Forays into Hardware Moddification and Hacking: 2011

Friday, December 02, 2011

Dual temperature Logger

Oh you poor neglected blog, I really should be paying better attention to you. Here is a project I have started to work on that I believe belongs on this blog and not really in my homelife. I have a friend that has a unfinished crawlspace that is easily accessible (read walk in height) that I've mused about placing a barrel for aging weird beers in. The trouble is it is unregulated temperature, and I want to have an idea of the ranges I can expect from it before I lay my precious beer down there.

I purchased a TI Launchpad a while ago, for the purpose of having a cheap and available development board to play with. These are great at $4.30+shipping you don't need to worry about ruining them and they have the USB host for programming them built in. It is quite a nice dev-board for the price and I know Texas Instruments is just trying to buy market share here, but if it drives down the Arduino and Phrallax devboard prices I'm all for it. I need an experiment and want some long tail results about the temperature inside the crawlspace vs the outdoor temperature to get a feel for how stable the temperature is. My hope is that it stays above 40°F (his furnace and hot water tank are down there so it should be above freezing) and stays below 70°F in the summer. Below 60°F would be really ideal, but for free you can only hope for so much.

My general plan was to get two temperature probes and tweet the temps a few times a day, hack-a-day posted this little project that has me thinking that I may use WUnderground for a destination to store the data. I could I suppose roll my own CGI script to take a post datastream and keep it in a text file, or use a wireless accessory to get things really interesting. This will probably have to be an ongoing post because I haven't decided how I want to proceed. I can work on interfacing directly with the network using the Devboard and a Wifi module. That route has some benefits and runs around $50 for the wifi module. Another route is to use a bluetooth module and interface with an Android phone to do the heavy lifting for me. I could just log the data to the phone on an SD card, and using No-IP access a webserver to just check on it from time to time. The beauty of using the Android device is it has built in WiFi, storage a built-in battery backup and is really pretty compact. A final option is to use the Open ADK and plug in via the usb port. The drawback is it was designed for Arduino boards, so I'll be inventing the wheel here to make it work with the TI board. I'm not opposed to buying something like the IOIO, given the costs fall pretty much in line with the cost of the WiFi module, I had just hoped to pull this off with the TI boards.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Liquid cooling minor case mod

I put together a PC for a Vista build about 3 years ago, and every summer since then I have had concerns about its ability to survive the heat of our basement. I had been considering a water cooling rig for my Quad-Phenom machine because it idles at about 40c during the winter months.

I didn't want to have to build and leak test a system myself so I settled on Corsair H50 All in One CPU Cooler as an alternative. I thought this would be a good compromise to the noise/heat dissipation as well as the overall build and test problems of normal water cooling systems. The theory was really there, but it all fell apart when I realized that I didn't have a 120mm rear exhaust fans. The only option that I had was the Acrylic side of the case had an 80mm hole. After a little research I found that a 4" holesaw is ≈ 102mm and decided I would give that a try. If you have ever tried to cut a hole in acrylic you probably know what was wrong with this plan, despite having 4 clamps holding the acrylic down, everytime I lowered the drill press down to the material it caused it to jump a few millimeters before I could get the drill head released. The surface area of the hole saw allowed too much grip. Plan b was to drill the hole in some particle board and use a trim router to finish the hole. The key to this is going slowly enough that you don't heat the bit up too much and start melting the acrylic. All things considered, for 45minutes of work it was a pretty successful project and I managed to not ugly up the acrylic too badly.