Inspiration

This blog post does not relate to one of my own achievements.  But I came across the this article and I found it inspirational.

PC case overhaul

Now that I have my brand new, home made 19" rack; I'm moving the internals of my old pc to a new 19" rack mountable case.

Before starting the move, I backed up all the data that was on the PC. Yes, I didn't forget :-)

First I put my two patients on the operating table :-) .

As I'm having software RAID configured I needed to be sure to reconnect the drives in the same order as before. So I labeled the drives according to the connectors on the mother board.

Then I took a pic of the back of the PC to have an idea of how everything was setup before the move. I also took some further pictures of the connectors inside the PC.

Once I was assured that I had enough pictures, I disconnected all cables from the mother board.  Once disconnected I moved the mother board to the new case, followed by the power supply.

One neat thing about the new case is that it contains sleds for the hard drives making mounting the drives much more easier

After reconnecting everything, I booted the machine and everything seems to run fine.

As a finishing touch I tried addeinga some blue CCFL's I ordered on  ebay some time ago.  Unfortunately one of the two was broken (either in transport or during one of my moves :-) ). So I added the remaining CCFL to the case.  I'm still not sure how exactly I'm going to mount it, but below pictures give an idea how it might look.

Still some work to do, but, looking good so far.

Garage Storage

My latest creation, a custom built garage storage.  I helped build this for a friend of mine.  It's nearly finished but I'll see if I can update the pics when it is completely finished.

I designed this using google SketchUp.

One side hosts the washing machine and the cloths dryer. The other side, at the bottom has some narrow storage next to what will become a shoe rack.  On top there is some bigger storage foreseen, at this time it's still missing some boards though. To maximize the storage space, I indented the closet to 'embed' the light switches.

I choose to use multiplex (18mm thick) as it would make the whole storage solution much sturdier and stronger than using MDF.

Hopefully my next post will be about something non-wood shop related or people start thinking I'm a carpenter or something similar.

DIY 19" server rack

A while ago I purchased Sun Fire V480. As this is a 19" mountable server case, I went looking online for cheap (preferably Sun microsystems) 19"server cabinets/racks. However this search remained unfruitfull.  Either the cabinets or racks were too big to handle or too expensive to buy or ship. So I decided to make one myself.

I set out to make this rack in wood which is cheap and lightweight.  After reading an article in Make magazine I even attempted to not use any metal material. After creating the sides the ol'fashioned way I eventually decided that using 'modern' materials like vises and angle  irons would be much quicker and productive :-)

So after constructing the rack I attached 2 12U rack strips I bought via e-bay to the rack.  As a test I mounted a network switch in my home made rack.

I added some wheels to the rack, to make it more movable.  Afterwards I slid in the Sun Fire V480 an an empty rack mountable case (in the future I'll move the contents of my desktop to this case).

Before mounting the wheels I added two  beams to the rack to prevent it from tipping forward too much,making it safer for me to slide out a server.

Arduino RFID project talk tape lost

Just got informed by one of the organizers of newline conference of the whitespace hackerspace that they can't find back the recording of my talk Bringing logic to a gym.

BUMMER

So I guess that I should have brought my own recording material.

Standing desk - part 2

So what to do with your old desk when you made yourself a new standing desk?  Throw it away?

Nope,
just put a board underneath it,
add some wheels,
throw some file cabinets on the board,
put your tools on the cabinets

and TADA!!!!!!

a small work bench that you roll out whenever you need some extra space and you don't want to clutter up your standing desk :-D

Standing desk - part 1

Just finished the base version of my standing desk.  It still needs some finishing touches and I still have to throw my gear back onto the desk.  But here are some shots of my new *achum* work of art.

The base is mostly made up of some 2by4s and some angle iron and the top is a door I had laying around.

It's dimensions: Height 105cm, Depth 78cm & Width 200cm
Follow up of this blog post is here.