My peg board is starting to fill up. Still have a bit of capacity.
Peg board
Reply
Monthly Archives: February 2023
Playing Xbox
So I sorted my Xboxes today. I have owned 36. I sold 2. I turned one into my bench testing system. I have 26 which are in various forms of broken. That’s anything from a dicky DVD drive, to error screen, to FRAGing, to won’t even power on. Then I have 7 which are working. Of those 2 are chipped, 3 aren’t chipped, and 2 I’m not sure about yet.
I’ve introduced a colour coding system. On the left is a red sticker if the Xbox is broken or a green sticker if it works. On the right is a yellow sticker which has an X in it if the Xbox is not chipped, a question mark in it if I’m not sure, and a plain yellow sticker means it’s chipped.
I stuck a reminder on the second drawer:
More shelving!
In addition to the new shelving I’ve added two more bits.
One is a shelf for my Chumby (or anything else) and the other is a 10cm plastic protrusion which I can use to hang my headphones (or anything else).
Those green drawers are made from cardboard and needed a little extra support under the left hand side on the bottom which is why I stuck one of my 4.5mm PVC sheets under there (but I also needed something to attach the 10cm protrusion, so two birds, one stone).
Those PVC sheets I’ve been using were 4.5mm thick clear Nanya PVC cut to order at 254 x 174 mm by Plastics Online. I had to order a bunch of them to meet the minimum order requirements (I think I ordered 8 and they sent 9).
There’s space between my three stacks of drawers for one or two component boxes, so looking forward to making something interesting to stick in those.
Temperature Conversion
Got my temperature conversion chart printed and installed so I can talk to the Americans. The HTML I used to generate the charts is here.
New shelving
I needed a bit of plastic of a particular size. But the company that cut to size for me demanded a minimum order. So I ended up with ten pieces of plastic:
I got some angle brackets and used three spare pieces to make some shelves. See if you can spot them all:
Hmm. Here’s one with slightly better lighting:
Nice hack
So it turns out that the centre piece from the corkscrew of a bottle opener makes an excellent centre punch!
SPIDriver and I2CDriver
Zener diodes for temperature critical applications
“In a 5.6 V diode, the two effects occur together, and their temperature coefficients nearly cancel each other out, thus the 5.6 V diode is useful in temperature-critical applications.” — Zener diode.
The two effects referred to are the Zener effect and the Avalanche breakdown.
Transformerless Power Supplies
This is a very interesting read: Transformerless Power Supplies: Resistive and Capacitive. I was referred to it by @mariush over on the EEVblog forum.
Case fans
Got some extra case fans for one of my towers. Found PC Airflow Guide: How to Set Up and Position Your Fans and How to tell which way your fan is blowing.