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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… Read More »Mystery Auction 2022

C.H.I.P Resurrection

I was one of the lucky people to buy multiple C.H.I.P’s as part of the Kick Starter campaign. So far I’ve honestly not used them for much and they were gathering dust. As part of my ventures into Home Assistant, I wanted zoned audio. So it made sense to try Shairport-Sync on the Chip’s. In general is should be easy enough to get it sorted, in 3 lines your done. Unfortunately previous projects on the Chip’s made them unusable, so they needed re-imaging. Unfortunately the company is no longer supporting them, but thankfully their guides, flash images and community are still preserved. I had tried previously to reimage using windows running VirtualBox, but there was USB driver issues. A physical Ubuntu box worked fine. This script makes flashing them a breeze. Followed by this guide… Read More »C.H.I.P Resurrection

Augmented Reality Sandbox

Found this neat project by Oliver Kreylos, and gave it a go over a weekend using only spare parts. It came together well on a Toshiba i5 laptop. I found there to be issues using the Intel graphics card/drivers, so I swapped to an AMD Athlon 2X4 with a Radeon HD47## card (no longer supported by AMD). It did refresh faster than the Intel graphics card, but had the same ‘unknown’ issue when trying to render water. After swapping out the Radeon with a slower Nvidia card, it all displays correctly, but the frame rates where pretty slow. I reduced the quality of the water and the frame rates have increased. With a working model, I decided to upgrade from the test cardboard box, speaker stand and copious amounts of quick release clamps. The sandbox and stand… Read More »Augmented Reality Sandbox