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"I Have A Graaand Plan!" -- The 'Universal Formula' for a basic cyberdeck, Part 2 -- A basic hookup guide
01/26/2022 at 02:11 • 0 commentsOK, you have all your parts in a big pile, how do you put them together? Well, as with so many things, the answer to that goes to the adult diaper industry...
Which is to say: "It Depends!"
[Insert chorus of groans here...]
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here till Thursday. Try the veal!
*ahem*
There are rather a lot of possibilities here, honestly, and your best option really does rest on what you have. The central determining factor is where you're getting your mainboard, so I've organized a limited build guide here based on that. Rearrange the steps to suit your individual build, the sky's the limit. Each likely scenario is in bold, so scroll to the one that best fits you, and go from there.
If you have an Intel Compute Stick, a clone, or a compatible as your system unit...
...things are fairly easy. This is your textbook basic build. You should have two USB ports -- one might be USB2.0 and one USB3.0, but it's *highly* unlikely you'll have more than two such ports -- plus a MicroUSB for power, a MicroSD slot, and a male HDMI port. If you're lucky, you'll have a separate audio-out, but usually this is handled by HDMI only.
You should plan on a cheap USB 'sound card', unless you like to argue with Linux, because configuring sound output on these things is typically something of a challenge at best. A USB wireless card is also a good idea -- do your research, though, and try to avoid anything based on Realtek chips. DeviWiki is a good resource, but their ad provider is truly a creation that would scare HP Lovecraft himself; have good adblock software on desktop (AdBlockPlus or UBlock Origin come highly recommended; I can vouch for the former, and my pal who runs the local tech shop prefers the latter) and for the love of all that is good and righteous in this world, do not go there on a phone.
You also *absolutely* have to have a powered USB hub; the circuitry that runs those two ports is far, far too anemic for anything but the most minimal of peripherals. You can run a wired keyboard and a wired mouse, or a wireless combo and a single USB stick, but much of anything more will be entirely too taxing for it. A seven-port hub here will mean that you have more to use than a single port without unplugging things... if you even have that! A four-port hub will only leave you one spare USB connector if you're using a keyboard and mouse combo that takes only a single plug... or if you forgo either the WiFi adapter or USB 'sound card', in which case you will either have a truly awful Internet connection (when you have one at all!) or a mute machine.
Also, expect poor thermal performance, even if you have good ventilation. The early Compute Sticks (and clones/knockoffs) were entirely fanless, and the current ones have only token active cooling. Even a dinky 40mm PC fan goes a long way here... something ripped out of a dead laptop, particularly if it's known for sounding like the sort of jet propelled smoothie machines coffee shops use, is truly invaluable.
Basically, your hookup guide is:
Hang the external hard drive or SSD off one of your two USB ports.
Hang the USB hub off the other USB port.
Run an HDMI cable to the controller board you got for your LCD screen (or whatever other display solution you're using)... you will very likely need a female-to-female gender changer here.
5v power goes to USB hub and to MicroUSB on the stick PC.
12v power goes to the LCD controller PCB.Once you build your structure, housing, whatever, and plug in your peripherals, you're done.
If you have a MiniPC...
...really it's the same situation as with the Compute Sticks, clones, and compatibles, except that cooling will likely be an even more thorny issue than with them -- the MiniPCs really seem to like having huge passive heatsinks with no fans whatsoever, when they really need fans -- and you will almost certainly have an audio jack (unified for microphone and headphones/speakers) and three or four USB ports.
You also may have a system board that needs 12v or something closer to laptop voltages like 19v. If it's a 19v board, it likely will run on 12v anyways -- give it a try, it's worth it!
Follow the build guide above, making exceptions for the fact that you might not need a USB 'sound card' and can almost certainly get away with a four-port hub here... and, again, you may have to deal with strange input voltages.
If you have a disassembled laptop...
...depending on what you have, and *why* it was disassembled, this can be an advanced project or a simple one. Again, I don't encourage Windows *tablets* because they usually use a strange display protocol called MIPI -- and finding compatible displays that aren't your own is nearly impossible without a considerable degree of reverse engineering followed by custom cable making. This is made even worse by the fact that tablets often leave behind one of the common 'safety' features of laptops, as far as repair and recovery are concerned -- even when they *have* a secondary display output, such as a MiniHDMI port, whether or not it mirrors the primary display on boot by default is anyone's guess. (Laptops have done this, reliably, for *decades* now, as a simple diagnostic aid.)
I also don't recommend Chromebooks -- many of the lowest-end ones are actually based on ARM processors, especially if they're early systems, and even if they aren't, the BIOS has some Google-enforced special sauce inside that effectively keeps you from natively booting any other OSes. (Technical: you have to have an OS kernel with a Big Daddy Google signature -- which is to say, a Chrome OS kernel and nothing else.) You're looking at installing something like coreboot to make that hardware truly useful -- which is not something to sneeze at, even for the experienced! Just don't.
Assuming you have all the parts (except maybe the battery, optical drive if there is one, keyboard, and touchpad) and they all generally work, *and* you can wire the power button in a reasonably coherent way -- probably the best approach would be a new custom housing physically incorporating the power brick into the body. At that point your steps are something kind of like...
Assemble the laptop components in your new case structure. Be sure it can vent heat well!
Add a hard drive on the internal connector if you can, via a USB port (or eSATA if you have one, that's better for that) otherwise.
Hang your powered USB hub off an internal connector.
Hang any additional USB peripherals (eg a USB WiFi adapter if the internal is shot and USB is cheaper/easier, or a USB 'sound card' if the internal sound chip is hosed) off the hub.
Add keyboard and mouse, hang off of USB hub.
Incorporate the lid and screen from the old laptop, in as intact a fashion as you can reasonably manage.
