Over easter the family took a trip up to Toronto to have a look at the Lake Mac Heritage Festival. This is something we have been planning to do for the last few years but finally managed to get there.

It was nice to be able to slow down and just have a look around at all the different things on show. Mostly there were boats but there were some cars and vintage farm engines that held our interest for a while as well.

Below is a set of photos that my lovely girlfriend took while I was getting distracted by all the shiny bits.

Enjoy,
Rex

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Written by Rex ORegan-2

Published: 01 April 2016

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So I finally have a space inside for me to work on the CNCs. This is a drastic improvement over where they were. outside. Where I would freeze in winter, cook in summer and be attached by mozzies at any time of the year.

I had planned to build a set of bespoke shelves that would allow me to put the servers above the machines rather than below them as you see here. However that didn't quite work out so in order to be able to actually get these inside before it gets cold I got a pair of shelves from Super Cheap Auto in town
I have not complaints about these shelves. They are fairly solid; and while I needed to give them a few taps with the hammer to get them to clip together fully that does mean that they won't be falling apart any time soon.
Each of the pieces are fairly flimsy, but once everything is together it becomes fairly rigid and I have no problems putting as much as will fit onto these shelves as inevitably will happen.

The next thing I am looking for is an old monitor that I can connect to the computer for the Lathe so I can control it and ideally a rack mount cabinet that I can fit both of the servers in along with the switch so that the cables are a bit neater and I can put them away from any possible shavings that might be leaking out of the machines.

I have a few things coming up. We got some good photos at the Lakemac Heritage festival so I will be sharing those. These CNCs will be running again very soon and I have a few things I would like to make with them that might actually happen now. And I have a Hard drive that I have been asked to destroy for data security so I will go through the details of construction with that.

Cheers,
Rex

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Written by Rex ORegan-2

Published: 28 March 2016

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Sometimes you just can't do things the "right" way straight off the bat.
This is a great example of that. I've been trying to get Jerry (The NAS server) working so we can share files among our LAN. Unfortunately the RAID card in there doesn't like to play nicely with *BSD so I've gone back to Linux which I know. And has drivers for the card.

Unfortunately I couldn't find an easy way to boot from the USB drive that FreeNAS was using. So I had to use a normal Hard Drive. The only one I had spare with SATA was a little 2.5" laptop drive. That is fine, except I don't have 2.5" caddys for the bays in the front and I can't see any other spots to put this. So I've attached it to the backplane and you can see to do that it couldn't be sitting right on the bottom of the tray. However if I left it like that there could be problems with dust or rodents. So I slipped a normal caddy in, lifting up the front of the drive a little to slide it under.
Hmmm, a bit sketchy, but it let me test this idea without spending money or stupid amounts of time on it.

It's in the bottom tray here, just before I boot to test this. The middle caddy has my big drive and is unplugged to make sure it doesn't cause issues. The top one is just a blanking caddy.

So sometimes you can get away with doing something without having everything perfect. So don't let the fact that it's not the best way to do something don't let it stop you from doing it.

Cheers,
Rex

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Written by Rex ORegan-2

Published: 08 March 2016

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In may last post about Nathan's Computer I promised to share some quick benchmarks and thoughts about the build. So here they are, I'll start with the benchmarks. I just used Cinebench because that's a name I remembered and I wanted to see how fast the 8 threads would go through the picture on the CPU test. For monitoring temperatures I used Speedfan because I've used it a lot in the past.All the time these benchmark were running I was watching the CPU temp with Speedfan. I don't have any screenshots there, but none of the cores really went above the mid 60 degrees C.  These temps are much, much better than I have been used to with my laptop over the last few years and almost makes me want to build a personal desktop machine so I don't have to worry about the system killing itself when there is a constant high load. The cooler we used was a Deepcool Gammaxx 300 I was a bit nervous about having such a big heatsink hanging off the motherboard without any bolts going through. However if you don't push on the actual cooler itself then it seems to stay on fine. If there are problems however I'm sure we can find a solution at the hardware store.

If I were to do this again would I change anything? Probably not. However I probably would've looked longer for a motherboard. While the one we got was good and had everything we needed it is a custom HP part and doesn't have a standard power socket pinout or any labeled power switch pins. Eventually I did find solutions to each of these problems but it took a lot of searching. Because not many people are buying the motherboard out of a HP z400 to stick it in a completely different system without any of the HP stuff. So going down that route can cause headaches.

All in all I think it has been a good project and Nathan seems to be happy with this machine so far. If you would like to see some of the other projects I have on the go at the moment follow this link to my Projects page which I keep updated with the status of my other projects.

Speaking of other projects, now that this is finished I'll have to start on something else. Or perhaps finish building the shelves for the CNCs so I can do some more work on them.

Cheers,
Rex

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Written by Rex ORegan-2

Published: 05 March 2016

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