The ghetto mod thread

[ncovert]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

^Two problems with that:
1) The hard drive bay is rivited into place, and there's only one.
2) The front fan port is 80mm (it's the white plastic thing below the hard drives.)

With that single 40mm fan, my hard drives are about 20 degrees cooler than they were before. Imagine when I get a nicer case with a 120mm fan on the front, right in front of the hard drive bay.

[mariushm]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I couldn't stand 40mm fans on the case. Now I can barely stand 80mm fans.. i'm too spoiled with 120 and 140mm fans running on low speed in my full tower case.

Be careful with those hard drives. Based on some studies Google made on their servers, it's actually detrimental to the hard drives to be very cooled... Below 30c, the failure rate increases by quite a lot... same for above around 40c.

See https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...df03858c92.pdf

page 5 (section 3.4) and page 6 with two nice charts on it that are self explanatory.


--

I don't see the point of that mod with two 40mm fans in front. Slap a 80-92mm fan in the front of the drives pulling air from under the front of the case (there should be a channel there in most sane cases).. the airflow will be enough to keep the drives cooled enough.

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

For server drives, it makes sense to have a fan to cool them. But for regular desktop/laptop drives, I don't bother anymore either. My laptop's 20GB IBM/Hitachi Travelstar regularly runs around 45 to 50C. On a hot summer day, it peaks around 57C. One time I saw it peak at 60C. It really was that hot because I shut down the laptop and took out the HDD to check just for curiosity. It was impossible to hold.

[TELVM]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

... See https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...df03858c92.pdf ...

Interesting graph in there:


35~40C seems the best temp for HDDs.

[ncovert]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I think my hard drive temperatures are fine (around 30-35C.)

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Slight modification to my main PC, as the dual fans above were driving me insane with their rattling noise.

I actually had a similar setup, but it was a standard size for the time, in 2002, because my T-Bird 1.3 was 131 F at idle!
And it was in the 5.25" spaces under the CD-ROM drive.

Definitely not a tiny one like that.

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Here's my latest one: Unided BT-909 cordless phone gutted from its 3.6V 3AAA rechargeable battery pack and hooked to a BlackBerry 5V, 0.7A charger.


https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1388367107
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1388367107

So far so good. Battery is always showing half full (or half empty - take your pick ), but other than that, the phone is working fine and has been in service for over a week now. It saw 4 or 5 one-hour long sessions this week due to the holidays.

I modded it because I was just plain tired of dealing with dead rechargeable batteries. I think my family has gone through 1 or 2 cordless phone sets over the years. On the weekends, the phone regularly sees several 1-hour long sessions. The original batteries lasted about 3 years. Last summer, I bought some cheap replacement rechargeable batteries from eBay, but their capacity dropped quite a bit within 6 months (nothing unexpected here, though - I knew exactly what I was getting). Micro Center and Radio Shack sell some replacement batteries too, but I suspect those won't be as good as the originals. Plus, at close to $10 a pop when a new phone set can be had for not much more, I decided enough is enough. Ghetto mod time again .

And oh yeah, why the green tie on the BlackBerry charger?
- A friend of my mom gave me that charger because the cord was snapped where the cord goes out of the charger. I had to crack it open to fix the cord. Closed it all up with hot glue, but decided to put a green tie just in case.

By the way, the mod is completely reversible. The wires that are going to the phone have connectors at the end that I made out of thin steel sheet. They plug in right where the battery plugs in. If I ever get a battery again for this phone, I can just take out this mod and put back the new battery in .

[TELVM]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

^ Reminded me about my melting-modem-ghetto-cooling-system™ :

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Nice!
That's one big fan on that modem. Downloading too many torrents, perhaps?

[SeanB]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

All I did was to add 2 24V 60mm fans salvaged out of an old copier, along with another 2 larger fans (80mm) also salvaged out of the same copier. All run from the 12V rail, and run silent, plus as they are nice ball bearing fans with around 15 years operation on them with no noise they are likely to last a good few years more. The small fans move air along the bottom of the case, and the larger ones move air on the top and there is a 50mm one directed at the HDD bay. Currently sitting at 34C and has been that way for a long time ( highest recorded is 47C) so it seems to be working.

[Heihachi_73]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I fixed a Nintendo NES last night. Regardless of which game was put into it, all I ever got was a grey screen, and it was not flashing. Even after swapping and changing stuff, including the 72-pin cartridge connector from another NES, cleaning contacts and making the entire PCB spotless, still the same result - a blank grey screen (it did flash on and off with no game inserted).