Shuck the case off the power brick, and incorporate it, along with the USB hub power supply.
Wire up a mains-rated master power switch, and wire an inlet connector (the "IEC" connector off an old, dead ATX power supply -- or any of the zillions of other things that use it -- is a good choice) to that switch on one side. Wire the power bricks to the switch as well.Good luck!
If you have a compact desktop (SFF / USFF desktop, Mini ITX board, NUC box, thin client, etc)...
...extra credit time! This can get REALLY interesting -- and either really easy or really hard, really fast, depending on how much you know and are prepared for, and how resourceful you want to be.
Mini ITX systems and those with standard ATX/ATX12V (20pin/24pin, respectively) power connectors can use things like the PicoPSU for power as long as you're not driving anything ridiculously beefy. Otherwise, it's down to working out supply connector pinouts and wiring an adapter, or reusing the existing supply somehow. NUCs, some SFF/USFF desktops, and a few Mini ITX boards on the weirder side of things are designed to use external laptop-style power bricks instead.
Thin clients are also a nifty choice. There's a kind bloke in the UK who collects them and has basically a closed-source Wiki chock full of unmistakably priceless information at https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/ -- an invaluable resource. Click "Details" in the tabs at the left side of that page and you'll be dropped clean into the midst of it all :) It's organized by manufacturer (make), then model. He doesn't have every single one on Earth in there but he *does* seem to have the vast majority. This is SUCH a help because these systems are not only incredibly minimal by design, they also are incredibly *weird* -- the whole point is maximum cost reduction vs a standard (ish) PC, after all -- and so you get all sorts of crazy things, from proprietary power supplies, to incredibly out-of-date connectors and ports in odd shapes.
Often, in fact, you'll be dealing with an IDE interface designed to directly connect to a notebook hard drive or equivalent, so it's actually a 44pin IDE male header! SATA connectors are actually quite rare, and mSATA even rarer. (Don't even *try* for M.2/NGFF, you're almost guaranteed complete disappointment.) Where SATA connectors *are* present, you'll be encountering a unified 22pin connector with power and ground both, made for something quite a bit more compact than a standard laptop drive and placed in a way that makes such a drive impossible to use without extension cabling, the vast majority of the time. This is true even of relatively modern such systems.
Also, nearly always these are designed to be fanless systems, and they really suffer in that way. Rigging some sort of active cooling is *highly* desirable here where at all possible.
Proceed as for a laptop or MiniPC, whichever makes more sense, making adjustments as required by the hardware you have.
OK, it's built. Now how do I make it boot...?
That's the next log. See you there...
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"I Have A Graaand Plan!" -- The 'Universal Formula' for a basic cyberdeck, Part 1 -- Parts, Variations, and Substitutes
01/23/2022 at 10:15 • 0 commentsSorry for the wait. One of the many phrases my grandmother had -- between her, my grandfather, and my mother, I've got a phrase for dang near everything! -- was...
"Life is what happens when you're making other plans..."
No kidding. Put differently, life's little unexpected quirks and all can be SUCH a pain in the tail. Ugh.
So. The magic formula for a simple cyberdeck.
Stick PC, like an Intel Compute Stick, or a clone or "compatible". USB 3.0 external SSD. *Powered* USB 3.0 four-port hub. eDP laptop LCD panel. Universal HDMI-to-eDP converter PCB. USB keyboard and mouse of some kind. Power supply that runs everything.
Linux Mint is your OS. You don't need to be smart to use Linux. If you had to be smart to use Linux I'd never get past the boot screen. I'm not out-and-out proof that there's a village somewhere that's short one idiot, but I'm about the modern equivalent of the caveman that hits himself with his own club because he wants to know what will happen if he does. (Spoiler, Og have bad time of it, when Og hit own head with club...) If you can use Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 at an "I know how to turn it on and get to Google" level, you will *probably* be OK in Linux with a little help once you install it. There will be a section on that!
That's really all you need, at least as far as computery stuff is concerned. I usually add a USB WiFi card because the built-in WiFi on those Compute Sticks and their clones/knockoffs ("compatibles") is universally horrendous at best. For some strange reason, sound of all things is usually a bit of a bear to work out as well, it's one of the few things that doesn't "just work".
Of course you also need decor and structure -- make it your own! There are just too many creative variations here to even begin to suggest anything, with one sole caveat that I will bring up. It is VERY common to rummage about in the attic, find some vintage relic computer, and upon applying power, discover it's dead -- and then just shrug, gut it, and put something far more modern inside.
FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND PLEASANT IN THE WORLD, DON'T FREAKING DO THAT!
(Please read this, but if it genuinely can't possibly apply to you ever no matter what, or you're just beyond any redemption and hope in that department -- there's a [RAMBLE OVER] label at the end of this, just scroll to that... but if I hear that you've destroyed innocent vintage computers by willingly not reading this, I will find you and I will follow you for a week with an out-of-tune thrift shop accordion in the least musical way possible.)
Instead, Google the make and model of the computer and see if you can find an enthusiasts' community around the machine. If it was a machine of any notoriety or popularity -- even if its notoriety came from poor sales and everyone kind of hating on it (like the TI-99/4A, which famously convinced Texas Instruments not to be in the computer market! -- chances are that a community of people who like the thing for its quirks has grown up around it anyways. Even if you don't want to repair it, you can almost certainly find someone to sell it to, and others who will tell you how to safely sell it and safely ship it.
