More Optical Media Drive Salvage

I started writing this about two and a half years ago. I'm posting it now so I can clean out my 'Draft' folder on blogger. Lots of the stuff doesn't still apply, but I figured I'd finish writing it with what I had and just post it.

Reverse Engineering HP PCIe Mezzanine Cards - Part 1

This is a big project that's way above my electrical pay-grade. Am I going to do it? Yes. Will it work by the end? Maybe. I've heard conflicting rumors about how tolerant PCIe is supposed to be. One quote I've heard is that you can run PCIe over a wet string. But that might not be the case for server hardware like the HP Blades. But we'll burn that bridge when we come to it. For now, we need to figure out what we're doing and how we're going to do it.

100

This is the 100th post on this blog. It's nothing special, but I just wanted to take a minute to take stock of the things I'm working on and further confirm my decision to switch to a once-per-month posting cadence to make the blogposts better and more complete.

WiFi Enabled Alarm Clock - Part 1

Alarm Clocks are simple devices - they beep occasionally at a specific time. So it's probably not hard to make one. But what if we had a WiFi connected Alarm Clock? Something that would make "Internet of Things" an actual buzz word. Get it? Alarm clocks buzz... ha... okay, I guess not. Let's just get on with the build.

What Can You Do With A Broken LCD Screen?

Not much.

But there are ostensibly some things you can do with a broken LCD panel. I found a small one in my box of stuff that had its ribbon broken off during moving. Unfortunate and (for me) unfixable. But can we salvage parts from the LCD screen and, perhaps most importantly, make use of it

State of the Blog - Year 4

October is a month I look forward too for many reasons. Primarily: it's spooky season, and I love Halloween. But also it's because I get to write one of these shorter "State of the Blog" posts which gets me out of doing two projects this month. But that leads me to consider... should I only be doing one project a month?

Failed Attempt to Lap GPU Dies

Integrated circuits are beautiful. They are perhaps the most complex structures humans have created. The fact that they work at all is nothing short of a miracle. And if you've ever seen an exposed die of some of the more complicated chips like microprocessors or GPUs or things of that nature, you know that the structures printed on the silicon are absolutely stunning. Our mission today is to try and get at the structure of some chips and expose their beauty. Spoiler alert: it didn't go well.

Remote Audio Transmitter with an ESP8266

The motivation for this project was to have a wireless way to listen to my building's intercom remotely, be it from another room or from another state. Having the ability to do this doesn't necessarily add security to my residence like cameras would (maybe keep an eye out for a post on that), but it's interesting nonetheless. So what we can do is capture the audio over WiFi with an ESP8266 and capture it on a server. All with the power of Docker, of course!

Fixing a Broken Midi Keyboard

If you can't tell by this post and the last post, I'm really running low on things to write about here. So I looked around my room. What could be fixed quickly and relatively painlessly. Something I had been putting off for months. Then, in the corner of the closet, I saw it: a two octave Axiom keyboard that wasn't recognized by my computer anymore. Easy fix, right?

'Reuse' Comes Before 'Recycle': Low Power Server from a Scrap Laptop

If you know literally anything about me, it's that I believe that computers are only useless when they're off. They're still capable of a lot - even the old ones - but only if they're on and working. So when I see perfectly good computers going to waste, I try and figure out something to do with them. This was the case with a Dell Latitude E4300 I found in the trash a little while ago.

Dumping and Decompilation of Old Stereo Firmware

Remember that game console that I made a while back out of old computer parts and a stereo enclosure? It still had the motherboard intact. I desoldered everything from it and got some interesting (and somewhat usable) parts. There were some parts that I didn't dive into though, and I'd like to take the time now to shallow dive into one of them now: the EPROM.

Make Something That Isn't A Computer A Computer - Episode 4: Amazon Fire TV Stick

With each passing episode of this series I can hear you screaming at your screen more and more. "BUT TUCKER!" I hear you yell. "THE AMAZON FIRE TV STICK IS BASICALLY A COMPUTER ALREADY! WhY iS iT tHe SuBjEcT oF tHiS sErIeS???" And I suppose you're right. But that's not the intent of the product. The intent was to plug it into your TV and use it like a Roku. What we're essentially going to do is change it into a compute stick.

Moving Very Heavy Servers

My friend Wesley and I moved those massive C7000 servers from his home before I was able to do all that transcoding. He wanted to make a video about it. It turned out... like this. Don't try doing it this way. It was ill-advised.

Cloud Gaming - Part 1: The Proof of Concept and The Plan

Cloud gaming. Everybody's doing it. NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, Sony... you get the picture. Big tech companies are doing it. Am I willing to say it's the future of gaming? Not quite, but it is an interesting service that clearly has a market. I wanted to see what it took to build a service like this in the cloud as well as the bandwidth it required to play things at a higher resolution, framerate, and quality than my computer.

Virtualizing my Original Homelab

Remember that high school home lab that I had set up many years ago? Well, most if it is coming down. After graduation I'm moving to my own place and for some odd and inexplicable reason my parents don't want those horribly outdated computers in their basement. Well, I certainly don't have room for them in the place I'm moving. So why don't we take what we can and virtualize it? That way we can still have the computers without the bulk.

Looking at a DLP Chip From a Projector

DLP chips are pretty neat in a "how do they work?" sort of way. Like, I get how they work, but I guess I don't quite understand why someone thought moving thousands of microscopic mirrors at lightning speeds would be a good idea to produce images. It blows my mind that this technology works at all. The DLP chip has to produce the image on its surface in order to make it come out of the box, so let's tear one down and see if we can make it work without light.

Software Engineering and Computer Science Major - A Retrospective

I'm almost at the end of a Software Engineering and Computer Science double major at my college. I'm a month away, but I don't have any classes this quarter (just finishing up a Senior Project) so I feel qualified to have an opinion on the whole... thing. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to write about yet, but I do know that I can't possibly be as thorough as I should be.

Setting Up My Plex Server In Docker

I've been gearing up to maintaining my own Plex server. Back in the good ol' days, I ran a Plex server off of my very first computer in my homelab and it was... adequate. It didn't have a bunch of media but it served its purpose. But, eventually, I stopped upgrading it and it became obsolete very quickly. Then, in college, my friends and I started to build a Plex machine using an old laptop and an external 16TB hard drive. Then we outgrew that, so we moved to a larger storage system. Now, we're all graduating. We all want copies of the Plex but we also want to continue to grow it. So, how did we do it?

How I Transcoded 11TB of Media Under A Week

The answer to the question "how did I transcode 11TB of media in under a week" will not shock you. In fact, there's really only one answer: I threw a disgusting amount of compute power at the problem. Now, I know what you're thinking. Throw enough computer at something and it will break, but the design used to solve a problem is just as important as the power you have behind it. If you don't use the power correctly, then you don't truly have power.

Running a Blade Server Without an Enclosure

I remember when the commercials for IBM Blades aired on TV. I thought the concept was pretty interesting, although at the time I didn't fully understand what was going on. After working with a few HP blades for a while, I get why they're so important. You can put a lot of compute power in a very small amount of space. But in order for many of them to be useful they have to be linked to a midplane in the blade enclosure. Or do they?

Headless Raspberry Pi Stream Youtube Streamer

There are many reasons you'd want to stream to Youtube from a Raspberry Pi. With the camera attachment, you can watch over anything with great clarity. My friend wanted to set up a camera to watch over his hedgehog - mostly for fun - and chose this system to do so. In many of the solutions I've seen to now, it simply offers a command line interface from which you can start streaming. What I intend to do is far more simple to use.

Building A Temperature Based Fan Controller

Cooling is important. I know this, because in the file vault I built myself there is hardly any airflow with 8 hard drives in close proximity to each other. This causes the hard drives to approach their safe temperature limit. In an enclosed space, they exceed it and shut down. This isn't good, as it wears the hard drives more than regular usage. So we need to add a fan to them. I want to build my own temperature based fan controller because I'll need one for another project I'm working on. The payoff on that one will be pretty cool, too. So stick around.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 6

Calvin has been on my desk for far too long now. I really want to just, you know, finish this project. Obviously, the software will be continuously evolving, but the hardware will be packed away in this nice package and will not be in wires and parts on my desk as it has been for many months. But I think that Calvin's design - as well as his codebase, isn't what I want it to be. Maybe I should start from scratch? Let's design a whole system architecture that allows us to make a whole smart home based on Calvin.

Turning A Broken Chromecast Into An Audio Chromecast

The Chromecast reinvented the way we share media with those around us. It baffles me that it took so long for a company to make a device that turns dumb TVs into smart TVs. It's also amazing the power they pack in their tiny form factor. The small Chromecast 1 was way ahead of its time. It's a miracle that it can do what it does and do it so well. But because they're so compact, they can fail very easily. For example, I recently got my hands on one that produces very strange video artifacts. Like, very very strange.