With the limited success of my RxTx receiving i wanted to really receive signals which meant I needed better components in the tool chain. It was obvious that my old 600MHz Pentium laptop wasn't going to cut it and the built in 48kHz sound card were the weakest of the links (Along with my puny un-shielded connectors).
I had been looking around at sound card options and all of them seemed really expensive (Re: over $100). With that out of my budget I as just going to see how far I could go with my old windows laptop (It even had a piece of string to hold the screen upright).
The very next day someone posted on the forsale list at work a
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum which was just what I was looking for and only $30! Since it's a PCI card I needed a desktop PC to put it into. Luckily I had just rebuilt my home server and had all the old components lying around in a cardboard box. I also had a case lying around from the server before the one I just upgraded so my plan was to take the super old components out, put in the less old components and see how that went. Those less old components weren't quite as fast as I would like 1.2GHz AMD and 512Mb ram but they were good enough.
I wasn't looking forward to transplanting the power supplies and motherboards and whatnot so on a whim I headed over to the computer recycling area at work. This is where people put their old electronic components and the company makes sure they're disposed of properly. It's fine to take something and reuse it if you can, since reuse is MUCH better than recycling. Luckily for me I found a nugget of gold in there. Looks like someone had got rid of their old high powered machine. They had taken the hard drive of course, but the rest of the machine was intact and still together in a remarkably heavy Antec case. I lugged the box the half mile to my office not even knowing if it would work. When it powered up and did the power on self test beep I was delighted, DVI yielded no signal, but dsub VGA showed the bios configuration screen. I was in luck!
I got the box home and threw in a hard drive (I was amazed how many old drives I seem to have lying around) and started the windows XP install process. At home I have a Mac mini with a 20" monitor that only does DVI (I had been given the monitor it has one bad pixel). I've had trouble with PC Graphics cards and DVI in the past, they don't seem to show the bios screen, and that was critical for setting this machine up. So I used the only VGA capable display I have, an LCD TV in the bedroom.
It went really well, Windows installed, told me I had an Athlon 2100XP and 1 Gig ram and a ATI Radeon graphics card (the old one out of my old server was better so I switched that out in the end). After about the 3rd reboot during installation it started driving my TV at something more than 800x600 and then on the next reboot the screen suddenly went gray with little colored dots in diagonal lines on it. Ah Ha! I thought, this is why someone left this piece of crap in the recycling pile at work. I started swapping out components to see what was causing the problem and they all displayed this same gray screen. I was flummoxed. I even went as far as to put in the old server motherboard and had the old power supply hanging off it, now I was SURE I was running a computer that worked. I switched the input on the TV and sure enough every input with a signal showed the gray screen. I had blown up my TV. Poop. Oh well I guess I was done with that for a while. I later justified to myself that I didn't like that old TV anyway, it hummed when displaying white, the scaling of solid colors (like The Simpsons) was awful, we never watched it much anyway and I got it from Costco so I think that we might even be able to take it back. (Note: the next day I turned it on again to get a picture of the gray screen for this blog and sure enough it was working just fine. I guess it just needed to sulk for a while, so the TV isn't dead!).
Later in the day I found myself over in the valley so we popped over to Frys to see what they had for displays and they had a nice one for $180, 22" 1600x1050 with speakers built in, nice, I got it.
With the new display I was able to continue the endless cycle of running windows update, reboot and repeat forever. All while getting some of my other favorite software on there, Google Chrome, Firefox, Google Video Chat, Google Gears, Sound Blaster drivers, ATI Radeon Drivers, Webcam Drivers and of course Rocky (with my own ini file) and the I2C USB drivers. I still need to get Cygwin and Emacs on there and perhaps Skype too.
Now that I had a machine I needed somewhere to put it, hopefully somewhere not too far from my antenna. luckily the old water tank shed, which we optimistically call the 'guest house' was close and I could set up in the loft/bedroom area. The very same area that seems to have a family of squirrels (or worse, rats) living in the walls and floor. In true ham fashion my first Ham Shack Desk is an old door. The handle hole makes a perfect conduit for computer cables. The hinge holes on the near side could use soe covering up at some point. I rested one end on a filing cabinet and the other on a 2x4 wooden cleat I screwed to the wall. It works really well (in that stuff isn't on the floor anymore). I'm looking forward to playing more here.
The new PC works great. The only limitation is that it only has USB 1.0 ports (a $10 five port USB 2.0 PCI card will fix that) and the USB WiFi dongle that I'm using up there only works with a USB cable extender and it stuck in the window (a $20 PCI wifi card with a separate antenna will fix that too). I'm especially happy that it has 2 9pin Serial Ports, a Parallel Port and a Game Port too. Those should be useful for some projects. I'm using an old Dell USB keyboard, if I end up needing to type a lot up there I guess I'll need to get one of my Kinesis keyboards up and running.
I finally got my RxTx 6.3 Software Defined Radio in a case. I mentioned in the weekly net that I had built it and I was invited to bring it to the next club meeting (which is tomorrow). I'd already clipped off the connectors in preparation for putting it in a case so I really needed to finish that off today so I can show it off tomorrow.
I'm pleased with the old presta bike valve dust covers that I used as spacers to get the PCB above the metal mounts that were already in the box. The USB socket is from an old wireless router and I covered the unused holes with leftover water heater earthquake strapping. I used Epoxy Resin, but it was pretty old. I plan to file it down and then use body filler to fill in the empty spaces if I can ever be bothered.
You might be wondering about the lab is at work that I've been talking about. It's just a little room well set up for working on electronic projects. It's rarely busy and I've always been able to get a good hour or so of work fit into my day here and there. The soldering iron they have is awesome, it heats up in an instant and is really nice to use with swappable tips. I was surprised it didn't have a volume control to set the heat, but it appears to be the perfect temperature anyway. If it did have a volume control, it would go to eleven.
