The collected works of Pontus - Page 3

Sure, no problem

I was actually wondering about the same (and commented about it on the video).

Hah! and they replied They pump position data out to MS FlightSim, what a weird wedding.

eMGee wrote: I've noticed that, too. For what particular reason did they prefer or the necessity to use a Zip-drive, I wonder.

I did my googling:

The WBC-3000 removable media disk, is a direct replacement for DEC and Pertec type 14 inch cartridge disk drives with fixed or removable storage capacity of 2 1/2 to 30MB. This product utilizes a Syquest EZ135 135MB removable cartridge disk drive or a removable hard disk drive canister.

I suppose that removable media was desired to emulate the feeling of removable cartridges. And at the time the WBC-3000 was designed, the ZIP was reasonable in cost and size. Today a SD-card would probably be good enough.

I nice set of machines there otherwise. I spot a PDP-11 or Vax and a cromemco system three. What is the terminal on to of the SGI-machine?

StephenT wrote: Oh, if only you could see what we've got on our pallets. I'm not sure what terminal that is on top of the SGI but I'll check next time I'm in there.

mmm pallets How long have you guys been around?

A scary solstice to you all:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ftld7Ohojg

I think this comic sums up my thoughts on the matter.

Whereabouts in france are you?

I'm interested in a Crimson, if its close enough to home

ozpass wrote: Sorry, for some reason I thought my location was listed under the avatar (getting confused with other forums) the Crimson is at my house in the UK - near Manchester.

Aha, I'll do some research on shipping costs and see if I can make a reasonable offer. I'm told shipping from the UK is quite expensive so we will have to see

This is of course assuming you are willing to go through the extra work of putting it on a pallet?

Did you by any chance get the machine from Mike Ross?

I'm a software developer for an RDBMS development company since two and a half year. A bit surprised, I'm working mostly with Android now which has it's ups and downs. Before that I was a SysAdmin for a small bioinformatics cluster (well, it grew to some hundred nodes at its peak) and wrote Perl to interface with an ancient Fortran program.

The combo of being a sysadmin and developer sucked a bit. And the combo of Perl and Fortran was ... interesting.

I dismantled two CPU modules today, meaning that I removed anything I can use for spares in my deskside or rack. That leaves only a few fillers and the massive backplane in the middle of the box.

Has anyone tried to remove it? Is it hard. I would like to give it a try before I send the remnants to the next world.

I'll have a go at it on Thursday, well see if I give up, swearing and bleeding

I got some time over this yesterday so I decided to try and yank the midplane from the poor CPU modules. It was actually really easy (at least with the kind of rivet mayhem I had in mind). These system are clearly designed with service in mind! And as requested I documented the process:

First you need to remove all Node boards, XIO cards, disk drives and control module. Then you unscrew seven screws that hold the XIO cage in place (encircled in red):

Then pull the cage straight out:

Now it's time to remove the node board card holders, one at the bottom and one at the top. Two screws each:

The bottom card holder is simply lifted out. The top one is held in place with a latch which needs to be firmly pressed in the direction of the red arrow, then pulled gently down:

At last you will have the midplane in full view and you have no less than 14 screws, which are labeled with a encircled cross on the circuit board, to undo. The board is suspended by four knobs. Now give the board support by holding you hand at the bottom edge and take hold of a XIO connector (careful not to touch the compression connector) and wiggle to board out:

And you are done! Here is an empty O2K CPU module from the rear:

And from the front:


I though about making a wiki entry, but I was to lazy to enter the 50 word description of myself

Great! Thanks!

PymbleSoftware wrote: I like your collection. I used to have a VT-131 and was offered a PDP 11/23 in the late 1980s (They used to be used to monitor the backup to the backup for the railway signal switches) but being young and transient I had no where to put it. For shame. I used to own a BeBox once too. I even wrote an article in Dr Dobbs and (phone) interviewed at B e Inc.

Thank you, I have put some effort into it. How was the BeBox and BeOS ? is Haiku worth a try?

Did you by chance record the talk by Hoffman? that would be interesting to hear.

If I can, I'll try to make it to this years event.

Hi.

I just hauled five lovely SGI computers home. An Onyx2 deskside, Indigo Elan, O2, indy and the reason for the topic: a Fuel.



I took it apart and removed some dust and other nasty stuff, it looks rather good now. However, after plugging the power chord into the machine I get nothing but a rather high pitched whine from the PSU and something I would describe as clicking but not quite, like metal changing shape due to heat. I get nothing from the L1, although my USB-to-rs232 adapter has been acting up.
After removing the power chord the whine persists for a while (I suspect some capacitors are discharging)

The PSU is a 460W hipro. Is this PSU worth trying to repair? I believe the fuel has a SGI specific powersupply which is rather expensive?

