Hardware

Category page of all posts on the web site that are tagged as related to hardware including PC / embedded and more

Hardware Technician Tool Gems: Precision Electric Screwdriver

Published: June 11, 2021 / Last Modified: October 30, 2022 / 2 Comments / , ,
wowStick w/ included accessories

This is the second in a series of articles about tools I’ve found during my IT hardware technician career that made my life much easier. These are all tools I have used for years that a lot of people have likely never seen or been exposed to before. Last time we covered a replacement for canned air / duster and this time we’re going to cover the wowStick fully electric precision screwdriver!

If you’ve ever opened a laptop or cell phone you know there are dozens of screws you have to remove. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made was an electric screwdriver. Let’s take a look at why!

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Aircooled Open Frame AMD Ryzen Threadripper Build

Published: June 10, 2021 / Last Modified: March 2, 2023 / 2 Comments /
P5 Open Frame Threadripper Build

This year I’ve been doing more with technology than ever and I wanted to build a workstation. As most of you probably know building a computer is an absolute nightmare right now. After navigating the process I figured I would share what I ended up building as it may give some people some ideas on how to complete their build. I also think the open frame builds turn out really cool and have some benefits I wanted to talk about as well.

This is a workstation grade build so it is not going to be cheap. Everything in the build (except for the GPU and you probably won’t want to pick that one anyway, but more on that later) is generally attainable at reasonable prices. Here’s what I ended up going with!

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UPS Backup Battery for Raspberry Pi? PiSugar Solderless Setup

Published: June 9, 2021 / Last Modified: March 2, 2023 / 6 Comments / ,
PiSugar - Top with LED Battery Indicator

I’ve had the original 900 mAh PiSugar UPS backup battery for the Raspberry Pi Zero for several years now and it’s an absolute game changer. With the wireless capabilities of the Raspberry Pi you have a completely portable and networked computer available that is extremely tiny. It’s much more capable than hooking it up to a power brick and is actually designed for the Raspberry Pi!

In this article I’ll cover how to set up a full UPS battery backup with several hours of available power using the the PiSugar as well as the PiSugar 2 and some of the shortcomings in the first version the 2nd revision fixes. Let’s get started!

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A Good Alternative to Canned Air / Duster for Electronics

Published: June 8, 2021 / Last Modified: March 2, 2023 / Leave a Comment / , ,
OPOLAR Air Duster for Electronics / Computers

As a computer technician / technology enthusiast I have a lot of electronics that need to be kept clean. I used to use canned air / duster for this task but it’s pretty nasty stuff to work with. It is extremely cold, you don’t want to contact any coolant with any components, the bottles run out at the most inconvenient times and generate a bunch of waste, etc.

For this article I just wanted to share a tool I found a couple of years ago that made my life a lot easier. It is also cheaper over time and much more environmentally friendly!

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Soundproofing ASIC Miner Enclosures With Acoustic Foam

Published: June 2, 2021 / Last Modified: April 29, 2022 / Leave a Comment / ,
TUFFIOM 15U Full Side View w/ Hanging Foam

Extremely powerful hardware tends to be very loud. Enterprise servers, networking equipment, cryptocurrency miners are three major offenders. This type of equipment tends to have very small fans that rotate extremely fast and emit a high pitched “whine”. This is fine if you are stuffing all of your equipment in a closet somewhere but for some deployments and situations this isn’t always possible

There are extremely expensive racks that have sound dampening foam and other materials preinstalled for situations like this but they are extremely expensive (thousands vs . what we will be doing which only costs hundreds). In this article I’ll show you how I modified some (relatively) cheap racks available from Amazon with acoustic foam to reduce noise from ASIC cryptocurrency miners as well as other loud equipment

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Fast Raspberry Pi 4 Storage Benchmarks

Published: July 17, 2020 / Last Modified: November 12, 2022 / 31 Comments / , , ,
Raspberry Pi Storage Benchmark 2020

We’ve now received over 20,000 benchmarks at Pi Benchmarks! These are submitted by regular people from all over the world.

In celebration of that milestone as well as the launch of the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 take a closer look at which device you should choose for your Raspberry Pi 4 as determined by science and measurement!

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Telecom Monopoly CenturyLink’s Static IP / Modem / UPS Scam Outlined

Published: July 8, 2020 / Last Modified: October 18, 2022 / 20 Comments / , ,
CenturyLink Tower of Shame

I’m really sorry to say that I was excited when I found out CenturyLink offered gigabit 1000 up 1000 down fiber to the home in the neighborhood I just moved into. Dreams of things like having enough upload speed to leave the cloud and operate jamesachambers.com independently in my own home seemed like they could finally be a reality. Dreams were quickly shattered when I realized what kind of incompetence and dishonesty I would be dealing with.

