Building a 12v car charger for the ASUS Eee
The ASUS Eee is a fantastic ultra-portable notebook with almost everything required for geeks (and nothing that isn’t). Plus it features fantastic build quality and is very well priced. If you live in New Zealand you can get them from DSE; at the time of writing they are the exclusive supplier. I worked out it’s the same cost as importing one once you include all the duties and tax, plus you get the advantage of a proper NZ-style mains charger.
Anyway, being so small I thought it would be nice to be able to carry this around in the car. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a car charger available anywhere at the time so I decided to tackle the problem myself. As a bonus this provides an opportunity for an external high-capacity battery. Read the rest of this entry »
I recently acquired a free WYSE Winterm 3200LE. This neat little device is designed as a dedicated client for Windows Terminal Services (RDP) and Citrix ICA. The concept behind them is for businesses to run all of their applications on a central group of servers and have users log remotely onto a desktop session on these servers to access their applications and data.
The advantages with this type of set-up are centralised management and reduced hardware cost as users only need a small, inexpensive client device called a thin terminal instead of a fully functional desktop computer. There are also some drawbacks to such a set-up but we are starting to head outside the scope of this article.
WYSE are a major manufacturer of such thin terminals and have been for some time. The Winterm 3200LE is somewhat old now, sporting a the following hardware:
- National Semiconductor Geode GX1 233MHz CPU
- 16MB SDRAM (upgradable to 64MB by replacing the SODIMM)
- National DP83815 ‘MacPHYTER’ 10/100Mbps NIC
- 8MB onboard NAND flash
- Cyrix 5530 ‘Kahlua’ AC’97 audio
- 2 USB ports
The GX1 CPU is considered a low power equivalent to a Pentium MMX.
If you are lucky you should be able to pick a surplus Winterm up virtually free from IT vendors or big companies upgrading their equipment. They also often appear cheap on Trade Me and eBay. Even better are the HP/Compaq t5000-series terminals as they are an entirely standard x86 platform (not just based on one therefore no hacking required; just load up your favourite distro) and much faster than their Winterm counterparts.
Although slow by modern standards the 3200LE is very small, based on the standard x86 architecture and draws less than 15W of power making it ideal as an experimental embedded platform. The device comes preloaded with Windows CE 2.1 which is very limited in functionality if you intend to do anything other than run Windows remote desktop sessions in 256 colours. Getting Linux running on this device will render it much more useful and is quite easy to perform with a little hacking, so read on…
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Here are some plans for a 2.4GHz collinear omnidirectional antenna I found lying about. I’m not sure where this came from so I’ve posted it here for you to use.
If I get around to building one I’ll post a construction guide with photos and test results.
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A member of the project recently purchased a XH8287 access point from Dick Smith Electronics. This had previously been returned by a clueless customer on the basis it didn’t work and found not be faulty so was purchased at a substantial discount. I was tasked with preparing it as a MarlWiFi client and on closer inspection I noticed it appeared to closely resemble a Linksys WAP54G… And it runs Linux… Oh the possibilities!
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Ever tried getting a Compaq Deskpro to boot without a keyboard plugged in? While it initially appears impossible, I recently stumbled accross the proper method quite by accident. I thought I’d post some notes here as it is poorly documented on the web.
The Deskpro series are very well-built, quiet and reliable PCs and they suit the task of a ‘poor man’s server’ extremely well.
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