Edit: Spelling and formatting

Thank you smj. I read up on the thread and others it referred to. I'll take a shot at opening the PSU and hope to find some broken components Meanwhile, I'll play a bit with the Deskside.

Thanks recondas, I'll do some research and take the PSU apart, if I find an i2c chip we'll know for sure. But is sounds more likely to me that it is ATX2.1. However like DELL have done, they might have swapped the pins around.. doesn't sound very likely though, but something to keep in mind.

Hi all

I took my PSU apart today and can report the following. It is labeld HP-W460GC33 and has SGI stickers with 060-0140-007 REV:B and SGIW460GC33. The circuit boards on the inside is also labled SGIW460GC33 so it was obviously made on order from SGI. There is also SGI-W460GC31 on the primary side circuit board as well as IT-W460GC31 on the secondary. Probably the circuit board was use on several models. Googling w460GC31 gives pictures of the insides of an ATX PSU that looks very similar.

I checked all IC's I can find and didn't any i2c circuit in there. There is one Weltrend wt7517 which is a PC POWER SUPPLY SUPERVISOR with over voltage/current detectors as well as a FAN C function.

Checking the pinout on the 24 pin P1 connector it doesn't match the color coding of neither ATX or WTX specs, but the _alternate_ pinout here http://pinouts.ru/Power/wtxmain_pinout.shtml matches except for one pin. That page also states that there is a 6-pin header used with the alternate pinout for CPU power, which the Fuel uses (well, it's a 8 pin connector but 2 are not connected)

The fan header goes directly to pin 12 and 24 in the P1, the silk screen on the circuit board on the other end of the cables are labled FANM1 and FANC1. FANM1 is directly connected to a pin on the fan header. I'm guessing FANC1 goes to the wt7517 and the fan header by the looks of it.

So, I believe that there is no i2c shenanigans and that this is a WTX PSU with the alternate pinout and the fan is what the Fuel L1 is looking for. This could perhaps be verified with a working PSU and someone who can measure the voltages.

Thanks for pointing me in the WTX direction.

I also found a dead bug and some goo inside. I'm hoping some cleaning of the PCB in question will do some good.

Here are some pictures I took.

Somebody has serviced this before.

I haven't given up on this. I did however break my hand which slows down most things. I've decided to try and convert an ATX PSU while trying to get the original fixed.

Some progress!!

I bought a decent ATX PSU and extensions for the 24 pin P2 and 8 pin P3 motherboard connectors this way I could easily move the pins around and add FAN signals to P2. I hooked things up in a mess of wires on my machine room floor. First gave power to the PSU with just my adapter to see that there were no shorts. Next I connected P2 to my Fuel, this way the 5V stand by power is available and I can try to communicate with the L1 port.

Hooking up my terminal and trying different baud rates I only get garbage. But very consistent garbage, hmmmm. I get a bit confident and try to power the beast up, nothing but more garbage on the terminal. I get more confident and hook up P3 (8 pin 12 V supply) and press power again. Now I get a beep, slow spinning fans and a red light that turns into a steady white blinking and more garbage on L1.

No bad! about here I figure out that the baud rate should be 38400 which my old vt320 can't handle. Time for an upgrade I now hook up my laptop and connect with the correct baud rate and voila! L1!



This is where I'm at. I'm going to play some more with this now.

And thanks for you're concern tingo but don't worry, I'll be able to get you the ND-110 safely to you anyway

And Success!!

I got these two warnings:
and


The first one comes and goes:

Not sure what to make of it, there is no 2.5V from the PSU so its either a fault in a DC/DC regulator on the motherboard or its derived from something on the ATX PSU that isn't within WTX specs.

The second problem then, the fan. Well, it wasn't spinning. I measured power between FANC and ground and it was very low, perhaps it wasn't meant to be powered from the motherboard. So I took power to the fan from a 4 pin molex. Now it spins. And after figuring out the fan wasn't giving any RPM readings, I swapped it out for the original fuel psu fan. And voila:



I'll post details tomorrow. Now I'm gonna take a picture of this mess and go to bed.

recondas wrote: Outstanding!!

Very nicely done Pontus - Fuel owners worldwide you you a debt of gratitude.

Thank you! Your encouragement is much appreciated.

ramq wrote: Nicely done Pontus!
This could very well be an option for fried PSU's, but it would be awesome if one could work out the fan issue altogether and get a (much) quieter Fuel PSU.