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Raspberry Pi 4 USB Boot Config Guide for SSD / Flash Drives

Published: June 29, 2019 / Last Modified: February 3, 2024 / 1,024 Comments / , , ,
Raspberry Pi 4 with Samsung 950 Pro NVME SSD

The Raspberry Pi 4 is finally here and has a lot of exciting changes. One very major downside is that it doesn’t support true USB booting yet out of the box (like the 3 series did).
The Raspberry Pi foundation states that it is being worked on and will be added back with a future update. No timeline has been given yet for that to happen but they state it’s one of their top priorities.

Most of my projects heavily depend on having good performing storage so sitting and waiting was not an acceptable solution. In this guide I’ll show you a workaround to use USB devices as your rootfs device and use a Micro SD card as bootloader only which gives us full SSD performance after boot!

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My Early Bitcoin ASIC Miners (2013-2014) – Pictures / History

Published: June 6, 2019 / Last Modified: November 12, 2022 / 3 Comments / ,
Block Erupter ASIC setup

The most competitive Bitcoin mining operations today consist of entire warehouses of large ASIC miners usually located near sources of renewable energy or power plants selling off excess energy production for cheap. To get seriously involved in the Bitcoin mining space of today will require you to already be quite wealthy and to put up some *serious* cash.

But things were not always this way. I found a bunch of pictures in my photo library of my old mining rigs back from the dawn of Bitcoin ASIC mining and wanted to share them. Let’s go on a journey together back to the year of 2013 and explore what old school Bitcoin mining ASIC hardware looked like, how much it cost, and what we can learn from them today!

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Raspberry Pi Cheap SSD Upgrade Guide

Published: February 4, 2019 / Last Modified: March 2, 2023 / 96 Comments / , ,
SSD now cheaper than Micro SD cards

I’ve covered the benefits of taking your Raspberry Pi to a solid state drive (SSD) before extensively in this article but in a nutshell you get around a 280% increase in raw throughput and a 1000% increase in 4k random read/writes over a MicroSD card.

In this article I will teach you how to upgrade to a SSD on your Raspberry Pi for under $30.

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Turn Old mSATA SSDs To Fast USB Stick Drives

Published: March 10, 2018 / Last Modified: March 2, 2023 / 9 Comments / ,
Looking down the barrel of the mSATA drive

Since the M.2 NVME form factor has won the high performance solid state drive war many of you may be stuck with older micro SATA (mSATA) drives.  These still have a very awesome use that will only cost you $10 to take advantage and have a blistering USB stick instead of throw them away!

These are full blown SSDs and their performance blows a regular USB flash drive out of the water.  They support the trim command and show up as “fixed disks” instead or removable storage.  This means they support cache write optimizations that normal USB removable drives don’t.  This allows you to do all sorts of awesome things on them.  Some examples:  Windows to Go, Fast Portable Linux, Virtual Machine storage, etc.  You can also just use it as a really fast drive to transfer files back and forth with your friends while looking like a total techie badass.
Looking down the barrel of the mSATA drive
View of the top of the drive

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UDOO X86 Microboard Breakdown

Published: November 18, 2017 / Last Modified: March 16, 2022 / Leave a Comment / , ,
Front of the board

The UDOO X86 is a single board computer that runs an Intel 64-bit chipset. It also has a separate chipset with a full implementation of Arduino. It runs Windows 10 and any flavor of Linux. The board is touted as as the “new PC that can run everything.” That is quite a bold claim!

In this breakdown we will examine the Udoo X86 and see how it stacks up against other SBCs!

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Old Skool NES Classic Case Fan Mod

Published: July 16, 2017 / Last Modified: March 17, 2022 / Leave a Comment / , ,
Pi Classic Fan Case Open

This is a followup to my awesome Old Skool NES Classic RetroPie build.  When I posted my build on Reddit several users that already had the case noted that the case tends to get very hot.

That’s not good, but since the case is so awesome I was determined to find a solution.  This mod requires no soldering, no drilling, and is dead simple and cheap.  It also does not modify the look of your NES Classic RetroPie setup at all!

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Check If Raspberry Pi is Undervolted Or Throttled

Published: June 26, 2017 / Last Modified: March 2, 2023 / 7 Comments / ,
Raspberry Pi 4

I uploaded a quick gist that will measure your Raspberry Pi’s true clock speeds using the vcgencmd. Don’t believe what other tools like cpufreq tell you that your Raspberry Pi is running at because they are lying to you! The true clock speeds are controlled by the firmware and vcgencmd is the official way to interact with the Raspberry Pi’s firmware and hardware and are the only readings you can really trust! Available at https://gist.github.com/TheRemote/10bda1ac790f959210db5789f5241436 or click read more to view it directly on my site.

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