A particular special note. Commodore computers, especially Commodore 64s, are NOTORIOUS for their original power bricks going sour over the years and doing awful things to the machines when you plug them in again after a few decades. They are among the easiest computers to repair afterwards, because the community around them has a fanaticism that borders on that of a religious cult (LOL) and there's just so much *of* it. I can recommend personally the Lemon64 Forums, but if you have a little electronics knowledge (all you need, really, is a soldering iron and a multimeter) and some time to kill, Adrian Black's YouTube channel, "Adrian's Digital Basement" has several so-called 'repair-a-thon' videos, and they're quite educational. Each one he fixes multiple dead vintage systems of a single kind, each with different problems. Both Mr Black and the Lemon64 folks are AWESOME.
For what it's worth, a common and easy way to tell if chips are bad, in ANY system, new or old, is to apply power and feel the tops of the chips with your fingers. It's easier to do this on older computers, the chips back then pulled way more power.
[RAMBLE OVER]
What eBay and Amazon call "MiniPCs" -- usually smaller than an Intel NUC or clone, these are more like a Roku 2XS with actual computing power inside -- or, if you can manage, a particularly low-end laptop. Anything other than a low-end, compact laptop, unfortunately, is going to have a mainboard much too large to be usable, unless you're building an absolute monster big enough to have a shoulder strap on it. I've got a Dell 11 3000-Series laptop that is giving me some issues, I'm going to try and rework it into a monster 'deck for the example build, as a bit of a flex because I can lol.
Windows-based tablets are going to be a bit hit-or-miss, a lot of them have very weird screens where you really can't use anything else, and many lack a secondary display output, which means that reuse here is nearly impossible unless you do some pretty clever stuff. IMO: don't bother.
Internal drives on "USB IDE SATA" cables are... okay... but those only really are USB2 devices, the newer ones that are SATA-to-USB3 are better for this. However, both are really only meant to be used for testing, any claims of long-term reliability by the seller or anyone in marketing, *especially* anyone without demonstrable firsthand experience, should be considered suspect at best. Also, platter drives (mechanical *hard drives* -- not SSDs, those are solid state, hence the term SSD, "soild state drives"!) are fine. Yes, they're ungodly slow next to an SSD, but they're also deplorably cheap, and most of the time you're going to be working with processors far too anemic for the difference to matter.
Also, if your system-of-choice has eMMC storage, YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED AN SSD OR MECHANICAL HARD DRIVE. Because of the way eMMC is designed and built, it is not a reliable storage solution in a long-term sense. The simple explanation is, it's a single chip with memory and a controller inside of it, like an SSD but on a single chip. However, that memory has a limited number of accesses -- reads and writes -- before it goes bad, and the memory in eMMC in particular is quite limited in that way. The point, after all, is to lower costs, so they use the cheapest stuff they can get without it almost instantly failing, so the number of reads and writes it gets is a lot lower. Most operating systems (Windows included) just don't care, and the algorithms for reading and writing that make this stuff last at least a little longer ("wear-leveling algorithms") are likewise cheap -- resulting in a very limited lifetime for these things.
Further, they are 1000% irreparable. When a platter drive dies, usually it's a bearing failure, you get that clicking sound. You actually can, under certain circumstances, take that drive apart in a laboratory clean room and move the stack of platters over to a second, essentially identical drive. The challenges there are in finding as close to an exact replacement, working drive to swap the platters into, and finding someone with the lab grade clean room who's willing to let you borrow it. An SSD? You can replace burnt controllers, and if all else fails you can pull the chips off and read them out in a $50 eBay chip programmer.
But you can't do that with eMMC, it's literally one single chip. If it dies, it's dead, there's nothing to do here, go home. I hope you have good backups. If you don't, you're screwed!
...so don't use it. Use another drive, and boot from that. Pretend the eMMC doesn't even exist, or at most, use it for your Linux bootloader (usually GRUB2). This is fine. Just don't *then* use a USB thumb stick, they're meant for storing files casually -- photos, documents, that sort of thing. An operating system needs to access its drive at a rate that will burn a USB flash drive (thumb drive, etc -- there are many alternative names) out in a matter of *days* of casual use. It will be a rapid and extremely painful death.
As for USB hubs -- obviously, USB2.0 is absolutely serviceable, just slower. In fact, it's usually only a minimal performance difference, if that, running the OS on a USB2.0 hard drive or SSD instead of a USB3.0 drive. You *absolutely* need it to be powered, though -- the USB ports on a MiniPC or a Compute Stick (or clone or knockoff) are sort of adequate, in terms of the power they can provide, for a USB wireless mouse and keyboard combo receiver and maaaybe a USB stick (you rarely get more than two or three ports on these things), but something like an external hard drive that's mechanical and uses one of those USB Y-cables for power and data (where there's a separate, extra connector for additional power) is going to choke that out and bring down the entire USB subsystem on that device. For sure, four devices plugged into a hub will do it easily.
You of course can use larger USB2.0 or USB3.0 hubs -- 7-port ones are sort of common, but far more expensive than 4-port models -- and there are (extremely shoddy, but effective) ways of converting a bus-powered hub with no external power option to accept external power. You really can't have too many USB ports, in my experience, so whatever you can get, get. That said, be aware that most cheap eBay-sourced and Amazon-sourced USB hubs from no-name sellers either internationally or that import such things domestically (which is nearly always a ripoff) use USB hub chipsets that don't work properly on anything but Windows -- on systems like this, your eg $20 10-port USB2.0 hub will only run at USB1.1 speeds. Sadly, this is because the USB chipset manufacturers haven't created decent drivers; the solution is to avoid their products. For what it's worth, I've had strangely good results from IOGear brand devices.
