The First Life of Moscato

This was the first time I had truly built a computer completely from parts. It was a really great learning experience. When I got to the packages, I whisked them away to my work-bench. I first started by opening up the case, and getting a feel for what I had set myself to. The case had more fans in it than I had previously thought. I only thought it had the fan in the side panel, but it also had one on the roof and rear.

I figured out how to clear out the 5.25in bay spacers to make room for the bay adapters. Once I installed the 3 bay adapters, I then installed the fan controller as well. I had originally intended to put the controller in the top most 5.25in bay, but due to my haste, I had forgotten about that. I ended up putting it the bottom bay. This is actually a better location for the controller. If the server sits on a desk, the display will be more easily readable. If the server is on the floor(say near-ish my bed) then the light from the display will not bother me. This also means I didn't have to redo 48 screws by hand. I then installed the power supply and motherboard. Next I spent two hours or so looking at pin-out diagrams to connect the front panel, power supply, and fans. I wanted to be especially careful to make sure that I wasn't going to break anything. I then put the SATA card and the RAM into the machine. Once I was convinced that I had hooked everything up to the point where the machine would boot, I put Ubuntu 11.10 on a thumb drive. The machine was assembled on my floor up to this point, and then I moved the operation to my workbench. I hooked up my old dell screen with 1600x1200 resolution, keyboard, mouse, and thumb drive armed with Ubuntu. When I first turned the machine on, I thought something was broken because it was so quiet. I reset the box and waited again, and then the Ubuntu start-up screen launched. Mission accomplished.

This rig is very quiet. In fact, I had to turn off the infamous Dell T110 to truly appreciate the quiet. My refrigerator was still way louder. The 230mm roof fan is exceptionally quiet when set to "low" via a switch on the rear panel. The fans in the hard drive bays are also very quiet under 1100 RPM. At about 500RPM, the bay fans are exceptionally quiet. Depending on the actual heat output of the all of the drives when they are installed, It might be appropriate to enforce a minimum speed of 500RPM to provide some airflow but also stay quiet. The solid state power supply, solid state drive, and slow efficient fans work together to be exceptionally silent. I put one of the temperature leads onto the heat-sink on the CPU. Under idling, the temperature reads around 110F. In contrast under load, I have seen it get to 116F; a pretty cool running machine too.

I name all of my computers after wines: merlot my Dell T110, syrah my Dell XPS 17in, and malbec my Acer Aspire. I mentioned my naming scheme to one of my friends, and she quickly replied that she had recently had a glass of Moscato....and it was done. Below are some pictures of the process.

Here are the packages! 

Here are all the parts lined up on my workbench.

Parts

Parts

Parts

Parts

Assembly in Progress

Since I live in a man-cave, It can be a little dark sometimes. My flashlight has magnets which I used to attach the light to the case in various ways. This was one example of how I put the light on the case to help me build.

The solid state power supply goes in!

The Installed Cooler Master Bays

The Motherboard Goes In!

The moment of truth! It worked!

Operational, but not final. The cables are a mess.

Naming the Machine

It works

All Bay fans on.

When I turn a fan off with the fan controller, it turns the LED fan light off too. It is kinda neat to be able to see if a fan is running or not.

357 updates..........

A Power Efficient and Quiet Server

Right now, I have a Dell Power-edge T110. It works well, but it is noisy and overpowered for serving files and archiving. It also lacks the space to house a nice stack of drives. I want a server specifically for archiving and file serving. My family has numerous hard drives which contain terabytes of family generated media, and I want all this media collected and backed up redundantly. I want a server that is:

• Low power
• Quiet 
• Fanless as possible
• Raid six

These requirements are driven by needing an always-on quiet machine. Right now, the dell is noisy enough that I can hear it across my place and it is rather thirsty.

