Second monitor for twice the derp!
Update on things
So what was that fuss about with cleaning the room with fiberglass dust and playing with solar panels?
The answer is boats. Badass solar-electric boats.
I joined a club that builds a single-person boat and enters it in an international competition called Solar Splash. I will be working with a large motor, those solar panels, and lots of of batteries. On top of that, I will be building a current and voltage monitoring/data logging system using an Arduino. Things just got more fun :D
Time capsule now jumpstarted with an ATX power supply from an old Dell. It survived a couple days of continuous operation as the house’s wifi without losing power or malfunctioning, so I think it is stable enough to return to the owner so he can recover his archive data.
Finally, a rambling inside look at the internals of my VU meter project, with my actual voice narrating (as much as I hate how I sound). Questions are welcome.
That mysterious black box from the previous post is the control box for a giant LED VU meter display, shown above taking a bite out of “Beyond Monday” by the Glitch Mob. Blue bar graph responds to bass (200 Hz and below) and green responds to everything else. More info coming soon about construction and internals.
Questions are welcome, but may be answered in upcoming posts instead of one by one.
Hmm… What could this thingy be?
A few of you followers know already and a few of you don’t.
Stay tuned :P
Apple Time Capsule 1st Gen. (2008) Repair
I will be pulling this Time Capsule apart, replacing the failed capacitors in its power supply, and modifying the case so that it runs cooler. I will cut a hole in the bottom of the case and place the fan so that it draws in fresh air and forces it into the case, where it will escape from the vent slits. I will then wire the fan directly to the 5-volt output of the power supply, so the fan runs whenever the device is powered on.
Forced air cooling in this manner will bring the internal temperature down to reasonable levels and allow the device to keep functioning for years. If I only replaced the capacitors, the device would fail in the same manner in another two years or so, because the capacitor failures are only a symptom of the real problem of overheating.
I will be charging for this repair, because my time is valuable, I hadn’t really planned on this until it sorta appeared in front of me to do, and I can always use a few dollars here and there. Compared to buying a new device, my repair will be quite cheap :P
Apple Time Capsule 1st Gen. (2008) Repair Introduction
Apple’s Time Capsule is a wireless router with built-in hard drive for automatic backup of devices on the network. The first generation was released in 2008, and within a couple years became notorious for mysterious power supply failures that left the devices as $300+ bricks. The failures were quite similar in that the device would lose power suddenly and be unable to start back up. The reason for these failures, the more I read about them, only becomes more and more silly.
Flash firing in slow motion. Captured at 60 frames per second and replayed at 6 frames per second to show the afterglow in the tube.
A closer look and a run-through of operation. Tomorrow will likely involve shenanigans resulting from my friends getting to play with it :P
Turn on video annotations for more info.
This is me, under the escalators in the Boylston St. entrance to the Hynes Convention Center. I liked the darkness down there but iPhone cameras seem to dislike bright flashes in said darkness, hence the video artifacts when the flash goes off and my friend reporting the camera’s displeasure. I’ll take better videos at school tomorrow.
