News on my Tech & Stuff

News on Tech, Gadgets & my own mods. PC case mods, linux powered devices, cool gadgets, internet advances, science news.

Sunday 7 June 2009

Top's are on, away we go!

Finally got all the part's together, figured out all the bugs in the operating system's, where to put everything, neatly and without damaging any components.

First of all the VCR case mod.
If thats unclear, it's a PC motherboard & power supply housed inside a VCR.



The memory card reader is thein the fron slot is the part I'm most proud of in this mod.


Secondly after waiting nearly 1 week after completing the bottom part, it's sized and sitting snugly ontop!











A nice on-end shot with a 19" LCD.







Sucessfully running with its power supply pictured to the left.

Tuesday 2 June 2009

'Sandwich PC'

Here is the start of my 'sandwich' PC. which is an old HP/compac evectra desktop usually found in larger corporations, schools and my house!

I've taken the motherboard out of the clunky old case. Taken the original fan and CPU heat sink off as well.

For those too lazy to use google images, follow link for some pix of a evectra in it's original case.
Google Images Search

Starting with a piece of plastic acrylic i found somewhere. Lined up the mobo holes and fitted some sockets into the plastic.


Here is the motherboard with its main/only component's that I've added.

You can see a few things there that might look out of place.
Its Ram (left side) is 1 x 256mb SD, very old school , I'm still looking for a 512mb stick (max).

Top right is the IDE to Compact Flash adapter, with a 1 gig card inserted.
The CPU has slim heat sink and a slim fan, which ill swap out with a larger heat sink, if i can keep the temperate low enough.

Which comes to the OS. I've settled on Puppy linux.
It has plenty of different install options, and it can load completely into ram on start up.
Puppy is a small 100mb linux distro which I've been able to fine tune and boot this system in 55 seconds.

I'm not posting a pix of it completed as yet, cause I'm missing a top part.
Hopefully getting a top piece of acrylic this week, from a friend of a friend or down at reverse garbage. In the end it will measure 22x23x6cm in size total.

In the end I hope to have this mounted to the back of a LCD monitor.
As it's going to be very quiet. It'll probably end up in the bedroom.

Saturday 31 May 2008

Monday 14 January 2008

QUAKE LIVES!

quake was my first love of PC games, i think it was helped along with the kickarse soundtrack by Trent Reznor.

Playing around with my new nintendo DS, and some of the homebrew, i come across a decent port of quake1!
having network support i recalled running quake1 on the xbox1, within minutes i was up a playing (by myself) quake 1 on PC, NDS, xbox1.

can anyone think of another networkable version of quake1?

WinQuake
QuakeDS
QuakeX(xbox)

Friday 11 January 2008

Jaycar Electronics

Jaycar Electronics

this should do the trick using two car batteries, in our future car.