A brief note on keyboards and mice. Obviously, use what works for you, but just be aware that some of those options might be harder to make work than others. For instance, nearly any USB Apple keyboard will work properly with Linux (and the keys will even act as their Windows equivalents, in the locations you'd expect them to be!) but very old Apple keyboards using ADB will require a special converter -- while you can make this, easily, for a $5 or so Arduino clone and a bit of time with programming, my experience with the Arduino editor tells me that this is not as easily done as one might otherwise expect. The editor tends to get hung up in some particularly shortsighted ways, and its error reporting is... lacking, at best, in terms of friendliness to newcomers and non-programmers. Even more oddball keyboards will require something like QMK custom keyboard firmware, which is apt to be a nightmare to the unprepared and the inexperienced.
Regarding displays. There are a LOT of possibilities here! You *can*, in fact, use desktop monitors and retrofit them, but you need at least a little bit of electronics knowledge to do this easily -- basically, you remove the original power supply, replace it with your own, and since nearly all modern monitors use a backlight inverter built into that power supply, you'll need a universal inverter off eBay to replace it.
Laptop LCDs are the obvious choice, they're easy to get, they're cheap, and they are easy to interface with eg HDMI and other common display protocols. Most laptop displays nowadays use a protocol called "eDP" to connect to the laptop internals -- this is "embedded DisplayPort". If you're handy with electronics at at least a moderate level, it's actually not that hard to make a simple converter to standard DisplayPort (see https://flogbook.wordpress.com/2018/09/30/passive-displayport-to-edp-adapter/ for instructions.) *However*, be aware that DisplayPort connectors use a 20pin connector with 0.5mm pin pitch, and they're surface-mount. This makes things... hard... simply as far as soldering the connector goes. Cut cables are not really a solution here, as the design of the connector makes it nearly impossible to get a multimeter probe in there to work out which wire goes where -- and if you've ever done that sort of work before, you know just how widely wire colors can vary from standard... where there even is one.
Older displays, and some cheaper new ones (such as the one in the Dell Inspiron 11 3137 I have for the example build later in this series) use the older LVDS protocol, which is not nearly as universal -- although far more so than most folks think. A friend of mine on here, Arsenijs, has an EXCELLENT guide to dealing with this -- https://hackaday.io/project/179868-all-about-laptop-display-reuse -- but the specific layout may be a bit confusing if you don't know the lingo. Simply put, you probably want these specific entries, in this specific order --
[WIP] MT6820-B board information
How to find info on your LCD panel?
Common LVDS laptop panel pinouts
LVDS cables for controllers
Rewiring a MT6820 cableeDP panels and their controllers, however, are pretty much just plug in the cable at both ends and go. All you need is a 12vDC power supply of at least two amps' rated current capability, and you're good to go. No futzing with cables and controllers or ordering a PCB with bespoke programming and cabling from overseas... what a mess!
However, sometimes alternative displays are kind of interesting, and sometimes not all that much of a bother. If you're doing a build that's heavily rooted in the 1980s, look at old portable TVs, especially the black-and-white ones with a CRT picture tube. These rarely need that much power -- usually about 12v 1a or so, sometimes a bit more or less (generally no more than 1.5a, however) -- and although they are relatively heavy and bulky in comparison to a sleek, slim modern LCD, they add a considerable level of period authenticity to a vintage-style system if you're going for that. Best to avoid the color ones, though -- early color CRT televisions, particularly the portable ones, had truly awful resolutions, and are far, far too blurry to use. A simple pair of converters is all that's really needed to make that work with HDMI -- most of those televisions have composite video input on a side jack. It's really not that bad!
Use an HDMI-to-VGA converter, one with a MicroUSB power connector, and then a VGA-to-Composite scan converter (these are usually listed on eBay as "VGA to RCA switch box converter adapter" devices) and you'll drive that old TV just fine. Total cost should be somewhere around $25. There *are* HDMI-to-Composite converters on there (avoid the ones that are very obviously cables with no electronics in them at all, those rely on being able to do weird obscure things and it's just not going to happen) -- I can say for sure that the "Mini" converters do NOT work, but I cannot speak to newer devices such as the ones listed as eg "1080p HDMI-compatible to AV convert cable male to 3RCA composite female adapter" etc, as I've not used them yet.
You can also use this trick to make eg some portable DVD player aux/add-on screens or "automotive backup camera" screens and DSLR monitor screens and such work as well -- but those get expensive fast. There are also prebuilt displays on Amazon for about $100 but be aware that what you're getting is a phenomenally nice housing and a surplus laptop LCD paired with an eBay-grade standard display kit that's worth maybe $25. You're certainly not getting $100 worth... if you're lucky it's about half that. I have one -- the display panel is essentially worthless and the build quality inside is truly shameful, but the housing proper is fairly thick powdercoat steel that is sturdy enough to probably be capable of stopping particularly low-caliber small-arms fire.
There are some *really* interesting displays out there, if that's your thing, that you can use if you're into that and you're fairly advanced with such things -- I've got an old Compaq Portable III that's genuinely beyond rescue, for example, but I'm going to rebuild it with a similar plasma display screen and more modern guts at some point -- but that gets into highly technical stuff and sourcing strange components from foreign countries, and it does so both remarkably easy and remarkably fast, so that's beyond the scope here.
Power supplies, by the way, need not be a thing to sweat over. I've used everything from generic eBay laptop bricks stripped of their housing and zip-tied together (literally!) to oddball such bricks -- the LaCie "Bigger Disk" brick is a favorite, it's dual voltage at 12vDC 3a and 5vDC 4.2a max output, but it uses a very strange four-pin Kycon connector for power -- those are sometimes *ahem* a bit 'fun' to get ahold of. Bottom line, if it works for your needs, however janky it may seem to others -- use it! "If it's stupid, but it works, it's really not stupid" is an axiom to remember here.
