I made a shoe rack

Shoe Rack
Originally uploaded by Qfamily.

Got this idea from somewhere I can't find now. I'm probably going to take this one down as I keep bumping into it. It's a hell of a lot better than leaving shoes on the stairs. As least I'm not tripping over them. I think I'm either going to try doing something under the stairs, or just off the side of the landing.

The lights work

The lights work
Originally uploaded by Qfamily.

I finally got the lights to work on this thing. I have a 9 volt battery as the main power source. I ran one circuit to each head like assembly (1 super bright LED and one orage LED) and one circuit to the tail lights (four red LEDs). I found out that when I power it up, the tail lights didn't come on. I added a 3volt battery, salvaged from the flashlights, to the tail light circuit and it did the trick. Now I just need a way to get the wires to stick to the 3 volt.

Terminal Server Experiment

Terminal Server Experiment
Originally uploaded by Qfamily.

So I got a server from work that I was going to convert into a terminal server. The problem was that it was a 1U system. The reason that's a problem is that a 1U system has small fans, and the smaller the fan, the bigger the noise. Bigger fans can rotate at slower speeds. When I turned on the 1U server, I could hear it from two floors away. I was going to have to convert this into a tower system and use bigger fans.

I was able to cut some material out of this case to house the motherboard, but this motherboard required A LOT of fans to be running in order to power on. I just didn't have that many large fans. I also had to use mount the 1U power supply into the case because it's 25PIN +8 and I didn't have any of those. Because I was restricted to this power supply, I didn't have power for the SATA drive (because of the back plane board for the drives). My only option for the drive was to lay the back plane on top and mount the drives. Then because the distance was so far from the controller, I could only mount two drives instead of four.

Anyway, unless I was willing to put some money into this, the conversion is a failure. I'm going to just suck it up and see if I can add parts of this server into my workstation that I'm using as a server anyway. Just combine the two int one really mean terminal server. I don't think I'm going to get as much RAM out of it as I would like though.

Taking things apart

Taking things apart
Originally uploaded by Qfamily.

I've been removing and playing with LEDs from scraped computers. I have super bright white LEDs I'm using for headlights, orange (seen in the picture) and red for brake lights. Hopefully I actually get this all lit up and done by the end of this coming weekend.

Server Mods

Server Mods
Originally uploaded by Qfamily.

I'm trying to modify a tower case to house a 1U server. I need to take a final pic, but it didn't turn out so good. I ended up not having a location for the SATA drives due to not having any power cables. I had to lay the back plane board on top and put the drives in up there. Not very good though since if someone so much as bumps the system, the drives could slide out causing a system failure.

I might just end up trying to mush it all into my PC system that converted into a server. All I really need is the memory and drive space. I'm not hurting for CPU power in that thing (dual core AMD 6000)