue reading “PC Watercooling Prototype Is Pumpless” →

Compaq Portable III Is More Than Meets The Eye

April 15, 2024 by 8 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.

Continue reading “Compaq Portable III Is More Than Meets The Eye” →

IRC Client On Bare Metal

April 6, 2024 by 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.

Continue reading “IRC Client On Bare Metal” →

OSHW Framework Laptop Expansion Hides Dongles

April 1, 2024 by 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.

Continue reading “OSHW Framework Laptop Expansion Hides Dongles” →

Homebrew GPU Tackles Quake

March 28, 2024 by 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.

Continue reading “Homebrew GPU Tackles Quake“ →

Upgrading PC Cooling With Software

March 9, 2024 by 21 Comments

As computing power increases with each new iteration of processors, actual power consumption tends to increase as well. All that waste heat has to go somewhere, and while plenty of us are content to add fans and heat sinks for a passable air-cooled system there are others who prefer a liquid cooling solution of some sort. [Cal] uses a liquid cooler on his system, but when he upgraded his AMD chip to one with double the number of cores he noticed the cooling fans on the radiator were ramping quickly and often. To solve this problem he turned to Python instead of building a new cooling system.

The reason for the rapid and frequent fan cycling was that the only trigger for the cooling fans available on his particular motherboard is CPU temperature. For an air cooled system this might be fine, but a water cooled system with much more thermal mass should be better able to absorb these quick changes in CPU temperature without constantly adjusting fan speed. Using a python script set up to run as a systemd service, the control loop monitors not only the CPU temperature but also the case temperature and the temperature of the coolant, and then preferentially tries to dump heat from the CPU into the thermal mass of the water cooler before much ramping of cooling fans happens.

An additional improvement here is that the fans can run at a much lower speed, reducing dust in the computer case and also reducing noise compared to before the optimizations. The computer now reportedly runs almost silently unless it has been under load for several minutes. The script is specific to this setup but easily could be modified for other computers using liquid cooling, and using Grafana to monitor the changes can easily be done as [Cal] also demonstrates when calibrating and testing the system. On the other hand, if you prefer a more flashy cooling system as a living room centerpiece, we have you covered there as well.

Probes connected from a Pi Pico board to the SPI flash chip, with other end of the probes connected tot the level shifter circuit resistors

Motherboard Revived With Simplest 1.8V SPI Shifter Ever

March 7, 2024 by 15 Comments

If you have ever had to fix a modern desktop motherboard, you might have noticed that the BIOS (UEFI) SPI flash is 1.8V – which means you can no longer use a Raspberry Pi or a CH341 adapter directly, and you’d need to use a 1.8V level shifter of some sort. Now, some of us can wait for a 1.8V level shifter adapter from an online store of your choosing, but [treble] got a “BIOS flash failed” motherboard from Facebook Marketplace, and decided to make it work immediately.

She tells us a story about reviving the motherboard, and there’s one thing she shows that is interesting in particular – a very simple way to level shift 3.3V signals from a serprog-flashed Pi Pico down to the 1.8V that the flash chip required, something you are guaranteed to be able to build out of the parts in your parts bin, only requiring nine resistors and an NPN transistor. If you ever need to reflash BIOS on a modern motherboard, take note. As for 1.8V rail, she ended up tapping the 1.8V power pin of the SPI chip the motherboard itself to power the chip while programming it.

In the end, after swapping the two BIOS chips places and fixing a broken trace mishap, the motherboard booted, and works wonderfully to this day, a much-needed upgrade to [treble]’s toolkit that allows her to do RISC-V cross-compiling with ease nowadays. This is not the first time we see people reflash modern boards with 1.8V chips – if you want to learn more, check out this incredibly detailed writeup! Need to do some further debugging? Use your Pico as a POST card!