A word about batteries. By and large this is not a thing to tangle with if it's your first rgoododeo -- but if you've some experience and you're comfortable enough with your handiwork that you're willing to risk a light-metals fire in public spaces for doing it wrong -- go for it! Just be aware of what can go wrong, and how easily -- and how to deal with it. You need a Type "K" fire extinguisher ("Purple K" is the common brand) -- lithium batteries have magic flames inside them that make them work, and a standard ABC extinguisher just won't do for the kind of fiery temper those things have. Type K extinguishers are absolutely necessary -- that's what they're designed for, after all.
So, there's your ingredients and some (rather extensive!) notes on easy variations and substitutions and easy pitfalls. The next project log will give you a fairly basic idea on how to hook it all together.
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"But, What is Internet?" - How to Cyber(deck) and what one is, anyways...
10/15/2021 at 21:47 • 0 commentshttps://imgur.com/gallery/Nx1dnUwThe, erm, less-obvious reference, all the way from 1994...
...if you don't get the more-obvious one, well, you're probably just not old enough! Wait a few years, I'm not explaining it. Especially not here...
*ahem*
A brief note on terminology. The field of computers, like nearly any other specialist field, has, over time, evolved sort of its own language -- certainly its own vocabulary! PCI Express, modem, form factor, baud rate, kbps, resolution -- some of these terms are old, some are still in use today, but all of them are computer jargon, terms of art used to describe things in the field that would otherwise be hard to explain or refer to.
I'm going to need to use that jargon throughout the rest of this, and where it's not been explained adequately, I'll do my best to provide at least enough information that you can ask your own local Friendly Neighborhood Nerd for more... or consult Wikipedia if you're an information junkie (or an information sadist! Most of those articles are highly technical in nature and not simple to understand... sadly). For those who prefer the dead-tree method -- good for you! Hardcopy should *never* be rendered obsolescent or obsolete (if it's still somewhat around, like a PS/2 keyboard, technically it's obsolescent; obsolete is properly both dead and gone in at least practical entirety) -- last I heard, Barnes & Noble still stocked computer maintenance and repair books, although those tend to be rather comprehensive tomes, several inches thick, and priced like college textbooks. An A+ Certification textbook will be priced similarly, but (ironically) may not be nearly so comprehensive, as newer such books tend to omit entirely, or gloss over, a lot of 'legacy' (obsolescent) hardware such as older-style PCI slots and how they work (aka "Conventional PCI", the white expansion-card slots that predate PCI Express... if your PC is much newer than about 2010, you probably can ignore this) that are still on a few really old systems out there.
A particularly important bit of jargon is "form factor". Simply put, a form factor is a formal or informal specification ("spec") for a hardware design. Typically a given spec sheet (any written documentation) for a form factor describes its physical layout, its dimensions -- and the acceptable ranges and tolerances, as well as restrictions on both in places where such need apply, for such dimensions -- any features that need to be included (and where and how) or excluded, etc.
A "cyberdeck" is a specific form factor of portable computer. Historically, it is a de facto spec, having evolved from a number of sources in (believe it or not) the mid-to-late-1980s and early 1990s. The term was created by William Gibson for his breakthrough novel "Neuromancer", but, according to his own accounting in an interview many years later, he was, ironically, rather unfamiliar with computers at the time and thus was careful to leave his narrative descriptions extremely vague! Illustrations in the source rulebooks for the first edition of the tabletop role-playing game "Shadowrun" in 1989 (basically, imagine playing "Dungeons & Dragons", but instead of a fantasy world, it's the "Blade Runner" universe) gave a proper imagining to the design, but it wasn't until people actually started designing and building their own such computers based on those illustrations that a spec emerged. It's essentially design by crowdsource (crowdsourcing is the model Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are built on... however, a more appropriate modern approximation might be a Twitch streamer's chat crowd, if we're a bit optimistic) but given enough time and experimentation by the appropriate people, it can indeed turn out quite nicely... as happened here.
What emerged is simple, but effective. A large, rectangular base, typically at least as large as a 'standard keyboard' (this is to say, a desktop-style keyboard large enough to have a full number pad, navigation and cursor keys, a full complement of a dozen F-keys, and the three indicator LEDs for the lock keys... basically, a full 103/104-key keyboard), and often incorporating a touchpad or trackball style mouse to one side as well. A box or other space hangs off the rear of the keyboard, at the far-left side, housing the "system unit" (the mainboard, CPU, RAM, drives, etc). A proportionally-small LCD screen, such as from an EeePC or other netbook, folds over the system unit lump (which often is fairly irregular in shape or outright incorporated into the keyboard somehow) like a typical laptop.
A fine example of this is the cyberdeck build by [Tinfoil Haberdashery] aka [mothernaturesson] on Imgur, which had a writeup here on Hackaday, back in 2018...
[Hackaday Blog Article: A Mobile Computer to Make William Gibson Jealous]
[Imgur Build-Log Gallery Link: The working prototype of my cyberdeck is complete.]Notably, however, as this is a field of hackers, makers, and tinkerers, there is considerable variation in implementation -- 'decks (for short) which put the screen on the right, or incorporate multiple screens, or incorporate smaller or oddball keyboards or even build into the housing of 1980s home computers such as the Commodore 64 or early "luggable" style portable systems are not unheard of -- in fact, the system above, as an eagle-eyed viewer will note, uses a compact keyboard, and its successor, which also got a Hackaday article, and is quite honestly one of my favorite designs ever (no joke!), incorporates a split keyboard around a center-mount system unit with a touchpad in its lid; the display mounts over a housing for a battery subsystem -- a true rarity in such machines.
[Hackaday Blog Article: Advancing The State of Cyberdeck Technlology]
[Imgur Build Log Link: The Cyberdeck Mark 2: the dream of the '80s is alive.]
Perhaps, someday, I will be able to claim that level of technical wizardry -- I certainly aspire to it! Alas, for now I am hardly fit to apprentice such a master. I can hold my own, but I'm nowhere near that good...
