Fujitsu Esprimo E920 D3222-A12 12V/11Vsb to ATX conversion (#P28)

Recent hardware acquisition: Parts of an Esprimo E920 system (board, CPU, RAM and power supply) for replacing my main desktop system, a good old FX-6300 with 970 chipset board.

Why would I post about this? Well, it’s not a drop-in replacement. DIY required, since those OEM things always have some custom oddities. In this case it’s two (and a half) of them:

  1. Power supply has no ATX mounting bracket
  2. Power supply and board are not -12V/3V3/5V/5Vsb/12V units but 11Vsb/12V only
  3. Board has no I/O shield, just fitting case cutouts

Note that there are datasheets of this very Fujitsu board out there that show a regular ATX connector with all the standard voltages required. […]

2nd August 2020 3rd August 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

High Speed 4 Ports LED USB 3.0 HUB With On/Off Switch Power Adapter USB Hub For Desktop Laptop and the CAT S61 (WHL #58)

This post is filed under “old, forgotten crap that has issues with recently added hardware”.

Well, this might be the new record holder for ancient reviews – but only due to recent events. I bought this USB 3.0 hub for 3.59€ with free shipping back in July 2017 (pricing hasn’t changed all that much). It was a purchase following up the 3+1 Gigabit/LAN adapter described in WHL #34. I still run this thing to support four USB3 keystone modules that are roughly 2.5m away from the mainboard. That’s not only difficult for the USB signalling at the highest speed setting, but also a strain when running high power devices such as 2.5″ hard drives or a mobile phone that needs a bit of juice. […]

19th July 2020 18th July 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

ESP32 hardware faders (#P27)

Maybe my google-fu is rusty, or there’s simply no full example of this on the Interwebs…that’s pretty strange.

This is about the cherished ESP32 that will feature an extension/replacement of my #P7 series. This was an ESP8266 board that replaced a dumb lighting control, offering sensor logging to a database. I quickly found out that the limited pin count (and quirks) of the ESP8266 would require me to think about e.g. shift register extensions to make the entire project viable – which now got replaced with the large ESP32 that does have all the flexibility that I need. […]

12th July 2020 13th July 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

USB ISO multiboot script – Ventoy (#P26)

Speaking of the GitHubs on the Interwebs: I’ve been using a somewhat selfmade bash script to make bootable USB media for quite some time now. It’s capable of running ISO files directly from the USB drive and also the option for a separate partition for some Windows WIM extraction, in order to offer bootable Windows install media. As I’m the only user and there’s not that much demand for running different Linuxes at the moment, that script is badly maintained and only got an update when like a new Ubuntu LTS hit the market. […]

28th June 2020 28th June 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

Netgear EX6120 OpenWrt support (#P25)

Looks like I missed a post last week…ah well, here it is.
From the bunch of defective hardware that I bought back in March there’s still some repaired access points left. One of the hobbyists that was interested in some EX3700 APs asked about the EX6120 that are more abundant, faster, and not much more expensive. He’s going to revamp his WiFi and wanted some OpenWrt mesh. Well…back then the hardware compatibility list said it was somewhat compatible, because both are closely related and the EX3700 has support. The EX6120 firmware was linked to the EX3700. […]

21st June 2020 22nd June 2020 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

Sneaked into BigCliveLive (#E13)

As you might have heard already, bigclive(dotcom) is running a separate channel nowadays for live streams such as the occasional Manx Beard Club or the more recent weekly corona streams. It’s called BigCliveLive and I’m obviously subscribed to both of them. Aside from the last two livestreams I’ve watched the entirety of those channels…it should be trivial to find out the total playtime with the very handy youtube_dl tool that I use for all of my YouTube subscriptions, but it’s probably comparable to EEVblog, that is, in the medium to high 100s of hours. […]

1st June 2020 1st June 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

Supermicro X9SRW-F small riser mounting adapter (#P24)

More fun with the Supermicro X9SRW (and we’re still not done yet!)

The two X9SRW machines that I got had the same CPU and RAM situation, but one of them was in a 815 (1U) case, and the other one still is in a 825 (2U) one. I scrapped the noisy 815 for my board and allocated the more spacious 825. Fans are not the only thing that differs, though, as the added height also caused Supermicro to exchange the riser card for a different one. While the top riser is just an angled PCIe x8 connector (high up to make room for some heat sinks underneath), the bottom one is a WIO type that distributes 32 lanes in total. […]

24th May 2020 25th May 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

Construction fails in networking gear (#R9)

Ah well, I’m too lazy to craft another post dealing with things currently in development – let’s rant instead.

A few weeks ago I bought this huge lot of “failed” networking electronics that finally led to having an 8-port PoE switch at home, which is a nice addition – the MikroTik wAP ac finally runs on PoE as intended, the four ports (2x1G, 2x100M) of the Fritz Box router are no longer overcrowded, I did have a good time repairing two of those switches easily and I didn’t even spend a penny on all that thanks to a few sellable items (plus brownie points for donating quite a few more). […]

10th May 2020 10th May 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

Fitting a proprietary Supermicro X9SRW-F into a standard 3U 836 case (#P23)

Blogging’s a bit tedious right now, as shipping parts is rather slow at the moment, and there’s so much going on at work…

This has been in the making for the past two months now. Some very nice dude gave away “old” servers at a popular German hardware forum, but requested local pickup due to the difficult and expensive shipping of entire server chassis. These were decommissioned colocation servers from his own business, aged 7 to 12 years and no longer viable for 24/7 operation – still decent machines for occasional use. […]

26th April 2020 24th May 2020 By Bzzz In 2 Comments

3.5″ Floppy disk drive benchmarking (WHL #57)

Yeah, you read that right. Time for some serious benchmarking of good old floppy drives. The type of benchmark that the interwebs have been waiting for.

In case you’re questioning my mental health right now: Nope, not affected by COVID-19 or the “quarantine” (that only keeps me from delivering a 2U server and causes people to act strange in the supermarkets). I’ve gone mad quite a long time ago. Probably a glitch during assembly.

Now, I got four bad boys here, revving their, umm, stepper drives?
Alps Electric DF354H(121G), 33wk 2007 – full size 3.5″ drive (5V 1000mA)
IBM FRU 06P5223 ASM 08K9835, Feb 2004, USB drive (5V 500mA)
Sony MPF820, Dec 2005, Slim drive (5V 750mA)
Teac FD-05HF, May (?) […]

12th April 2020 13th April 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment