Will this fly?

The Box - Bulding my first custom home server

2019-11-15T16:20:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, I wanted to have a home server, however the list of the requirements I put up made this idea quiet challenging. I wanted to have:

the server should support virtual machines
the server should support minimum 10 disks
the server should have low noise profile
the server should look OK to keep it in the living room

I was checking the computer cases available on the market, however those were

either ugly looking
smaller ones were not supporting the amount the disks I need
bigger ones were too huge and noise for the living room

OK, so if there's no case matching up my needs, than nothing else remains just to make one.

OK, but how it should look like?

a table
a simple seat
a pouffe

A pouffe like case would fit the purpose. The size is about right and it is an expected furniture in the living room.

So where we should start. Let's gather the hardware... I decided to buy a used brand machine, because of the quality of the hardware, this was cheaper then buying a whole set. So I bought HP workstation which has a Xeon CPU and nice amount of RAM.

So, the hardware is done, but a few small piece is missing e.g. disk racks, leg for the furniture and some supports to for keeping the sides together.

I was thinking about how to gather these items... Should I buy? Should I make from wood, from metal? Nah, I decided to design and 3D print these.

Thingiverse link of the 3D print designs:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3979224

Disk rack with disks...

What's next? The material of the case. Well, the best I found which is easy to work with and strong enough is MDF wood.

How about the design?! Well, I was watching a couple of videos about what's the key of having a low noise machine case. What are the key factors of an almost noiseless computer case?

use huge CPU cooler
use huge fans, which move slow
use the chimney effect

What's the chimney effect, simple, hot air goes up. This means to extract the most hot air, we need to have big fan on the bottom of the case and a big hole on the top of the case. However this also means that the original setup of the regular computer case is simply will not be efficient enough. To lay down the mainboard will not let the hot air out quickly enough. So the solution is a new setup, let's setup the mainboard vertically, so the CPU cooler can be perpendicular to the airflow, help the hot air extraction without any extra effort.

And this is how it looks...

How the disks will be cooled? Actually the same way...

And this is how it looks at a semi assembled state...

Fully loaded...

And covered...

That's it!

Repalcing battery in BBurago car

2018-10-21T15:10:00.002-07:00

Prologue (you may want to skip this paragraph...)

My kids have a BBurago police model car, which I like too. This model is so realistic, I love it. Once upon a time the battery drained completely and the sound and lights gone. OK, usually it's daddy's work to fix issues like this. I immediately started to investigate the way of a battery replace, however I found no screws or anything like that.

No screws or anything

I googled for the solution, however I wasn't able to find the solution. So I left it. After a while this model car got into my hands again and then I saw something that looked like as a clip...

Tools you'd need:

1.8 or 2.0 Triangle shaped bit

Curved tweezers

3 pcs LR44 battery

The trick...
If you check those square wholes on the bottom of the model car you can see the clip which keeps the whole car together. Actually those clips are the registration plates of the car. By removing them you'll be able to open up the car. The clips work the way that the middle stick pops into its place and holds the body on the car tightly. The solution is to lift up that middle stick using a curved tweezers and pull out the registration plate for loosing the clip.

Lift the middle stick while trying to pull out the registration plate for loosing the clip.

You need to this exercise twice, front and rear. If all goes well you'll have the two plastic clips in your hands and you can then easily open up the car's body. Please make note about the clips. The clips are not identical so you need to remember which is for the front and which is for the back side of the car. (Little help, the thinner, longer clip goes to the front.)

"Registration plate" clips.

Removed registration plate...

Lift up the body and you'll see 3 triangle headed screws. Unscrew those and then remove the plastic cover of the electric circuit. This way you'll have free access to the batteries for replacing. Please check and remember to the polarity of the batteries. You may damage your model if you mismatch the polarity.

Lift up the body for the screws

Remove the plastic cover for replacing the batteries.

I'm suggesting a quick test to check if you did everything well before you re-assemble your model.

All looks good, now you can refit the body and push back the clips.

Pushing back the clip.

And you are done! Model car's battery was replaced. Kids are happy. The World is saved again! :-P

Power supply from recycled parts

2018-03-03T06:07:00.001-08:00

Hi Guys,

This is me again :) Let me share with you a new problem and its solution, also I'm trying to emphasize here that recycling can be a very useful thing :)

The Problem:

Recently I would need a power supply for one of my hobby projects. I used to collect the old phone's power adapters for this purpose, which I suggest to do for anyone, this can be handy - but I couldn't find the best match from my collection. Ordering from a online market place would take too many time. I'm generally not a patient guy.

The Solution:

Never give up. :) I started to dig deeper in my workshop and have found a very old T-Systems set top box. I googled around and found that's hard to re-use because that's encrypted somehow, and the hardware is way to old. I thought that'll be OK too, I'll take a part grab some buttons or LEDs or anything for my hobby projects.

When disassembling surprise, surprise, I found a HDD in it and a power supply, which had many common outputs, even symmetric voltage output like -5V, +5V.

Hooray, this was what I was looking for. "This must be perfect for my projects" - I thought. I had a spare of step-up converter, so any voltage, till its max. 50V, I could setup with that above 5V as that will be its input voltage :)

I grab a spare box, unfortunately wooden one (please don't do the same) I'd suggest rather a plastic box for electric projects ;-)

I drilled couple of whole on the box for power cable and switch:

I've used the existing screw holes on power supply's board to keep that stable in the box. And drilled some holes for the outputs as well. I used female banana plugs for this purpose.