It occurred to me some time ago that, if the end-user (that's you, sitting at your keyboard, thinking about the next Dell or HP you maybe need to buy and dreading the thought of even a glance at its price-tag) could build their own PC, custom-tailored to their own wants and needs, they could save a goodly bit of money, have something to show off and brag about, and it would be better for them than a "one size fits all -- except the ones that it doesn't" machine from the big-box bargain store. Some years later, I began building my own portable machines, and over time, my tendency to acquire parts of questionable quality and history, from sellers of questionable repute as well as my inability to keep from tinkering has meant that there has been a rather frequent need to rebuild those machines, often from the ground up.
Then again, if I woke up one morning and just randomly had Linus Sebastian kinds of money (aka "LinusTechTips" on YouTube) -- or even JayzTwoCents kinds of money -- I'd have absolutely no idea whatsoever what to do with it. I'd probably blow it hard by building my dream house in my dream spot for the place. Being rich is a skill -- so is being poor -- but they're different skills. It's interesting.
Philosophical musings aside, at some point in the midst of building one of these many, many machines for myself, I realized a sort of formula had evolved. I had established a routine method. It was simple, it was effective, it could be communicated easily and varied even more easily. I had, somewhat unconsciously, worked out what amounted to my own prior goal -- a simple, basic formula, communicable to and understandable by most people, from which they could assemble and build their own custom-tailored system.
Let me put that in its own block quote, it's worth setting it apart for the importance alone.
I now had a simple formula, which I could easily and effectively communicate to most people in a way they could understand. Following the formula, they could build their own computer, in a simple process lasting a weekend or less, custom-tailored to their needs. They would spend less and get more than any comparable pre-built solution from a retail outlet or specialty computer store could offer them, and they would have something unique to them that they could feel accomplished about and show off a bit as well.
Think about the power of that for a moment!
The next log will lay out the formula properly, and go into a very brief discussion of its potential variations.
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"Going to the Hardware Store" - Some Talk About Tools
10/08/2021 at 23:42 • 0 commentsHere's what you need, for sure. This sounds like a lot more than it is, mostly by way of discussion. You really don't need anything more than what's listed here.
- A power drill of some sort and drill bits. Corded or cordless doesn't really matter, except that corded is generally (but not always) more powerful and more expensive, and cordless is generally (but not always) more convenient. "Electric screwdrivers" are crap, don't buy them -- they have a clutch in them, but even if you circumvent that so that you can get the full power of the motor (which isn't easy!), it's still like a "Little Tikes" toddler toy ride-in car vs a midsize Toyota. Avoid. As for drill bits, literally the cheapest black metal stuff in the store will do you fine. Don't bother with anything fancier, but do get something with at least a couple dozen sizes.
- A multimeter. Don't get the awful ones at Walmart or hardware stores if you can avoid it. Go to an electronics place -- no, not Best Buy (ha!) or the Late Great Radio Shack. Honestly, the $15 Sparkfun Multimeter is legendary for a reason, and gets my penultimate recommendation. (I have one from back when they were still yellow!) You can kind of get away with not having a multimeter, for what it's worth, but it's really hard. You'll need a "continuity tester" (basically a flashlight-bulb-and-battery plus clip leads to complete the circuit, if whatever you're clipped to is connected through, it lights up) and some sort of voltmeter that can handle up to about 24vDC and tells you if you've got your polarity mixed up but otherwise doesn't mind (+/- ends swapped). Cheaper and easier by far to just get the multimeter, trust me.
- A screwdriver or bit-driver set. Best bet here is an electronics bit-driver set. The ones Amazon carries under weird brand names you've never heard of, marketed as "electronics repair screwdriver bit set" type things -- those are your best bet, especially ones with magnetic bits. (Don't go to AliExpress unless you want to be old and gray with a Gandalf beard when it finally arrives!) Mine is branded "ORIA" and is awesome. Also, protip -- the Walmart "Hyper Tough" one in neon puke green is not a magnetic-bit set... annoyingly. I can't recommend it because of that, but if you're absolutely desperate beyond all reproach, it's better than nothing.
- A big, long-handled Philips and slot-head screwdriver pair. Sometimes things need "persuading"... don't be afraid to apply a little leverage when you have to ;) and have what you need on hand for that. Speaking of which, expect the slot-head model to do double-duty as a miniature prybar... this is an old trick for a reason. Magnetic tips are a plus, here, too, BTW, and you should be willing to pay a little extra for them if you can.
- A mini hacksaw. Sometimes also called a "compact hand hacksaw" which doesn't make much sense. This is the kind where there's a utility-knife-style grip in line with a standard 10in or 12in hacksaw blade. If what you're looking at is a case of "Honey I Shrunk The Otherwise-Normal Hacksaw", pistol-grip and all, that's the wrong thing. These things are incredible, though -- you don't need a big-boy saw, Dremel, or anything like that if you have one of these, not for this project at least... unless you're doing something absolutely whackadoodle to show off, in which case you probably already have a garage half-full of fancy tools I've never heard of anyways.
- A utility knife. Sometimes called a box cutter knife. Put away your tactical survival how-red-is-your-neck Signature Jeff Foxworthy Edition hog-splittin' sawtooth switchblade thing, you want just a basic yellow Stanley "it's sharper than a butter knife" type here, the kind literally everyone uses to open cardboard everything. Don't pay more than you have to, even Walmart's cheapest bargain-bin model is good enough. Anything fancier just gets in the way. Protip: keep spare blades on hand. They're cheap, and if you snap one late in the evening on a rainy Sunday, they're invaluable.
