Addictronics

The Water Cabinet is my cluster of:

* 486 running Windows 3.1
* Pentium I running linux. – firewall
* Pentium II ubuntu. – file server
* Pentium III running 40+ versions of linux. – linux box
* Pentium IV running Windows XP Home (For School/Safe Stuff)
* Asus w/Dual Xeon’s (3.5 Ghz ea) running Windows and Linux. Will Be 4 Ghz ea.

I had a bunch of computers ranging from old to new and decided to put some into one case for ease of use. From that the project has grown. I want to be able to take this to lan party’s with no hassle as well as use all the computers to their full extent (or more). Everything is housed in an old file cabinet that is being converted to house these computers. All the cpu’s, psu’s, hdd’s etc… will be water cooled. Here I have the rack built for all the mobo’s (the 486 will sit on spacers on the bottom of the case). As you can see I can use all the pci slots with no problem (except for the 486 o’ course). It is called the Water Cabinet because it is a filecabinet with water cooled computers…just to clear that up..

Here is an early mock-up, i had just built the main mobo rack and wanted to test fit it.

Here’s version 1 of the rack that holds all 6 psu’s, cd roms, floppy drives, and hard drives.

This is how they fit together outside the case. you can see how i raised the cd roms to clear the bottom 2 motherboards (very bottom on isn’t in the pic) for extra clearance.

My very first circuit. I had fun learning how to do this, and hope they will turn out even better in the future. The main reason for this was that i wanted to turn on and off all 6 computers with military style toggle switches, so this makes them behave like momentary switches instead of on/off.

I needed a way to switch back and forth between all 6 computers without manually switching the keyboard video and mouse. so i bought this 8 port kvm switch for $100 locally without wires.

I got this DD D4 pump last Christmas for this project. It is amazing how quiet it is. plus the built in resistor allows you to change the speed. Next to is is a 320 watt peltier TEC unit i got on ebay… it should help in cooling all 6 pcs.

My brother found these filters, we think that’s what they are. and I’m thinking about using them as a remote water level indicator…

Here are the rolls of 50′ IDE, and 100′ floppy cable, I want the inside to be really clean , cable wise.

Here are the spools for rewiring all 7 ( 1 dedicated for lights, pumps….etc) power supplies for exact fits.

I got this box of 3 monster water blocks, they have spiral copper (looks like copper springs that are stretched) in each of the channels internally.

Another (blurry) view of the water blocks. I’m thinking of using them for the lower speed computers, minus the 486…

Water cooler for my Radeon 9800 pro

I have already gone ahead and taken one of these 400 watt power supplies apart. I got 7 of them for $10 each online.

This rack replaces the old psu/cdrom/floppy…. one. It is much better, and stronger. Plus it looks better.

Here is sort of how the layout will look inside the case (right of picture=front of case). I put some duct tape rolls under the cd rack because it will be suspended inside the case about 4 or 5 inches from the bottom, hopefully this will be enough to slide the P1 computer under the whole rack and free up about 4 inches horizontally.

This is the current layout of my room. This is my “Test bench” setup, you can see the kvm switch (bottom left, with allot of wires) is wired up and working. (Note the USPS boxes sitting on the PSU’s are used as a shelf….it works)

Here is the filecabinet I am using as the case. It is a lot easier to convert this then it would be to make one from scratch. In this picture you can see the windows I have cut out of the side, top, and the hole in the front (was the back of the filecabinet) is for the CD/DVD and floppy drives.

Here is a side view of the case, I am thinking of cutting an identical window on the other side. I am not done cutting out the rear (vertical flat) side of the window because I don’t know how I want it to look yet. You can see a side shot of the psu, hdd, floppy, cd/dvd rack.

Same picture as above, except with the mobo rack and 1 cd rom for reference of how big this case is (2 drawer file cabinet)

A picture of the top window with the dual Xeon in its proper position, I haven’t riveted this piece in yet and yes it is crooked. Just replace that fan with a water block, and eventually in that processor next to it too, and you can start to see what the final case is going to look like.

I put two of the motherboards for final adjustments before permanently connecting the mobo rack to the case. I added the five cdrom’s, five floppy, and one gutted psu for the pic.

Well I finally painted more of the inside flat black primer. I think I am going to leave it flat black, it will cut down on reflection and should highlight the computer parts.

Done painting the outside black as well, and I went ahead and cut the window out on this side :)

Another look at the same thing. I have some ideas for the windows and sides….. It involves one big piece of Plexiglas…. :)

Rear shot of the case with both windows cut out.

This is one of four electronic valves used to switch between peltier and radiator cooling.

