Mystery Auction 2022

After some poor auction bids I ended up with two boxes, one of very old computer cards and one with 4 single board computers – which is what drew me to it. In the box with the cards, most of the interesting ones looked like they had been damaged. The single board computers were four somewhat identical motherboards with TFT LCD’s , 2.5 inch IDE hard drives, GSM modules and some basic I/O ports.

After checking the larger and older cards, there was nothing that could be saved, it looked like they had something large dropped on them. From what I can tell they were custom cards that plug into a back plane that acts as a bus between them. The only chip of value I found was an Intel MG80C186XL-20 which was apparently military spec version of the Intel 80C186XL-20. Please note the link above mentions it’s a collectable, and the corner missing is still in the board (sigh).

Moving on to the box of single board computers (based on 1006020008100P or Emetx-i602). I spent significantly more time troubleshooting them. They have PC Molex connectors so I figured a PC PSU would be the trick and happiness would follow. Not so much. The most success I got was a full white screen and the 2.5 inch IDE drives would spin up but didn’t sound like they were reading. No beeps, or indicator LEDs. After a while they were put aside until a few days ago while I was cleaning out the shed.

I also found a very old project I made from the early 2000’s – a single board computer based around a VIA chipset, a Tillamook MMX 266MHz CPU (Intel Pentium), 265MB of RAM, running DSL (Damn Small Linux) on a 32MB compact flash card. It was used for sniffing wireless SSIDs. I opened it and found the magical TFT LCD header used by the screens on the single board computers. To rush the project, the data for the LCDs came from the older board and the backlight was lit by an auction board. It came to life and it all its 640×480 resolution glory. I pulled the hard drive from the auction board and booted from it. It was running a version of Suse with a splash screen logo “iVision” and then froze. I booted the original older board (running DSL) and edited the LILO boot options on the IDE hard drive to try to get more information.

The following steps allowed me to at least work out what the single board computers from the auction where used for.

• The windows manager (XFree86) needed the config changed to accommodate the different graphics card.
• I couldn’t boot the IDE hard drive while the system still had the compact flash inserted or it would sit at “Creating devices” and repeat “hdc: hdc1” infinitely.
• The end game resulted in booting the from the compact flash running DSL, mount the new hard drive, bind the IDE drives /dev directory, chroot into it, run the sound application to initialize the sound (which fails later), and then start the daemon that starts the XFree86 window environment and then the “media player”.

What happened next was the most random out come.

I then exported the playlist and watched them, from what I can tell, they are mainly related to mens health. I know, given the components on the boards and the fact its main application seemed to be media related, so it should make sense, but it was very unexpected.

What did I get from the random box’s that I can use?

• 4 Working screens which will need replacement cables: NL6448BC26-01
• 2 Mostly dead 2.5 inch IDE hard drives.
• 4 Dead single board computers and daughter boards – based on 1006020008100P or Emetx-i602.
• 75% of a “collectable” CPU.

Financially worth it? Nope.

Mentally rewarding/interesting? Yes.

Future projects may include making the original single board computer portable with built-in screen for old Dos/Windows games.

Cheers.