- An X-Acto knife and blades. You only need a basic metal handle and a #11 style blade, which is the one everyone knows and recognizes instantly. Get lots -- the little box of fifteen blades with the disposal slot on one side carries a princely price tag but is well worth the cost. Competitor and off-brands are fine -- "Excel" is a good one, if you can get it. If you are absolutely destitute, at least at the moment (October 2021), Dollar Tree, in some stores, sells a little kit with a metal handle and six blades (of which one is a #11 style) for a wrinkled Washington plus sales tax. That said, Dollar Tree changes inventory almost as often as the Kardashians go through lipstick, and not all stores carry all things, so I don't guarantee that your store has it when you go looking (and please don't ask me to try!). Also -- blades are NOT sold separately, so go next door to Walmart, afterwards, and get as many spare blades as you can pay for from the craft section, though!
- A set of pliers. You should have a regular "pair of pliers" pair of pliers (technically, these are "water pump" or "slip joint" pliers) and at least two sizes (regular and fine/narrow) of needlenose pliers. Multiple variations on these (especially bent-nose style needlenose pliers) is great to have if you have a little cash to burn on it.
- Wire nips. Also called diagonal cutters, wire cutters, diagonal pliers, etc... I once knew someone who called them "parrot beaks" (ha!) but I think that was just that one very weird fellow. If you can only get one size, get really small ones -- I know this seems odd, but I speak from experience. I hardly ever use anything larger than my smallest pair and I have four sizes. I don't even know where my biggest ones are! If you can afford it, though, get a really small pair and a middling-sized pair.
- A nibbler tool (OPTIONAL). This is one of only two weird / specialty tools, and one of the two tools that are optional here. Having this will make your life a LOT easier, but you don't absolutely have to have it to do what you need to do -- there are other ways of doing what it does, although all of those ways are a lot clumsier and uglier. A "nibbler" is a metal-working tool, although it can be used on nearly anything up to about 1/8in (3.5mm) thickness or so, depending on how strong you are. Basically, it's a little block wtih a handle and a sort of 'tooth' mechanism. When you squeeze the handle, the tooth pulls back into the block, and if you've got it set up right against something, a little notch gets taken out of that something, as if a rabbit took a bite. Hence the name! This one is essentially identical to mine, dirt cheap but impressively durable -- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0002KRACO
- A basic soldering iron and solder. This is the other specialty tool, and the other optiional tool. Whatever you do, do not get one of those genuinely horrendous "Radio Shack" rug burner style ones that plug straight into the wall, take ten minutes to heat, and usually claim to be 30w or so... those are nasty and truly awful and you should avoid them at all costs. A cheap temperature controlled soldering station would be my recommendation... Amazon has 'em for pretty low. Dave Jones of YouTube "EEVBlog" fame got a laugh out of the 'Yihua' brand ones, some years ago, but he has stupidly high standards and they're actually pretty good. I had a similar one, rebranded by Sparkfun (and, sadly, long out of circulation) for quite some time. It was fine. If you can get a used Hakko on eBay, that'd be even better. I have a Hakko 926 that looks like it's been through a war, but it's one tough little fella and has never given me one lick of trouble.
Honestly -- if you can get a 2amp-rated-output power bank dirt cheap, get one and get an 8-Watt USB soldering iron off Amazon. Not kidding. Those things rock. (Before anyone makes sarcastic remarks about their capability... I repaired a spade lug on a large home air conditioner with one of them once, as its first use. That was at least five years ago, and I still have the iron and use it occasionally. It works fine.) If you're desperate, get the iron and rig a USB socket to a cheap six-volt lantern battery -- trust me, I know what's in those irons, they won't care. Above all, however, DO NOT EVER USE A CHEAP USB SOLDERING IRON WITH A WALL WART. Neither the iron's tip nor the power supply's output is mains-isolated, and there's enough wall current at that tip as a result to make an LED glow!
As for solder... avoid the newfangled "lead free" stuff. The fumes you see when people solder is what's called rosin flux, which basically is overcooked pine sap. There is absolutely no metal content there, it's all hype and confusion by people who mean well but have no idea whatsoever what they're actually talking about. 60/40 tin/lead is old as the hills and works fine. I tried lead-free solder once... it stuck to itself and the iron and nothing else. Gave me fits. It now resides where it belongs -- in my garbage can! The stuff I routinely buy now is labeled "American Solder" by Tejani Metal Industries. The common old formula -- 60% tin, 40% lead -- rosin-core electronics solder, 0.8mm / 0.031in dia stuff, 100-gram spools. I buy three spools at a time so I only have to buy it once a year, but I do a LOT of tinkering. One spool is flagrant overkill for this project, TBH, but it's what I'd recommend.
YouTube has tons and tons and tons of tutorials on how to solder. I'll be honest, don't ask me, my technique is awful and I've so far been too lazy to establish better habits, even though I know I should. It's actually easy to do, even badly -- and even badly done, it works fine, which is why I've not been motivated enough to fix my cringeworthy techniques! - If you absolutely won't do soldering for any reason whatsoever under the sun. Get some really tiny wire nuts. Orange ones and ones that are even smaller -- they're color coded. Before you start howling at me about wire nuts in your computer, the wires in your walls are held together with wire nuts and there's a whole lot more power going through that stuff than will ever see the inside of a computer box -- and, after all, you'll only need this for power wires! Pick your poison.
- One thing you won't need: anti-static gear. I know people are going to want to yell and scream and shout at me for this. You know what? You're all full of crap. I'm not even going to give you a chance. Bugger off, the lot of you, you're wrong. It's hype and old wives' tales and hearsay and the sort of Polly-Want-A-Cracker rumor mill material that has a longer paper trail than Simone's famous line in "Ferris Beuller's Day Off" about how Ferris is supposedly out sick!