After about 45 minutes of searching the parts catalog I finally found this heater core for $18.
I am planning to get another one of these for even better cooling (they are about 2″ thick).

This is how big each of these heater cores are and where I plan to put them.
They will be used to cool the peltier, or directly the system via the valves shown above

I found this kitchen hood vent filter at Home Depot. It should work well to filter out the incoming air and lessen the amount of dust inside the case tremendously.

I was playing around with the water blocks and the 320 Watt peltier, and I like what I see.
I’m thinking about using these and getting different water blocks for the other computer.

Here is a side view, you can see how sandwiched the peltier is, and how much surface area it has to transfer heat.

This is the battery inside of the battery backup.

This is the battery backup taken apart. I plan to make a mount and locate it inside the case. The file server (P2) and possibly the monitor and/or dual xeon will actually be backup-ed. The rest of the computers will still go through this battery backup. However they will only be EMF filtered.

I finally got the other heater core and started playing around with how I want it laid out. This is definitely not exactly how its going to be, I am just getting ideas.

Here are the two heater cores nest to each other, I have already cut the angled pieces off of the left one and put two 90deg connectors on it.

I cut the bends off the other heater core and went ahead and cut a little piece of pipe to connect the two together. Now all I have to do is figure out how to mount it and then I can solder the connections.

I started drilling the holes for the power buttons. I have drilled out the center two, and have one of the buttons already installed.

Here is the crosspiece for mounting the pump, It is just a flat piece of aluminum, this should allow it to move some and cut down on noise, the spring tensioned screws and foam on the bottom of the pump should help too.

here is the case all primer’d up and with all of the motherboards in place

i added some cross pieces in the rear to hold the heater cores and for support. you can also see where i mounted the gutted kvm switch on the right side.

Here you can see the kvm switch better in this pic. also the motherboards again. I put the cables in and it got really cramped.

I took the heat sink and fan off of my radeon 9800 pro VC.

I removed the metal shim that is too thick. i don’t know why they put it there, it holds the heat sink off of the gpu.

Next I attached the water block

In this really really really blurry picture you can sort of see that the water block for the radeon sticks above the case… the case is the black blurry part, the tip of the block is gray shiny and blurry, and my blurry hand is holding a blurry piece of gray paper behind it all so you can see how far the block sticks up. to fix this i am going to have to carefully melt the plexi in that spot and push it up, that gave me a good idea, but you are just going to have to see how it turns out.

I finally started rewiring all of the power supplies. 35 wires if i counted correctly (each). I only did this because the original were too short, and i hate splicing.

After wiring 3 psu’s i was getting anxious. so i finished one and wired it up, and surprisingly it works.

Oh yeah by the way, i am really lucky, while soldering the power supplies, i somehow swung a molten drop of solder onto my dual xeon board…It scared the ever living crap out of me. after i changed pants, i just touched the solder,and luckily it cooled enough in its flight to not stick to anything.

After over a year of trying to find some OS to use on my Pentium II, I finally have one that works. I have tried Windows, Ubuntu, Suse, RedHat, and more. FreeNas finally did the trick. I can now backup all of my files onto that computer and get onto the next part of the project. Also today I ordered screws to mount the HDD’s, CD rom’s and floppies. I am relieved to finally have a file server computer that I can use after all this time of trial and failure.

I finished gutting six of the power supplies. Now I am able to add their fans to my back shroud for the radiators. The fans are attached to this sheet of metal and it is spaced from the backside of the radiators. That allows the air to evenly flow through both radiators. I spaced the fans apart to leave room in the middle if I decide to add more small fans or one or two 120mm fans (pictured below).

I got a great tip off from a friend. www.LinuxMCE.com is the linux (ubuntu) god of MythTV. For those of you that don’t know what MythTV is click Here. I am dedicating my Pentium III machine to be MythTV backend server. With it’s new 500gig hard drive and tv tuner (soon to be 2) it will record shows for me to watch at a later time. This starts up a whole new project setting up the frontend server on my xbox… but that’s a whole other story. Pic’s later.

I might have understated the difficulty of setting up my LinuxMCE backend server on my 550mhz 256mb Pentium III machine. My first hurdle was running into the Grub Error 18 after installing ubuntu (a process which takes about three hours if I am rushing it). My first idea was to update the BIOS. I then proceeded to find the BIOS chip on the motherboard. I thought that would be easy until after about two hours of searching, I couldn’t find it. I felt ashamed that I could not find it. So I posted a challenge on Digg.com for people to help me find my BIOS chip. I posted a high resolution picture for people to look at and try to find it wherever it may be. Thankfully I did actually get some help.