Thank you. Regarding the fan, It's probably just a matter of taking the PSU apart and run an extra the FANM cable out from the fan to the mother board connector.

ramq wrote: Oh, about the VT320... I'll make sure to include a bunch of VT510/VT520's when you come collect the ES45's.

vt terminals is always good to stock Hmm, ES45 you say, Coincidentally I just bought a bigger car.

jan-jaap wrote: Hi Pontus, nice hack!

Would be nice to know your L1 firmware version, with my blue' Fuel I could not upgrade the L1 because it failed to 'detect' the PSU after that.

Oh, and AFAIK, 2.5V is used for the (DDR1) RAM, and is derived from some other voltage (usually the 12V line I think) by a VRM on your mainboard.

Thanks, much obliged.

Is this the version string you want?


I won't have time to do anything more with this for a while, but I'll try to get that picture and the details up a.s.a.p

So, what exactly have I done?
I bought one of these:

and one of these:

and one of these

The wires are easily removed from the molex using two paper staples that has been straightened out. So I just moved the necessary wires around according to the scheme below. I kept the female side as it were and moved the wires in male molex. The left hand side in the table is thus the female, ATX side and the right is the male, WTX side.

Using ATX pinout and WTX pinout (look at the alternate one) I made this mapping. I also followed the wires back into the WTX PSU since the purpose of the wires were printed on the circuit board end. And thereby I could verify the pinout.


Three positions on the male connector has get special treatment:

Pin 3:
This is +3.3V sense. If I understand sense lines correctly you have to run the sense line as close to the load as possible for proper function. The sense line on the ATX side shares pin 13 with a +3.3V wire, it is usually a brown slightly thinner cable, but you have to open the PSU to be sure. Cut it and extend it to PIN 3 on the WTX side (it is not shared with any other wire)

Pin 12:
This is FANC, it should control fan speed. Read more below

Pin 24
This is FANM, it monitors fan speed. Connect to tachyometer pin on fan:


Next you must swap GND and +12V on the P3 connector . Just to be sure, remove wires from pin 4 and 8. Like so:



Concerns:

1. The original Fuel PSU has sense lines on +3, +5V and +12V. ATX only on +3V. If accurate +5V and +12V is needed this might be a problem. But according to L1 they are well within margin when the system i idle.
2. The WTX guidlines state that a 460W PSU should deliver 45A on +3.3V. Not many ATX PSU goes over 30A. Similar for +5V
3. The FANC on pin 12 doesn't appear to work as expected. I expected that the wire would go directly to the fan header inside the PSU, but it looks like its going into one of the IC's, but I'm not sure. The FANC line stays put at +3.3V even when the system if powered down. This might be to low to start the fan from the PSU. Which might indicate that it is just a signal wire to a fan controller in the PSU.. but I don't know.. perhaps a good reason to get my oscilloscope out.
4. Will This system handle load? We'll see I suppose

So, thats it for now Here's how fun I've had:


Edit: Totally forgot the EPS12V / P3 connector pin swap table

jan-jaap wrote: Successfully upgraded the L1 on my Fuel to the last rev (1.48.1) using tjsgifan's recipe (thanks!). PSU still recognized

I'll stop hijacking your thread now

No problem. Great that you got the blue freak going again

Today I'm sorry to learn that DMR passed away this weekend. It's hard to overestimate his contributions.

https://plus.google.com/101960720994009 ... NuEDDYfvKP

Here is a great two minute presentation of Unix with DMR himself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoVQTPbD6UY

Most excellent. I have it on my todo-list to investigate the FAN-issues, but there are sooo many other fun things to do

Lovely. I'm moving in Mars and will make a computer room out of the new garage. It will be fun to follow your construction for inspiration.

I have X issues with wristwatches:

not water proof
battery runs out
time drifts (or DST changes)
wrist band wears out

My current watch:


solves most problems by being waterproof, recharges with a tiny solar cell, sets time from broadcasted signal and wrist bands are cheap and available.

Cool! Happy to see that some people have use of my findings

kubatyszko wrote: While I was at it - I checked the signal on the FANC pin - and it gives me constant 3.3V - nothing changes while powering up, nor while running.
This could be power for some of the internal logic - doesn't seem to be going directly to the FAN.

There is something going on there. I have tried with fans that have a tachyometer and it doesn't work. It's on my todo-list to figure out how the original PSU works with the extra logic that is on there.

Nice combo! great catch.

OpenMOSIX was great on 2.4-kernels. We ran it a lot(100+ nodes) in my previous workplace (and I think they still do). But for 2.6 it was never really finished, the patches are there and some efforts have been made to tie it all together..