Akom's Tech Ruminations - Hardware Hacks

Upgrading Dell laptop memory and the blinking CAPS LOCK led

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:05:56 -0500

Apparently if you have the power-on self-tests set to "Minimal" or "Fast" or anything besides the "Let's check everything for 5 minutes every time the machine boots", you'll have a brick with a blinking CAPS lock instead of a laptop once you upgrade memory.

The only way I found to fix this (other than clearing the BIOS) was to put the old memory back in, go into BIOS, and enable thorough self-test. With that on, the laptop notices the memory size change and does not freak out - merely tells you about it. Once you're done you can disable the self-tests.

(I experienced this on a Dell Precision M4400, but googling seems to indicate that this affects the Inspiron and Latitude lines as well, probably others).

Setting the date/time on the Mini Keychain Spy Camcorder

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:57:05 -0400

Keychain Camcorder

The instructions that come with this little gadget are priceless in their verbatim Chinese glory, but are not helpful in their vague "Leave the details as an exercise for the reader" approach.

Here are the exact detailed steps to actually set the clock
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D945GCLF fan issues and alternatives

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 09:24:36 -0500

I've had my D945GCLF (the Intel Atom 230 board) up for 440 days. That's an impressive uptime until you realize that it's a Gentoo box running asterisk, mpd, and not much else. As anyone familiar with D945GCLF or D945GCLF2 knows, the northbridge has an aluminum heatsink with a 40mm fan. Most people have had theirs fail right away, but I was lucky enough to have mine last over a year before starting to vibrate and slow down. Once I started getting Nagios alerts about high temps, it was time to do something.

I never liked the idea of small fans. A 40mm sleeve bearing wonder is certainly no exception. When it comes to cooling, I always look for big and slow - and that in my book means 120mm running at 7V speeds. I looked for a replacement fanless heatsink but couldn't find one that was reported to fit. Here is what I did:
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Replacing NiCd power tool batteries with RC LIPO's

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:35:42 -0500

I have a Dewalt 18V cordless drill, which was very expensive ($200 back in 2001), came with two batteries (heavy, NiCd packs), and I've used it extensively for just about everything when we bought our house. Now both packs are dead. I do maintain them well, as nearly 7 years is much longer than their expected useful life. So I checked out the prices - and the packs are over $80 each! ... Seems a bit expensive for a bunch of NiCd's in a nice (tough, indestructible, convenient) plastic package. I looked at NiMh cells... but then using the original charger becomes questionable (probably cannot), plus the cost of 12 cells is almost $80 in itself - not to mention soldering 12 cells together, myself??? I don't think so....

Then I thought about LIPO cells... Let's see - 18V, that'd be a 5 cell (18.5V)... Well, for a test, I figured I'd try what I have around, and what I have around are 3 cell packs.
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Fixing Sensitive Button on Motorola HS850 bluetooth handsfree headset

nospam@example.com (Akom) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:47:49 -0500

The Motorola HS850 was a very popular bluetooth headset in its day. A lot of people seem to complain that their HS850's gradually develop one of the following symptoms:

Dials/hangs up, randomly
Redials on its own, randomly
Hangs up or dials at the slightest touch or handling of the unit

This is what is most likely causing the problem:
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Replacing Garmin C330 Li-Ion battery on the cheap (with whatever is onhand)

nospam@example.com (Akom) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 20:04:53 -0500

I have a hand-me-down Garmin C330, the el-cheapo, no-text-to-speech teletubby-looking GPS unit that every online store was liquidating a few months ago. Mine also has a dead battery, and while it used to run for 1-2 minutes on it, now it barely runs 5 seconds. I can live with that, after all - you generally use it while plugged in, but it is oh-so-handy to be able to hand it to the passenger for co-pilot... co-piloting. So, I had to do something...
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Not all that is hackable should be...

nospam@example.com (Akom) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:16:55 -0500

Last week I hacked up my RC transmitter and added a Dual Rate switch

Dual Rate switch

See here: (How I hacked it up).

I thought I was so cool for adding two wires, one toggle switch and two drops of solder to an RTF transmitter (oh and a nice hole too). Well, everything worked great on the ground, but once I actually flew the plane, not all was well - the control range dropped to about 60 feet!. I didn't connect the dots at first and thought it was a broken antenna wire or something, or a new flying site (coincidence). Nope.

Apparently, adding two thick wires radomly into a complex circuit and placing them along the perimeter of the case can have some unexpected results. I took the wiring and the switch out, and all is well again, control range is longer than sanity permits me to test (plane is a dot in the distant sky, but still seems to be controllable).
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Hacking up RTF RC Transmitter with a Dual Rate switch

nospam@example.com (Akom) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:37:39 -0500

I can't say that I have a good reason for doing this, other than the potential for letting inexperienced family members fly my plane, but I thought this should be easy enough to do:

RTF Radio with DR Switch

The RTF transmitter that came with my Pitts S2A has a bunch of dip switches, which are not so quick to flip on the fly - and I've played with friends' real professional transmitters - and they have what seems to be useful toggle switches to control this stuff. So I figured I'm gonna pretend that I'm cool too.

The transmitter turned out to be very neatly designed, and finding the switch and soldering a pair of wires was surprisingly easy. Moreover, the cute silver pads on the top corners of the transmitter are actually silver stickers, covering up pre-drilled holes intended specifically for what I'm putting in there - a toggle switch.
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