Building A Cluster Of IPaq PCs

June 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 37 Comments

[Steven Pigeon] got his hands on ten iPaq computers that a friend acquired through an eBay auction. The older machines were in good condition but the march of technology had left them behind as casualties. He’s given them new life by assembling a cluster. The first order of business was testing the hardware to make sure it’s working. [Steven] used memtest86+ that comes along with the Ubuntu distribution of Linux to find one bad memory chip in the bunch (a revelation that took 10 hours to discover on the slow hardware). He assembled the unit above with MDF as a support structure and threaded rod to hang the boards. He ended up with a beautiful module and his next step is to choose the operating system that will pull the whole thing together.

We find this build every bit as beautiful as the file cabinet cluster. It’ll be interesting to check back with him and see what kind of performance he can get out of it.

Cheap And Easy Top-down Camera Quadpod

October 12, 2009 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

camera-quad-pod

We keep waiting for evolution to give us that third arm but in the mean time, this may be the solution for holding the camera while you document your projects. [DHagen] has made a four legged tripod (quadpod) for his camera in order to use it as a digital copy machine. We’ve spent many a night trying to get a steady and sharp video of an LCD or array of LEDs in action to document our weekend tinkering and this will make that all a lot easier.

His build uses materials that will total between $10-$20 at the hardware store down the street. A chunk of scrap wood is connected to the camera using a bolt in the threaded tripod hole of the camera. Two L-brackets are attached to the wood so that one is on either side of the camera lens. This leaves two mounting holes on either side of the lens to attach threaded rod using nuts. The assembly is capped off with a square of acrylic (plexiglas).

Quick and clean. It’s not the cheapest camera mounting solution we’ve seen, but it sure does a good job.