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.