Above it the bare board that I’ve unscrewed out of the thing. Some solder + a card…..

Now we are talking. For the record this thing is exremely well documented and has a large userbase. I had no problems figureing out how to solder this in. If you want to go to the source of this type of documentation:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Linksys/WRT54GL

Now all I have to do is format and mount it…

Holy cow it worked. 2G. Now all I have to do is chroot into it. Doing a time on a DD gives about 160kBytes/Second. Now I will turn this into something amazing……..

Well it broke, so I bought another one!

It even has the original stickers. But.. Its slower than I remember. So I’m trying out different Ubuntu versions to see what boots the fastest. Here are my methodology and results.

Methodology:
The first number is the ammount of seconds from the 0 in the grub countdown till the X in the initial X-server. The second number is the seconds till the firefox screen pops up after I click it while its booting (with auto login enabled.) The reason for this is to account for the total time till my computer is usable. (internet) This is with no performace tweaks, and keeping the default settings. (except enabling auto-login)

Yea so I got tired after all those versions. Maybe I’ll come back. So far though I like xfce (I use it on my eeepc (which has numbers of 1:39, 2:05 on xubuntu 8.04….)

At my work I deal with lots and lots of computers and lots and lots of drives. So during a week I see plenty of failing drives, just because of the statistics.

So now-a-days I run a “smart test” on the drive to see how it is. Unfortunately most drive testers and smart tests are crap. So I made my own and I want to share it with you….

It runs in Linux of course, and all it needs is a program called smartctl. (If you don’t have it and you are running Ubuntu, just run “apt-get install smartmontools” )

Here is how you can get it and run it:

$ wget a.xkyle.com/smarttest
$ bash smarttest

Thats it! Just give it about 2 minutes to run. Here is an example output:

Hours: 27519
SMART Errors: 0
Reallocated / Pending: 2 / 0
Read Speed: 41 MB/s

WARNING: This drive has over 26,280 (3 years) hours on it and should not be used as a Primary
WARNING: This drive has some reallocated sectors, this shouldn’t be used as a primary and requires judgment if it is to be used for a secondary

Its pretty self explainitory if you know about drives. If you want to know more about smart paramaters, check out the wikipedia article.

Here is the template with wired LEDS:

A multitude of completed digits (still missing the blank faceplate).

Painting the boxes:

This is an experiment with reflective tape: (didn’t make a difference)

And yet even more boxes are coming:

Here is the magic controller: (A little messy, not finished)

And the outputs of the controller: (Just cat5 connectors, cheap!)

We start with a template made at a sign shop, and the cover the edges with aluminum tape to protect them from the heat from the hot wire.

I’ve pushed out holes with a strait wire and a blow torch to give my entry points for my hot wires. Its going to be a plunge and cut job.

The laserpointer helps guide the hot wire because it inevitably bends and makes crooked cuts. Following the point makes straiter cuts. The laser isn’t cutting the stryofoam for us… Yet.

Only a CNC machine could have done a better job. A CNC machine…. With a laser cutter!!!

This clock is going to have a great R-Value !!!

God help us all.