My local tech shop, the guy who owns it is best buds with me. He does his repair work on a pretty little towel -- not a bath towel, the kind that's like a knotted rug. Truth is, we both acknowledge, openly, that he even has that rug for insurance reasons only -- you'd be hard-pressed to get a bigger load of bull-whotsit if you went to a cattle farm. Mind you, he routinely works on everything from $250 Walmart specials sold last month to XP era Dells to everything every major computer company (and most of the minor ones that do their business here) have sold in the years between those two extremes. He's seen some weird stuff, trust me...
Personally, I've worked on everything from 115x-Socket desktops with gaming motherboards to Commodore machines and Compaq Portables barely a year or two younger than I am (and I was born in the mid-Eighties!). I have an electronics background that's just as fleshed-out as my experience with computers, because the two developed simultaneously -- and I've been tinkering and computing since the early 1990s. I've never needed antistatic protection for anything I've worked on, and neither I nor my pal have ever wrecked anything with static. TBH I don't think I could if I tried, and I'm surprisingly good at wrecking things when I tinker, honestly.
The technical: The hype around anti-static measures refers specifically to the very earliest generation of CMOS-process chips (like the first 4000-series glue logic chips, 27Cxx ROM chips, and early static/dynamic RAM chips with a '-C' appended to their part numbers), which were extremely static-fragile, because in the 1970s, ways of protecting chips' internals from getting zapped by static was poorly understood. However, by even the early 1980s, that problem had essentially been solved.
The bottom line: if it's any computer or electronics anything that's relevant to what we're doing here, you do not need antistatic stuffs. Period, full stop, we're done here.
A preemptive warning. Comments discussing matters regarding antistatic protection will be reported, requesting removal. This is not a place where debate on such a matter is appropriate, and I think I've put forth enough evidence of my expertise and experience in this regard to establish that I know what I'm talking about. There are plenty of other places for such discussion -- use them.
The next Log will explain roughly what a cyberdeck is and my approach (and formula) to building them.
- A power drill of some sort and drill bits. Corded or cordless doesn't really matter, except that corded is generally (but not always) more powerful and more expensive, and cordless is generally (but not always) more convenient. "Electric screwdrivers" are crap, don't buy them -- they have a clutch in them, but even if you circumvent that so that you can get the full power of the motor (which isn't easy!), it's still like a "Little Tikes" toddler toy ride-in car vs a midsize Toyota. Avoid. As for drill bits, literally the cheapest black metal stuff in the store will do you fine. Don't bother with anything fancier, but do get something with at least a couple dozen sizes.
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"But Why?": Build vs Buy, an Introduction to the Concept
10/08/2021 at 20:42 • 0 commentsMaybe you're standing in front of your daughter's computer... maybe it's your own, and they're just watching. Maybe it's your son. Maybe you're a single parent, or maybe your son or daughter has two Mommies, or two Daddies... or maybe you're Mommy or Daddy in a more traditional relationship. I don't judge. In this moment, that's not the focus anyways. You're staring at a computer. The screen is blue and it's frowning at you. Your child looks up at you and they're just as confused as you are.
"What's wrong with it? Why won't it work...?"
You don't have a clue how to answer them. You don't even know where to begin. You look down at the thing. You're angry, frustrated, sad. You alternately want to break down crying and throw the machine across the room. Neither option seems terribly useful... and ultimately, you have the same question that your son or daughter does:
Why won't the #&@$$%!!!! thing just turn on and work?!
Several hours -- maybe days -- and an expensive trip to the computer repair shop later, the news is even worse. You need a new system, the old one is beyond repair. You look at your family nervously. A new computer is several hundred dollars... that's not a small amount of money! How are you going to afford that?
But: hit the pause button for a moment. What if you had another option? What if, given a weekend dedicated to it, you could build your own machine? Screw Best Buy and their horrible prices and pounding pounding techno music, screw the desperation in a plastic grocery bag that is Walmart, screw the nerds that wouldn't fix your own machine -- if you can't beat 'em, join 'em! You can do it yourself.
I know it seems unlikely. I know it makes you feel like Homer Simpson in a physics class when you look inside a Dell box... a stranger in a strange land. You've never taken apart a laptop. You wouldn't even know where to begin. Heck, putting together a desk from Staples is a bit scary for you, sometimes!
Let me tell you a secret: computers are designed that way. Computers are designed to impress us, to make us feel powerful when we use them, just like driving an expensive sports car does... but just like looking under the hood of a modern Toyota can make your head spin, so can looking under the hood of an HP Pavilion desktop!
I'm a friendly neighborhood nerd. I'm the guy that Granny calls to program her VCR, and that you, if you live near me, call when your cable box and TV don't want to talk to each other, and Larry the Cable Guy says he might be able to come next Tuesday if it's not raining. I'm the guy you call when you get that frowny Blue Screen of Death (and the one who told you to call it that) and you're trying to figure out if it's worth it to haul the thing down to Jeff for a couple hundred bucks of repair bills or whether it just needs someone to give it the electronic equivalent of "take two aspirin and get over it already", spank its parallel port for being moody, and send it on its way.
Modern computers look a lot more complicated than they really are. PCs go together like a LEGO set -- if you can plug a DVD player or Roku box into a TV, if you can plug a USB hub into a laptop, and if you know how to turn a screwdriver, you can put together your own portable PC. I'll show you how to build one in a style us computer dorks call a "cyberdeck", and tell you everything you need to know to customize it to your own personal wants, needs, and desires.
The only power tool you'll need for the typical build will be a drill of some sort -- and the super-cheap ones will do fine. Everything else you need to do can be done with ordinary hand-tools. This stuff is nowhere near as intimidating as it looks at first glance. I promise!
The next section will discuss what tools and such you do, in fact, need -- and what ones you don't need that you might think you do -- and what to get, and why.