Category Archives: Spark O Matic

Electronics and things that go spark

04/22/10

Fun with Win Terminals

So last weekend the local Goodwill got all the hardware of some poor buisness that went under. There was all kinds of stuff there, hubs, switches, LCD stands, WinTerminals, rack mount parts, etc. It was crazy, like an electronic palooza of sorts. I snagged one of the WYSE clients for 9.99 and brought it to work where everyone thought it was pretty cool. Two of the guys I work with went back and loaded up on the remaning goodies and got a couple of the WYSE’s too. Heres what the little WYSE’s 9450XE’s look like.

wyse_wt9450_21

The ones we got were running XP Embeded, and at various levels of freedom. Some allowed wrighting to their little 256mb solid state drives, while others were locked down tight. We spent more time then it was worth trying to get the WYSE device manager installed to flash them over the network, but gave up and installed laptop drives em. They have all the converter cables and power lines to run mobile IDE stuff which is awesome. Also since the little VIA’s just sip power they only pull .8 Amps to run over their little 12V AC adapters. They would make a great torrent box. But being that we can’t leave them alone we ended up installing the mobile drives, more Ram, and Windows XP Home. I put 7 on mine for a while, and while it was useable it also needed more Ram then I had. After we got them all running on XP, Travis and I started benched marked ours to see whos machine came out on top. His benchmark is with a solidstate page file and tweaked XP settings mines just stock.

bench

Check out those numbers! YEAH!! Mine is the brain dead one thats pulling 0.00mhz. This stuff cracks me up because you know that some supper serious overclocker people are going to see ours in there. Go lil WYSE’s clients!

03/22/10

Arduino and LCD’s

Awhile back I picked up an Arduino to play with. They are pretty fun to mess around with and seem very flexible as to what they are hooked up too or running. I scrounged around the printer grave hard until I found a Lexmark that had a serial LCD display poking out. Some quick screwdriver work liberated it, and then I looked up the data sheet on it, grabbed a tutorial from Lady Adda on LCD’s, and ended up with this.

<KENOX S1050 / Samsung S1050>

It spits out random sentences on the top and bottom every so often. So it could say Chuck Norris… Caught fire. Ostrich… Ate a Banana. etc. Not useful, but kind of cool.

03/22/10

Circuit Bender Box

Heres what my lil controller for upcoming circuit bending projects looks like. Gotta love reusing old PC power supplies, they rule for little project boxes.

<KENOX S1050 / Samsung S1050>
<KENOX S1050 / Samsung S1050>
<KENOX S1050 / Samsung S1050>
<KENOX S1050 / Samsung S1050>

It has 2 rows of just normal old throw switches and two Potentiometers that run down into some old parallel ports that I ripped off some old computers. This way you can take an old printer cable, hack it in half, and solder the loose ends into what ever electronic device you want to break bend. So now its just a matter of ripping something open and playing with the wacky sounds.

01/8/10

Friday! Stuff with faces!!

Here’s a small sampling of stuff around the office that I’ve put faces on Power Supply Monster style.

Grrr!

Grrr!

So below is Mr. Powersupply Squid, in all his squid like glory.

<KENOX S1050 / Samsung S1050>

This is/was an Hp laser printer, but now with a tongue and face, awesome.

<KENOX S1050 / Samsung S1050>

And just to throw some more random clutter on the front of the site, here is a cool logo I found on a stick of RAM today.

<KENOX S1050 / Samsung S1050>

At first I thought it was from some Asian origin, but its made in the Usa! That’s nuts, no one makes stuff here any more, especailly with cool simple logos like that on it.