Tag: open hardware

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

Convenient IBM x3650 server PSU power distribution board (#P35)

On the occasion of selling the second PSU from the long dismantled IBM x3650M1 machine (part of the stack shown in #P23), a direct result of eBay getting greedy and increasing their commission from 10% of the item price to 11% including postage (WTF?) plus 35 cents per item, I need to publish this real quick. I still do have access to powerful 12V supplies that can operate my lightbox setup to take photos of the things are usually operating the lightbox, but it would be pretty inconvenient to do so ;)

So here’s another piece of Open Hardware – a custom PSU board for said IBM power supply. […]

21st March 2021 22nd February 2022 By Bzzz In 4 Comments

CR2025/CR2032 battery dummy for power consumption tests and a hungry Supermicro board (#P21)

This bugged me for quite some time now: Ever since a very nice dumpster revealed a stripped Supermicro server chassis including a Supermicro X8DTL board (Dual-1366) to me, the BIOS battery of that system seemed to be empty all the time. You see, I use this machine as an offline backup, so once every couple of months I fire it up, transfer my data, and unplug it from power and ethernet. And almost always it doesn’t start right up because the CMOS data is gone. Ideally it should be a headless unit, so that’s highly inconvenient.

I finally got around to test this – the fix will be another project for some day in the future. […]

8th March 2020 15th February 2020 By Bzzz In 2 Comments

Breadboard friendly Four Decade Programmable Resistor Board, 1%, 1/4W, KIT (WHL #25)

Got some more Open Hardware today! Not mine, though…it’s a four decade resistor adapter from luftek, who apparently comes from Slovenia. He has a github repository for his project called Dekada if you want to check it out (literal git checkout is also possible :) ). I happened to buy Version 0.1 back in September 2016 for dirt-cheap 1.99 USD per unit – I bought two pieces via eBay, directly from luftek. Unlike the Wan Hung Lo guys, we in Europe generally have to pay a reasonable amount of money for postage…in this case 3.98 USD. […]

30th April 2017 30th April 2017 By Bzzz In No Comment

New at Wan Hung Lo: Open Source Hardware! Presenting the USB A-to-Micro bridge (WHL #4) (updated)

Oh well, I already announced it’s gonna be fake. But the other way round ;)

A while back, I saw the USB A-to-Micro bridge from youritronics. I already own one of these medium quality USB power meters that display voltage and current in an alternating fashion every few seconds. But complete control over power, data lines and also shielding is new. So I wanted one. In the short comment section however, someone noted that the signal routing probably isn’t the best. I had some spare time after Christmas this year, and I also wanted to test the Platinensammler (PCB aggregator) service from Jakob Kleinen. […]

1st February 2016 14th February 2016 By Bzzz In , , 2 Comments