The connections of the banana plugs from inside of the box:

Now the most interesting part is the step-up voltage converter. You can find many types on your favorite online market place. I had a spare one and used one of the many 5V outputs from the power supply to feed this lil' magic board. I placed it near to the top of the box and tried firmly fix it by using cable tie, which actually worked pretty well. This was needed because the module I'm using have a little screw on it. Using that screw I can change the output voltage of the module.

Here you are the result, I could run a 24V fan using 5V ;-)

Thanks for reading, I hope you did enjoy this at least as much I've enjoyed to put this little project together. Please stay tuned, I've ordered a Voltage and Amperage display for this project, which I planning to build in and will share with you Guys.

Bye for now!

Direct phone number for the service provider's helpdesk, is that possible?

2017-11-04T14:09:00.000-07:00

Hi There,

I was struggling with an issue and describe the problem to one of my friends. And after a couple of minutes we came up with the solution.

The problem

I wanted to have a solution for an annoying situation. When you try to call your service provider's hotline you need to cross several menu options, then enter your unique id just to have someone who might help you.

For example, the hotline number is this: 123456789, option 7 for problem report, option 2 for existing customer, then you need to enter your customer ID with a hash mark at the end e.g. 12345#. If you are sitting in a car you definitely don't want to do that, plus it's hard to remember the customer ID as you can have many different at different service providers.

Wouldn't it be great to have only one number, one contact on the contact list to call when you would need help from that service provider?

The solution

When I describe all these to my friend he told, that I could use a comma in the phone number to add pause and add the menu option and again a comma and the rest. As he told, when the phone dials the comma, it waits for two seconds and then dials the rest of the number.

Hm, then I thought this must be easy... Let's stick to our example, the phone number of my "magic" hotline contact would look like this:

123456789,7,2,12345#

I ran some tests and it turned out that the phone systems would need a bit more time, so more pause should be placed into the phone number. The final solution number looks like this:

123456789,,7,,2,,12345#

This worked beautifully. All these extra characters can be entered via the normal keypad on any phone, and stored into a contact.

So now you can have your direct hotline phone number in your phone, and I hope this saves you some minutes and headaches :-)

Have a nice one!

Temp 3D print filament spool holder from paper box...

2017-10-21T13:42:00.001-07:00

Hi There,

Recently I ran into an issue. I bought a 1kg roll of filament and wanted to print a spool holder.
I googled up the internet, and found this one:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:508896

And this is actually a Catch 22. It's hard to manage a long running 3D print without proper spool holder and avoid any run away of the filament string, which would end up in a knot then the filament would stuck at extruder motor and all these would end up in a catastrophic failure, a failed print.

Luckily my filament had a nice paper box. Then I thought "I might can use that box to have a temp solution for my problem".
And this lead me to this solution.
So I grabbed the paper box and a short piece of PVC pipe which I would use as spindle.

I placed the spool into the paper box. Where to cut the hole for the spindle is a very important question. Our ultimate goal is to allow the spool spin smoothly.
As you can see, my box was just a bit bigger than the spool. Therefore I couldn't put the spindle into the middle of the spool, because then the spool won't lay on the spindle, rather it would stand on the bottom of the box and wouldn't run smoothly at all. So I decided to move the center of the spindle to the left, where it could really support the spool's weight and the spool would have enough space to run freely. I just used the pipe piece to mark the hole for the spindle by pushing down hard. That left a nice circle on the paper to cut.
The rest is history...

Both sides of the paper box were prepared with the hole for the spindle

The pipe piece as spindle was placed its place.

And wrapped that up.

Then I cut a hole on the top of my paper box spool holder, where I let the filament come through and printed the above mentioned spool holder.

However if you plan to print a spool holder for your filaments, I'd suggest this ultimate, luxury one :)

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2119644

That's all Folks.

Have a nice one!

Radio controlled electric socket.

2017-09-02T14:07:00.001-07:00

Hi there,

This is a post for friends about an idea, which I recently came across led me to make a radio controlled electric socket.
I'm using a pump when I'm watering the plants in the garden. The issue with this method I have to run back from the garden to the pump to turn that on. I wanted to solve this issue. Something which would be able to remotely turn off the power for the pump would make it. Something similar as our remote controlled garage door. So then I went to my favorite online market to look after a electric kit for that. Then I found this:

Let the seller know your preferred Volgate, 110V or 220V also the frequency. In EU only 433MHZ is allowed.

This is great to my project, I would add a box for that plus an electric socket and job done. 😃
So here you are the story.
I've ordered from the above RC switch. I've ordered with 220V and 433 Mhz as this would work in EU. Please note: In EU only 433MHZ RC transmitter is allowed by the law.
So here your are the stuff I bought:

Stuff I used for this project

I bought, a bigger box which high enough for the socket, electric socket, battery for the transmitter and the remote switch.
First of all I cut a hole on the lead of the box to fit the socket.

Once this is done, we can do some cabling. This is the plan, very simple:

And this is how that looks in real life

Lets close the box and have a quick test

Voilà!

This wasn't too difficult, right? 😃

Bye for now.

The START

2017-04-05T14:38:00.002-07:00

Hi there,

I decided to start with a blog, however I have never ever thought that this would be so hard on the first step. It took me an hour to figure out the blog's address. All the simple, meaningful addresses were occupied. However I don't see the reason to not to free up an address of a blog which wasn't touched since 2002. Anyway. So here I am, and this blog would be about different ideas, which I implemented or plan to make it happen :)
This is the reason why the blog's name is "Will this fly?", which refers to the first steps in making something, when you could feel doubts and you may not sure if that idea will work. I hope you'll enjoy :-)