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• Measure Once ...

  osgeld • 03/17/2014 at 00:35 • 0 comments

  The fist cut I need to make is for the connector plate on the back. I could have spent a lot of time scribing around each component and making it tight as a drum.... but its on the back and frankly I am not that insane considering I am using hand tools. 

  The mainboard was already set on some radio shack plastic stand offs, as I had used the computer before with no box. so I just kind of dropped it in to where it would fit on one side.

  I used my calipers and measured from the rim of the box to the top of the Ethernet jack (the tallest connector on the rear set). I then used my calipers to scribe a line on the outside of the box based on that depth measurement. 

  I can hear the gasps and mumbles now, keep in mind these things are not some really nice multitoyo set of calipers, they are like some free with coupon crappy ones I dont mind messing up the tips a little using them as a scribe.

  Then I found the bottom of the mainboard from the top of the can using the same methods and scribe another line. Rinse and repeat for 4 DE9 connectors, 2 usb connectors, and toggle switch for power 

• Start of a Project

  osgeld • 03/17/2014 at 00:04 • 0 comments

  I have had this vortex86 sitting around for over a year now, It was given to me by my work  after it had been removed from a XY glue machine due to it being flaky. Its still flaky and will produce a goblin fart error now and then, but for the most part its stable enough for it to run ADT pro, a serial terminal, and google chrome. 

  As I touched on before, this thing is a 586 compatible 800Mhz SOC, and features PS/2 KB-mouse support, 10-100 lan, dual IDE ports, SVGA (upto 1080 resolution, but no acceleration to speak of), FDD,  3x USB2, GPIO, printer port, LVDS LCD io, 8 com ports, ISA header, pci header, mini PCI socket (slap a wifi card on that later) and 256MB of DDR ram. Also on the bottom is a slot for a compact flash card which is tied into the master IDE port.

  Its a 3.5 inch form factor computer, and is about the same size as a desktop hard disk, if you ignore the connectors sticking out of it, and is compatible with linux and windows.

  The enclosure is from a tin of pepermint bark, measuring roughly 9x6.5x2, which is plenty of space for the computer, a laptop hard disk, 4 extra serial ports, usb ports, and all the wiring without it getting too stuffy.

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