Remember Mauritius from High School geography? We didn’t either, but apparently it’s a small island nation east of the southern tip of Africa. It seems they are trying to develop an industry in eco-friendly data centers. The plan is to use a pipeline to gather cold water from the ocean, run it two miles to the island, and use it as inexpensive cooling. Because rooms packed with servers generate copious amounts of heat it’s easy to see how this can reduce the cost of maintaining a data center.
The thing that struck us here is, how eco-friendly is this?…
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Seawater cooled data centers
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Grow box controls heater, fans, and water
The Cheap Vegetable Gardner wanted more automation than their previous PS2 controller based grow system. This time they set out to design a full featured, compact grow controller that can measure temperature and humidity as well as control a heat lamp, fan, and water pump. An Arduino provides USB connectivity and interfaces the solid state relays and sensors. The assembled project all fits in a box but we are left wondering how much heat the four SSRs generate and will it be a problem?
[Thanks shawn]
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Color changing paint display
We’ve seen several creative projects from [Sprite_tm] and this one sets a new bar. He got his hands on some paint that changes color with temperature. By covering a circuit board with the paint then heating the circuits he’s created a heat actuated 7-segment display (his post is in Dutch). One second at 3 amps is enough to turn the black paint white. When the segment has been disconnected for about one minute the paint fades back to black. Now that we’ve seen his concept, leave a comment and tell us how you’d use it.
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Diamond thermal paste: update
The need to conduct laboratory-style experiments runs deep in some people. [Freddyman] built an apparatus to test out several commercial and homemade thermal pastes, including the DIY diamond thermal grease we reported on last month. He setup each experiment in the middle of an air conditioned room, ran the heat sink fan for 30 minutes to equalize the temperature, then turned on the DIY heat generator that the paste and heat sink were connected to. He’s got a lot of data from tests he ran with the eight thermal conductors; air (using no paste), Arctic Silver 5, Ceramique, Dow…
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How a storage company builds their own
Want 67 Terabytes of local storage? That’ll be $7,867 but only if you build it yourself. Blackblaze sells online storage, but when setting up their company they found the only economical way was to build their own storage pods. Lucky for us they followed the lead of other companies and decided to share how they built their own storage farm using some custom, some consumer, and some open source components.
Each pod is a standalone HTTPS-connected storage unit with 45 hard drives in it. Nine SATA port expanders connect to 4 SATA controller cards on the mainboard. The system…
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BrewTroller brewing control system
BrewTroller is an open source brewing control system based on the Sanguino. Targeting home beer brewers, this project gathers some of the best features from other DIY brewing controllers and packages them into a hardware and software setup so it’s accessible to those without the skills to design their own. It can interface with 4 heat controllers, 32 pumps/valves, 6 temperature sensors, 3 volume sensors, and 1 steam pressure sensor. The system displays information through a 4 line LCD. It can be used to monitor and maintain temperature during mashing, boiling, and chilling. If you have a more advanced…
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Update: Foundation PC Cooling
[gigs], whose foundation-based PC cooling project we covered earlier, has posted his initial test results. There was a large debate going back and forth in the comments as to whether or not this would work, and hopefully this should clear most of it up. He used a 150W fish tank heater to simulated his system’s heat output, and used a quiet fish tank pump to keep the water flowing. Over 8 hours, he was able to maintain a constant temperature 16° C (61° F). While not quite frigid, this would definitely provide ample cooling for normal operation with some headroom for…
Computer
Use tips while installing the CPU, Memory and Motherboard
1. Before you begin…
First thing is first, make sure that you have everything you need to get started. What good is it to get started only to find you don’t have everything necessary? This can take quite a bit of time, but is well worth the effort. Once you have inventoried everything it is time to get started! In addition to all of your parts, you will need plenty of working space and two to three hours to focus on the task at hand. Be sure to remember that carpet, and/or static is your worst enemy. The static…
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Custom flex sensors
Flex sensors, like the ones used in the Nintendo Power Glove, are generally expensive and hard to find. However, [jiovine] demonstrates that they are easy enough to make from spare parts. He sandwiched a strip of plastic from ESD bags between pieces of copper foil, and wrapped the whole thing in heat shrink tubing. The sensor is able to detect bends in either direction, unlike the original power glove sensors. His version had a nominal resistance of about 20k ohms, but by choosing a different resistive layer you could create sensors that are more or less resistive.
Related: 5-cent…
Life
Greatest Sacrifice
My greatest regrets in life was when I disappointed the greatest love ever from my parents. I don’t know what I should do to repay my mistake.The greatest love ever,Nine months, my mother carried me in her womb,Dedicated by love,Carried me in her arms tenderlyDedicated her life,Living in survival,Heat, cold, hard work,Striving for the best of all,For the best of me
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Homemade regenerative tube radio
There are no microcontrollers in this project. In fact you wont find a single transistor. This classic regenerative tube radio, modeled after an early 20th century homebrew is complete with schematic and additional photos. For those who are not familiar with tube designs and for simplicity, the regeneration circuit can be thought of as feedback though this relation may be argued. Read the rest after the break which includes a crash course in tube operation.
A basic vacuum tube generally consists of a heater, grid, and plate. A current is passed through the heater which as the name suggest,…
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Parts: Ferrite beads
Ferrite beads (L1 in the photo) filter high frequency power supply noise by converting it into a tiny amount of heat. Power supply noise can cause various problems for many parts, especially in analog audio and display circuits.
Ferrite beads are simple, but choosing one can be confusing because they’re not commonly used by hobbyists. Most designs will still work if you omit the ferrite bead(s), but beads are so cheap there’s no reason to sacrifice the added reliability they provide. We describe how we pick ferrite beads for our projects after the break.
A ferrite bead is rated…