The Case is designed to hold everything and a bag a chips. The major requirement is that it needs ten 5.25 inch bays. It will need nine bays for the three Bay Adapters and one bay for the Fan Controller. More on the fan setup later. This setup will allow the server to hold one sixty four GB SSD and up to eleven hard drives which have yet to be selected. The SSD will have an adapter to allow it to fill a three and a half inch drive space. The hard drives for the raid will be purchased at a later date. Each bay adapter can hold four drives and a fan. There will be a temperature probe running from the fan controller to each bay adapter. The temperature probes will be thermally coupled with the bays via some good ol' Artic Silver When the machine is idling, the fans maybe off or running really slowly.  When you ask the server to work for you, the fans will kick-in if there is enough heat in the drive bays.  The fan controller can control up to 4 fans, and it uses 4 temperature sensors to provide information to drive its behavior. Each of the 3 banks of hard drives will get its own temperature sensor, and the large case fan will be controlled with the fourth temperature sensor. In summary, this will allow the fans to activate on an as-needed basis.

The motherboard is a low power dual core atom processor which is passively cooled. This is done to conserve energy and reduce heat output. It also has six sata ports and a host of other input and output connections. In the spirit of being quiet, the power supply is fanless and very efficient. The motherboard has a sata card in the PCI slot to give a total of ten ports. This will allow nine drives to act in a software driven raid 6 configuration with the final drive holding the operating system. In the raid six configuraion with nine two-terabyte drives, there will be eighteen terabytes of usable space with the capability of loosing two drives. There are four gigs of RAM in a two by two configuration. The ram has a CAS latency of four-four-four-twelve.  

Stay tuned for more assembling silliness!

More about Me

IGVC robot at 2011 FIRST World Festival

Becreo Introduction

Brickworld Indy 2011

Hello,

Here is some video of the IGVC robot under remote control at Brickworld Indy 2011.  The broken part I was referring to in the video were the linear actuators.  The robot currently has 2 Fergelli actuators.  The rear of the actuator has plastic bits to interface the actuator into a Technic creation.  Turns out if you ram the robot into something, it jerks the affected module around and snaps those important plastic bits on the actuator.  Mine cracked, but if the robot were to hit a table or leg again then the actuator's plastic would break for good.  Before that happened, groups of little kids were taking turns playing with the robot.  I had hordes of little kids and parents intrigued with the robot for several hours.  Lots of good MINDSTORMS and FLL chats were had with parents and children alike.  It was actually my fiancée that drove the robot into a table and damaged the linear actuator plastic bits.........Jessica!!!

Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition LEGO Robot

This robot has had a long time in the making.  It was built for a competition called the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition - IGVC (www.igvc.org).  The goal is to navigate around a closed obstacle course autonomously.  The minimum size of an entry must be 2 feet by 3 feet.  Most entries into the IGVC are $20,000 to $30,000 university backed entries. The goal of this robot is to enter a LEGO MINDSTORMS robot into the IGVC to demonstrate that a low cost, roughly $2000, off the shelf LEGO “toy” can competitive with robots roughly an order of magnitude more expensive.


I wanted to make a remote control system for the robot to be able to test the mechanical systems. In particular, I need to test the suspension, speed, torque, durability, and other offload qualities of the design. Because there are 6 NXTs, using bluetooth and/or RS485 communications would get very messy very quickly.

I needed a system that was able to talk to each NXT quickly and efficiently. I decided to go with a Power Function system that can communicate to the NXTs using the Power Function lights and light sensors. The Power Function system uses lights to shine upon light sensors which are connected to NXTs. Each of the six wheel modules has an NXT that is associated with the wheel module. When a command is sent from the Power Functions IR Remote, the IR Tower powers an LED to trigger a light sensor which signals the associated NXT to power its wheel. Each NXT has two light sensors. One light sensor triggers the NXT to power its wheel forward, and the other light sensor triggers the NXT to power its wheels backward. What about turning? Two of the six NXTs have an additional two light sensors which are used trigger a Fergelli linear actuator in the same manor. They can be found here: http://store.firgelli.com/lego-actuators.html



It works! Some video to follow.

Overall View

Power Functions to NXT Interface using light sensors

Top View

Power Functions IR Towers

Wheel Module Close Up

Isometric View