Category: project

AI assisted construction of a Euro coin holder (#P48)

Yeah everything AI is cool at the moment, but can it do useful stuff as well? I recently got fed up with the plastic bag that I throw surplus coins into and wanted some kind of holder for easy dispensal. Doesn’t have to be a fancy mechanism (although that would be neat), I just need to temporarily store a few coins in an orderly fashion. I simply like to leave the house with a known, useful amount of assorted Euro coins, that’s all.

Searching the interwebs yielded this item from jeremrem: thing 55855

Nice, but not perfect. For whatever reason, the slots aren’t evenly spaced. […]

7th September 2025 9th September 2025 By Bzzz In No Comment

Dreame W10 mop pad drill adapter (#P44)

Super quick and silly STL file for today: Don’t you hate it when your round mopping pads for the Dreame W10 (/Pro) cleaning robot are still dripping wet after the robot “dries” them by spinning them around for a bit? Don’t you think the automatic air dry function where it blows warm air over it, wasting 50 Watts of power for literal hours, is the most infuriating quirk of the entire system?
Don’t you worry any longer! Spin it yourself! Dry it with the power of the over-9000-RPMs! :D

In all seriousness, the warm air dry function is a joke and not being able to deactivate it completely is the single most annoying thing of their stupid software. […]

25th August 2024 13th October 2024 By Bzzz In No Comment

Universal PCIe, AGP, PCI, ISA card storage board (#P43)

Looks like I haven’t tagged any post as “project” for over a year now…time to release some open hardware

I don’t really store much computer hardware – most components are either in use (at least occasionally), waiting to be sold (eBay and the like), or waiting to change hands the next time I visit family. Of course there’s floppy drives somewhere, or good old memories (ha), but it’s not like I have a collection of each and every Socket A motherboard or something crazy. There is, however, two boxes (Really Useful Boxes to be precise, the 9 liter type that I use for lots of things since they fit a specific cupboard nicely) of extension cards. […]

16th July 2023 17th July 2023 By Bzzz In No Comment

NVMe boot on unsupported platforms via Clover (#P42)

A bit more background info on last week’s NVMe adapter board used on the incompatible Fujitsu D3348-B1 2011v3 platform.

The Clover boot manager has been around for quite some time now, and its predecessor is already well over a decade old. It once formed from the rEFIt boot loader back when Hackintoshs were the cool gadget to have, and it had an intermediate fork step with rEFInd (oh those EFI puns…). Thankfully I’m really late to the M.2 party (or any other SSD form factors other than 2.5″/3.5″, really) for hardware compatibility reasons, and so all the early adopter issues have been ironed out over the years. […]

13th March 2022 8th April 2022 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

Samsung CLX-6200FX series RTC battery replacement (#P41)

Tutorial time! We don’t have a tutorial category yet? Well, it’ll be a project then…

Let’s just skip all the YouTube tutorial BS with two-minute intros on volume 9001 and thanking their sponsors entirely, and get to the point:

You got a Samsung CLX-6200FX series printer (6220 and 6250 – probably also their predecessors 6200, 6210 and 6240) that wants you to set the date and time on every power cycle, and you’re fed up with it? Great, Samsung wasn’t a dick about servicing, so here’s what you need:

* One new CR2023 3V lithium primary cell
* A small Philips or flat head screwdriver
* An ESD strap or a grounded piece of metal nearby
* The damn printer
* Enough space to access the back of the printer (no need to lift it)
* Ten minutes of free time

Same procedure by the way for adding or replacing extended memory, see below for details. […]

23rd January 2022 23rd January 2022 By Bzzz In 4 Comments

Supermicro 815 1U case 2,5″ HDD and RAID card battery holder (#P40)

New year, new hardware. Given space (in general, as well as in this specific case) is limited, old hardware has to go. So it’s about time post this 3D printed thingy, since the related hardware is about to be sold.

Now, the Supermicro 815 case, CSE815, SC815 or whatever prefix is en vogue nowadays, is one of those 1U pizza boxes. Shout-out to Supermicro for using webp images on their website already – but sticking to 261 x 222 px resolution for the full-size file.

Anyway, these come in two dozen varieties plus the EOL ones, and all of them have four 3.5″ HDD hotplug caddies in the front and some 1 to 3 card slots in the back, since it is a tiny case at 1U or 44mm height regardless of the 19″ width. […]

9th January 2022 9th January 2022 By Bzzz In No Comment

The PCB (Christmas) Tree 2021 update (#P32F1)

Ah yes, the good ol’ PCB tree.
It wasn’t in use for a good part of 2021 due to the fuse burning out, unclear if it was from an accident (some parts are still wobbly) or just slightly specced too low at 1.6A (slow-blow, but 24/7 operation). Since it was placed inside a somewhat difficult to access triangle cavity of PCBs, it took me a while to open it up again and move things outside. Voltage of the DC-DC converter was lowered slightly to around 3.2V and the single fuse was replaced by two individual units placed on the outside, dividing the power rail roughly equal between upper and lower tree (by current, not by physical size) […]

26th December 2021 26th December 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

AVM FRITZ!Box 7362 SL to 7520 upgrade + 7530 unlocking (#P39)

Quick reminder/PSA: Router patch week in every parent’s basement starts in a dozen days. Be prepared!

Not actually sure what type of…internet-free telephone service box thing my mom is using in the inherited farm house, but at my place, I needed an upgrade. Until earlier this week, an AVM Fritz Box 7362 SL (the cheapo 1&1 branded one) provided service. Bought that sucker 8 years and a month ago and it’s running just fine – except for the fact that it is considered EoL by AVM. That however is debatable, since on the one hand AVM announced EoM (end of maintenance) and EoS (service) dates for that box type to be June and December of 2019 respectively, but on the other hand nowadays no longer states exact dates for any product and has released FritzOS 7.13 for it just last month. […]

12th December 2021 12th December 2021 By Bzzz In 16 Comments

Tiny customizable OpenSCAD CPU shipping boxes (#P38)

Shipping season is here. For no good reason people start terrorizing the logistics companies and I’m probably one of them. Difference being: I need to get rid of stuff, not buy more. I need to ship items.

For quite some time now I’m fond of the idea of OpenSCAD as a STL file generator. While elaborate 3D designs with multiple levels of rounded edges and polynomial madness in three dimensions are better created in graphic tools such as DesignSpark, I don’t find them all that pleasing when making simple geometric shapes that need the occasional modification. […]

28th November 2021 28th November 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Not-so random thoughts on LSI HBAs again (#P34F1)

A couple months ago I scraped on the surface of the topic of LSI debranding/crossflashing. Now’s a good time to visit that again, since I got another branded LSI card that I wanted free of the manufacturers old firmware and the “hey look at meeee, I’m a veeeery special controller” look in any device tree. Yes, we know you’re special, but the annoying kind of special. You’ve likely been the default card in tens of thousands of servers or the only (supported) choice people had when opting for external SAS. […]

10th October 2021 10th October 2021 By Bzzz In 1 Comment