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.

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.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 5

Calvin is coming together. The software is moving along slowly, but I think it's time to assemble Calvin so there's only a single cable coming from him. The power cable. Everything else is optional, the way smart speakers should be. We'll add neato features like lights and working in its own microphone. Let's get to it!

Toggle Switch to Pulse Conversion Circuit

For my next computer build - my filevault and media server - I wanted to take a less microcontrollery way to turn the computer on and off. My parents' build required a microcontroller because I didn't have the parts for this when I built it, so I had to make do. But, as I said before, I don't like cutting sandwiches with chainsaws. It seems wasteful to me to use a whole microcontroller to do one simple task and sleep the rest of the time. So I designed a specialized circuit to do it. I'm by no means a electrical engineer, so this may be a poor design. But stay with me to the end, because this simple thing works (and it's a very short post because it's so simple).