Upgrading PC Cooling With Software

March 9, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 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.

Op-Amp Drag Race Turns Out Poorly For 741

February 23, 2024 by Dan Maloney 32 Comments

When it was first introduced in 1968, Fairchild’s 741 op-amp made quite a splash. And with good reason; it packed a bunch of components into a compact package, and the applications for it were nearly limitless. The chip became hugely popular, to the point where “741” is almost synonymous with “op-amp” in the minds of many.

But should it be? Perhaps not, as [More Than Electronics] reveals with this head-to-head speed test that compares the 741 with its FET-input cousin, the TL081. The test setup is pretty simple, just a quick breadboard oscillator with component values selected to create a square wave at approximately 1-kHz, with oscilloscope probes on the output and across the 47-nF timing capacitor. The 741 was first up, and it was quickly apparent that the op-amp’s slew rate, or the rate of change of the output, wasn’t too great. Additionally, the peaks on the trace across the capacitor were noticeably blunted, indicating slow switching on the 741’s output stage. The TL081 fared quite a bit better in the same circuit, with slew rates of about 13 V/μS, or about 17 times better than the 741, and nice sharp transitions on the discharge trace.

As [How To Electronics] points out, comparing the 741 to the TL081 is almost apples to oranges. The 741 is a bipolar device, and comparing it to a device with JFET inputs is a little unfair. Still, it’s a good reminder that not all op-amps are created equal, and that just becuase two jelly bean parts are pin compatible doesn’t make them interchangeable. And extra caution is in order in a world where fake op-amps are thing, too.

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Robotic Acrobot Aces The Moves

January 12, 2023 by Anool Mahidharia 8 Comments

[Daniel Simu] is a performance artist, among many other things, and does acrobatic shows, quite often with a partner “flyer”. Training for his acts gets interrupted if his flyer partner is not available due to travel, injury or other reasons. This prompted him to build Acrobotics — a robotic assistant to make sure he can continue training uninterrupted.

He has some electronics and coding chops, but had to teach himself CAD so that he could do all of the design, assembly and programming himself. Acrobotics was developed as part of a Summer Sessions residency at V2_ (Lab for the Unstable Media) at Rotterdam in 2022.

The design is built around a mannequin body and things are quite simple at the moment. There are only two rotational joints for the arms at the shoulder, and no other articulations. Two car wiper motors rotate the two arms 360 deg in either direction. Continuous rotation potentiometers attached to the motors provide position feedback.

An ESP32 controls the whole thing, and the motors get juice via a pair of BTS7960 motor drivers. All of this is housed in a cage built from 15 mm aluminium extrusion and embedded in the torso of the mannequin. [Daniel] doesn’t enlighten us how the motor movements are synchronized with the music, but we do see a trailing cable attached to the mannequin. It’s likely the cable could be for power delivery, as well as some form of data or timing signals.

He’s working on the next version of the prototype, so we hope to see improved performances soon. There’s definitely scope for adding a suite of sensors – an IMU would help a lot to determine spatial orientation, maybe some ultrasonic sensors, or a LiDAR for object detection or mapping, or additional articulated joints at the elbows and wrists. We gotta love “feature creep”, right ?

Check out the two videos after the break – in the first one, he does an overview of the Acrobotics, and the second one is the actual performance that he did. Robot or not, it’s quite an amazing project and performance.
CAVEAT : We know calling this a “robot” is stretching the definition, by a lot, but we’re going to let it slip through.

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3D Printed Circular Prototype Performance Prop Captivates Circus Spectators

February 2, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 12 Comments

When mathematically inspired maker [Henry Segerman] conspired with circus performer and acrobat [Marcus Paoletti] to advance the craft of acrobatics in round metal objects (such as cyr wheels and German Wheels), they came up with a fascinating concept that has taken shape in what [Henry] calls the Tao-Line.

Similar performance devices go in a straight line or can be turned on edge, but the Tao-Line is far more nimble. This is because the Tao-Line is not a continuous cylinder, but rather is made up of numerous circular shapes that allow the Tao-Line to be turned and inverted at different points in its rotation.

While a circus prop might not be your average Hackaday fare, it’s noteworthy because the Tao-Line started off as a 3D printed prototype, which was then turned into the metal fabrication you see in the video below the break. It’s an excellent example of how modeling complex shapes as a physical product- not just a 3D model on the screen- can be helpful in the overall design and construction of the full scale piece.

If you’re looking to build something that’s under the big top but not quite so over the top, you might enjoy this mixed-media digital clock. Thanks to [Keith] for the great tip. Be sure to submit send your cool finds via the Tip Line!

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Guitar Pickguard Adds MIDI Capabilities

December 6, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 1 Comment

For a standard that has been in use since the 1980s, MIDI is still one of the most dominant forces on the musical scene even today. It’s fast, flexible, and offers a standard recognized industry-wide over many different types of electronic instruments. Even things which aren’t instruments can be turned into musical devices like the infamous banana keyboard via the magic of MIDI, and it also allows augmentation of standard instruments with other capabilities like this guitar with a MIDI interface built into the pick guard.

[Ezra] is the creator of this unique musical instrument which adds quite a few capabilities to his guitar. The setup is fairly straightforward: twelve wires run to the pick guard which are set up as capacitive sensors and correspond with a note on the chromatic scale. Instead of using touchpads, using wires allows him to bend away the “notes” that he doesn’t need for any particular piece of music. The wires are tied back to an Adafruit Feather 32u4 microcontroller behind the neck of the guitar which also has a few selectors for changing the way that the device creates tones. He can set the interface to emit single notes or continuously play notes, change the style, can change their octave, and plenty of other features as well.

One of the goals of this project was to increase a guitar player’s versatility when doing live performances, and we would have to agree that this gives a musician a much wider range of abilities without otherwise needing a lot of complex or expensive equipment on stage. We’ve seen a few other MIDI-based builds focused on live performances lately, too, like this one which allows a band to stay in sync with each other.

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Caching In On Program Performance

June 23, 2019 by Al Williams No comments

Most of us have a pretty simple model of how a computer works. The CPU fetches instructions and data from memory, executes them, and writes data back to memory. That model is a good enough abstraction for most of what we do, but it hasn’t really been true for a long time on anything but the simplest computers. A modern computer’s memory subsystem is much more complex and often is the key to unlocking real performance. [Pdziepak] has a great post about how to take practical advantage of modern caching to improve high-performance code.

If you go back to 1956, [Tom Kilburn’s] Atlas computer introduced virtual memory based on the work of a doctoral thesis by [Fritz-Rudolf Güntsch]. The idea is that a small amount of high-speed memory holds pieces of a larger memory device like a memory drum, tape, or disk. If a program accesses a piece of memory that is not in the high-speed memory, the system reads from the mass storage device, after possibly making room by writing some part of working memory back out to the mass storage device.

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Improving Raspberry Pi Disk Performance

December 29, 2016 by Al Williams 31 Comments

Usually, you think of solid state storage as faster than a rotating hard drive. However, in the case of the Raspberry Pi, the solid state “disk drive” is a memory card that uses a serial interface. So while a 7200 RPM SATA drive might get speeds in excess of 100MB/s, the Pi’s performance is significantly less.

[Rusher] uses the Gluster distributed file system and Docker on his Raspberry Pi. He measured write performance to be a sluggish 1MB/s (and the root file system was clocking in at just over 40MB/s).

There are an endless number of settings you could tweak, but [Rusher] heuristically picked a few he thought would have an impact. After some experimentation, he managed 5MB/s on Gluster and increased the normal file system to 46 MB/s.

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