Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category.
October 6, 2011, 8:42 pm
The Solwise 600ER is a fairly standard ADSL router. What makes it special is that by default it runs the open source RouterTech firmware making it a little more hackable than a standard ADSL router. It uses a TI AR7 processor (MIPS32). Here are a couple of PCB photos:
The rear side of the PCB has unpopulated connections for a miniPCI card, most probably to add a Wifi card (and I’d guess it’s the same PCB as in the SAR-600EW).
I’d like to hack around with it a bit, and run an external facing webserver on it perhaps. It’s a shame it doesn’t have USB host.
October 5, 2011, 4:53 pm
I was frustrated by the Mac keyboard layout and also noticed that a lot of projects require some kind of custom keyboard controller (for example, if you’re trying to hack and old PS2 keyboard to work with a modern system. For this reason I decided to create a programmable keyboard controller.
The controller is based around a AT90USBKey and uses the LUFA library to manage the USB HID stuff.
To use the keyboard controller you need to removed the existing controller from your keyboard (hence the Mac keyboard disassembly I previously posted). Once removed you need to connect the keyboard matrix to the controller. It doesn’t really matter how you connect it, the idea is that the keyboard will learn the keyboard layout.
Here’s a close up of the controller installed in a Mac full size keyboard:
And a slightly less elegant hack in to a Mini mac keyboard:
To program the keyboard, open notepad or another text editor on your computer. Plug the keyboard in while holding down a key. The keyboard will being typing text in to the text editor. It’ll start my printing a welcome message and will then ask you to press keys on your keyboard.
The controller is now learning which key is which. It’s continually scanning the keyboard matrix, and when it detects a short between pins it registers this as the key it’s currently learning. Once training is complete the controller writes the matrix layout information to the AT90s internal flash. So you only need to train once.
The whole thing seems to work pretty well, though I think my debouncing logic could do with some work. Suggestions are welcome.
I’ve put all the code on sourceforge here.
If you’re interested in using or developing from this code, please let me know. I think a keyboard controller like this could be a generally useful tool for hacking projects.
October 4, 2011, 10:12 pm
Generally, true AT Molex to SATA Power supply cables DONT exist. This is because the AT connector does not supply 3V, SATA does. Luckily most SATA devices don’t use 3V. So you can get by with omitting this pin, which is what most commercial adapters do. The picture below shows a Molex connector should be wired to a SATA connector to provide 5 and 12v supplies. On the SATA side I relied on the cable colouring being standard. Though it would be more sensible to get out a multimeter and test them against the pinout.
Notes
Pinouts: http://www.smpspowersupply.com/connectors-pinouts.html
October 4, 2011, 9:51 pm
I had a old Optiplex 755 knocking around and I wanted to stick a PCIe graphics card in it. Unfortunately the 755 is a small form factor PC and the PCIe card, while electrically compatible, doesn’t fit.
I removed the section around the PCI bay, this allowed the front of the PCIe card to stick out of the system. Unfortunately the heat sink also encroaches on the footprint of a double width PCIe card. So it had to go. The casing around the heatsink and keeps it firmly coupled to the motherboard was removed. Amazingly with the heatsink JUST SITTING on the processor enough heat still seems to get dissipated, well… time will tell, but so far there are no signs of overheating.
I also had to replace the powersupply, there was no way the dinky little thing in there was going to power a double width GPU.
Fin
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