Their help yielded me this, a .pdf of the motherboard. From that I was able to determine that this was the actual BIOS chip (It is the one with MX on it).

Here is the tv tuner in place. There is a mouse pad between the mobo and the power supply so don’t freak out.

After downloading that file, transferring it to a thumb drive, jimmy-rigging up my dual Xeon setup to run. I was then able to run the file and have it format and prep the floppy. The laptop which is my main computer right now since all the others are in many pieces has no floppy drive and thus the need for such drastic measures. After that was done I turned off the Xeon and took the floppy drive and cable over to the P3. I plugged the drive into the power supply and the cable then proceeded to connect the floppy drive cable to the motherboard. One problem, the floppy drive cable I was using had its missing pin (The one used to make sure you don’t put the cable on backwards) on the third from end pin. The motherboard on the other hand had its missing pin on the second from end. My search for another cable turned up 3 more exactly like the first. So I took the slave connector off of one of them, and put it in the place of the motherboard connector. That didn’t work ..hmm. Well I finally found a cable that worked and got everything plugged up, switched on the pc and watched it try to boot from hard drive. I figured “Oh yeah I forgot to change boot order in the BIOS” so I restart and enter the BIOS. No floppy drive listed…… Eventually I realized that in a hidden menu you have to enable the floppy drive..why? Now I got it in the proper boot order and everything is recognized. I reboot and nothing happens. I try again and let it wait…. No bootable data found.

Here is a picture of the setup.

Well poop. So off of a hunch I take the floppy back of the P3 reinstall it on the Xeon and try the whole process using the other BIOS on hp’s web site that didn’t list my motherboard on it. I download it on my laptop, transfer it to the thumb drive, then to the xeon, then I run it and let it reformat the floppy. Floppy won’t format and it was the last floppy I had. Next day I run and get another floppy. When I get home I start the format and it installs on the floppy successfully. I turn off the Xeon, take off the floppy, move over to the P3 and reattach the floppy drive. I boot up and Success! I get the DOS screen that starts the BIOS updating process. I get that finished and start to reinstall Ubuntu 6.10, again.

Three hours later it is done. I reboot and “Grub Error 18″, I go to bed. After some more searching around I find that I should have manually partitioned the hard drive during installation. So I reinstall with new knowledge and some hope. I get to the partition er and I allow 100mb for the /boot 350mb for /swap and the rest for / “root”. Once the install is done I reboot and it works. Hooray! So I login and everything is working great. I have already burned the LinuxMCE file to disk and I navigate Ubuntu to their web site to run the installer. I download the installer, unpack and run it. I get about 40 minutes into the installation when it starts to update the system and everything and so I watch for a while until it gets stuck on this “starting samba daemons…” so I figure that it is probably just going to take a while so I turn off the monitor and go to sleep. I awake seven hours later and it is still there…. I read on a forum that I need to update my system before installing LinuxMCE. Wow, it would have been nice to know that sooner. Oh well, I go to system > administration > update manager and get it going. Everything’s going great and then it stops on one thing (I don’t even want to much less actually remember what it was). So I force it to quit and I restart. Or at least I try to. Ubuntu won’t boot….. So I reinstall and three hours later I go to download the LinuxMCE installer. But hey guess what, for some reason my network controller wasn’t installed during system installation. I try to get it recognized but end up trying something else. Off of another hunch I shutdown and pop in another network card and wa-la it works. So now I am sitting here watching ubuntu install its 164 updates and hoping that it doesn’t freeze again. Then I will proceeded to download the LinuxMCE installer, run it, and hope for the best.

/End Tantrum

Well I was able to install LinuxMCE fine, but when it ran i got a dos/cmd like screen. I had no idea what to do so I went to the forums at linuxmce.com and got started chatting. That is when I discovered that actually, LinuxMCE isn’t what I wanted, all I really need is MythTV. Sooooo…. I went to uninstall LinuxMCE. Well it turns out that you can’t. Yes, that’s right, you can not uninstall LinuxMCE (yet) because it embeds itself into Ubuntu so much. So I reinstalled Ubuntu ..again and ran updates. I just ordered a new tv tuner and i’ll post pics when I get it.

Also my FreeNas machine seems to be running great. Here it is in all of its glory.

And here is the temporary hard drive and power supply setup with 80mm case fan to cool the psu. Hey, it works.

And finally, a shot of both setups as of now. This is just for the installation process. They both use the same ram and I only have one stick, so only one machine can run at a time, but hopefully I will fix that soon with another 256 stick.

And that is is for this antiquated project. By the time I got around to finishing the case, everything was outdated beyond belief. However, it was a great learning experience that I had lots of fun with.