Category — Spark O Matic

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.

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.

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!

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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

Grrr!

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

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

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.

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.

Popularity: 37% [?]

Ahoy ye scurvy dawgs! Here we be installing a Wiikey 2 into thar lil Nintendo! (Pirates put exclamation points on the end of every sentence, this is fact.)

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Popularity: 44% [?]

First off, what could be more awesome then putting faces on inanimate objects? Think about it, wouldn’t a toaster look much cooler with some googley eyes on it? Maybe put some little horrified faces on your bread slices? Okay that could be a little grim, so lets put a face on something that isn’t a bread eating monster. Meet Mr. Powersupply robot guy thing.

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Popularity: 58% [?]