June 14th, 2009
So I’ve been wanting a storage system for a few years now. I was thinking just some hardware RAID with some big drives and leave room in the chassis for expansion but after reading article after article saying URE’s will pwn your ass on large arrays during rebuilds I was very skeptic. *Enter ZFS*
ZFS is like the holy grail of storage. Yes software RAID rules…
- Norco RPC-4020
- Two 80GB WD 10K SATA Raptors
- 2 Supermicro
- Other raid controller
- 2GB DDR2
- xyz mobo
- AMD X2 4050+ or some shit
Still need to pickup some data drives, the raptors are for a mirrored OS volume.
Tags: rack, servers
Posted in Uncatagorized | No Comments »
June 13th, 2009
When I was younger my parents would take me and my brother out every few weekends to look at model homes. Me and my brother were always fascinated with dedicated home theater rooms. My dad always talked about how cool that would be–for his birthday this year we were able to make it happen.
So first it started with they were going to buy a new TV–52″ LCD. We (my brother and I) convinced them to mount it on the wall. After that we convinced them to mount all the surround speakers on the wall. After much talk we got them to agree to have a dual display system–TV & Projector (PJ). I had a huge motorized screen in the attic a friend of mine got me from his old office building that was being demolished. We got them to agree to mount this motorized screen on the wall. Then we took it up a notch and got them to agree to mount it in the attic–hidden screen woohoo. Somewhere along all this we got them to agree to the components being behind in a media cabinet (IR Distro woohoo). There were trade offs for getting what we wanted–having to paint the whole @%$% room. Install and light some wall sconces and a ceiling fan…
I decided to run every possible cable to TV and just DVI (adapted to HDMI) and VGA (adapted to component) to the PJ. I also ran 3.5mm audio cable for an IR Emitter on the PJ.
Cables:
- x2 HDMI to TV
- 1 Component to TV
- 1 Composite to TV
- 1 S-Video to TV
- 1 Cat5 to TV (Network)
- 1 Cat5 for IR Receiver
- 5 Speaker Wires
- 1 Coaxial (terminated with RCA connectors) for Sub
- 1 HDMI to PJ (DVI->HDMI Adapter)
- 1 VGA to PJ (VGA->Component)
- 2 Romex for Power Bridge & PJ outlet
I had to decide how to terminate the cable–do I run them all onto wall plate jacks–that would be one big ass wall plate. I got a passthrough/spillout plate–I wrapped the connector ends in stretchy sticky plastic so they wouldn’t get gummed up in the insulation in the attic. Many people say to run some smurf tube from your PJ and TV to your media cabinet but in my case I didn’t feel it was necessary because I ran every possible cable for my TV and PJ. Also the attic is easily accessible and easy to work in so I can always add something else.
Tags: home theater
Posted in Uncatagorized | No Comments »
November 30th, 2008
This is something I’ve been throwing around for a few years–ordered the main components tonight. Should be ready to start building in a couple of weeks–damn hong kong shipping times. The controller supports 32 channels, at 500ma each. Most LED’s are 20ma so that’s 25 LED’s per channel maxed out–but since I’m using RGB LED’s, that’s 3 channels to power even a single RGB LED. I can make 10 “modules” of 25 led’s each–thats alot of LED’s though.
BoM:
x50 10mm RGB Common Anode LED’s
LED-WIZ 32-port USB Lighting and Output Controller
Some kind of U or h channel steel stock
4 conductor cable–might just use cat5
Resistors, tbd based on psu and number of led’s per module.
Tags: toys, usb
Posted in Uncatagorized | No Comments »
October 13th, 2008
So this is my project car, a 1997 240SX. I’ve had it for like 2 years and never done jack with it. My buddy sends me this picture of it the other day:
I flip out because my suspension is gone–but then I realize, they left their calling card. The Big Gulp cup. Sean must have needed it in a hurry and wanted to let me know he had it. <3
Tags: cars
Posted in Uncatagorized | 1 Comment »
September 28th, 2008
I was running some cable to an area of the attic I have never been through and it was flipping hot, much hotter then the other areas. So I went and ordered a bunch of 1-wire temperature sensors to install all over the attic so I can data log and see what areas are the hottest. I made a base for a heatmap that I’ll write something to create hourly and decided to make a mock up, obviously this is just a mock up and it doesn’t show any sort of resolution but it gets the general idea across.–Powerpoint made a decent mockup image–if only the jpeg compression didn’t suck so hard.
Attic Heatmap Example
Tags: 1-wire, heatmap
Posted in Uncatagorized | No Comments »
September 27th, 2008
I just picked up this PE6650 off fleabay for $154.50! Picked it up locally–it was 5min from my house so it was quite the steal if I do say so myself. I’m prepping this for colo in a new data center down the street from where I work.
PE6650
C-19 Plug
20A Edison
Onto the specs!
- Quad 2.2ghz Xeons
- 16GB of ram
- Two Onboard Gigabit NICs
- 900W power consumption–Requires C19 power cords–those 1000W whips that plug into 20amp Edison outlets, this made it a pain to use at the house, my washing machine and my APC SmartUPS 3000 are the only outlets I have to plug this into, the hooking it upto the SmartUPS tripped the breaker about a dozen times until I load balanced equipment between the two UPSs in the rack
I have rails on order and a DRACIII card, thinking about getting four 3.0ghz xeons for it…I’ll update some photos when I get it colo’d.
Tags: servers
Posted in Uncatagorized | No Comments »
September 27th, 2008
Finally mounted up my newest bot in the garage, collecting data to see the environmental differences between inside the rack and outside…
.NetBotz WallBot 400
So far it seems to be just around 20 degrees Fahrenheit…thinking about using a bunch of 1-wire tempature sensors wired to create a 72″ long tempature monitor, with 1 sensor every 12″. That should let me do cool things with monitoring the rack temperature almost per rack unit or something…
Tags: NetBotz, rack
Posted in Uncatagorized | No Comments »
September 1st, 2008
Well I finally got some Dallas Semiconductor 1-Wire Tempature Sensors in. I quickly threw a bunch on the breadboard to see how accurate they are and stuffs, pretty nifty, 2 wires is all it takes, ignore the 3rd leg of the sensors it doesn’t do anything…
Breadboard + 1-Wire Temperature Sensors
I put white blocks in the picture because of the nonsense on the breadboard–it was just some toying of a segment display from awhile back…
I plan to use these sensors (along with many more) to build a weather station, and I’d like to place a few throughout the house to see the difference in tempature between the rooms. Would be intresting to see the temp difference between the outside, attic and home on a graph.
Tags: 1-wire, smarthome, tempature, weather station
Posted in Uncatagorized | 2 Comments »
August 25th, 2008
OMG KEYFOB MANIAAAAAAAAAAAA
I ordered 103 HID keyfobs (used) for less then I paid for 3 NEW
These are almost all 5 digit keyfobs so every single one works just fine with my panel!!!
Keyfob Mania!!!
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: card access
Posted in Uncatagorized | 2 Comments »
August 21st, 2008
My DuoProx II cards came in today, they are 125mhz RF cards and magstripe…Not sure I’ll ever use the magstripe but figured why not spend the extra $0.25 a card. The read range is good about 4″-5″ and it reads just fine through my wallet at about 3″. Keyfobs are in the mail and should be here soon I hope…
HID DuoProx II
Tags: card access
Posted in Uncatagorized | No Comments »
.