A few hours later, I went over the PCB and noticed some corrosion marks which I didn't think much of to start with. However, it turned out that one of the traces between the CPU (RP2A07, as it's a PAL "Mattel" NES) and the SRAM (MCM2018AN35) had been eaten away. Traces coming from pins 4, 5 and 6 of the CPU were also corroded, however still read OK (0 ohms between solder points).

The ghetto mod: I grabbed an HB Staedtler pencil which was lying around, and scribbled over the small trace until the thing was completely silver, plugged everything in, put Tetris in and turned on the NES. Success! The copyright message come up, followed by the Tetris title screen, and it proceeded into the demo mode. I had this console for about 7 years, found on the roadside collection years ago, and it never worked since the day I found it!

Edit: For anyone interested in the caps this thing has, the tiny ones on the mainboard are all sky blue Rubycon caps (all of three electrolytic caps, the rest being small ceramic caps), and the internal PSU/AV/RF modulator board has a giant 25V 2200uF Nippon Chemi-con KME poking through a hole placed in the metalwork.

[TELVM]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Nice!
That's one big fan on that modem. Downloading too many torrents, perhaps?

To be honest the original intention was to achieve 'The Hovering Modem ghetto-mod' ... but I still have to polish a bit the Coanda effect part .

... I grabbed an HB Staedtler pencil which was lying around, and scribbled over the small trace until the thing was completely silver, plugged everything in, put Tetris in and turned on the NES. Success! ...

Pencils are awesome tools!

[Heihachi_73]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Fixed a Mega Drive II RF adapter two nights ago. Somehow one of the SMD transistors had desoldered itself and was causing the picture to disappear unless the adapter was sitting just right (usually a "technical thump" would fix it). What's worse is that the cable itself was bent around and abused in effort to attempt to get the picture working, and the yellow and white wires had finally broken inside.

Speaking of which, the three yellow, white and red wires (and common ground) are just the regular AV composite output, but instead of the RCA connectors it goes straight to the RF board via a removable 5-pin connector. The output is UHF channel 36, and only supports mono (as with most consoles with RF out, the left and right audio channels are joined together since the aerial plug only has the single pin and shield). One day I might get around to making it composite (AV) or even component (RGB) out, it's fairly easy to do as it's right there on the pins of the console's AV port. The down side is, the mini-DIN plug is a proprietary Sega item (as with Nintendo and their SNES/N64/GameCube AV plug, and Wii, PlayStation, and XBox all with their own mechanically incompatible connectors) and it's far easier to simply buy one online.

My ghetto mod before fixing this was a bunch of wires jammed into the AV port, each wire being wrapped around the pins of an AV connector pulled from a scrapped CRT TV, with regular RCA cables going straight to the TV from there.

As the AV out has common ground, only one wire for the white and red audio cables was needed to get sound to the TV, so it was four wires in total. This also worked for my 1989 Master System (which has Hang-On built in) - the Master System II only has RF out (much like the top-loader NES 2, which unfortunately wasn't released in PAL territory).

Also, I fixed another NES last night - there wasn't anything wrong with it in the first place, aside from another loose cartridge slot, but now it has the region lock bypassed so I can (hopefully) run NTSC games on it, which are a great deal cheaper to import than trying to find a "rare" or exorbitantly priced PAL game. Whether or not they play OK on this console is another thing. That said, many early games were in fact just Famicom or US NTSC games in a different cart and simply ran slower due to the PAL speed and had a different lockout chip (CIC / 10NES), in this case, the 3197D on my machines.

HES games Total Funpak and Arctic Adventure: Penguin & Seal now both work without having to piggyback another game behind them. Previously, as with all HES games, you have to plug another NES cart behind it, of which the HES game will borrow the CIC chip data from that cart as it doesn't contain one.

[Heihachi_73]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Repaired an NES AC adapter yesterday using a spare figure-8 cord. I thought this one was toast since it never worked ever since I got the thing, with an open primary being the most likely cause, but after finally opening the power brick (which has annoying rectangular-headed security screws), the primary was 153 ohms just like my SNES one (secondary was 0 ohms like the SNES one).

After cutting the plug end part way down, I now got the 153 ohm reading through the cable itself, and after hacking on the AC plug from the figure 8 cable, it now works fine, producing 11V AC without load and working nicely enough for a complete start-to-finish game of Mega Man 3.

Both the NES and SNES AC bricks are interchangeable, at least in Australia, with the model number NES-002E(AUS) (the AUS probably only references the Australian AC wall plug rather than anything else - it's a standard 220-250V AC transformer otherwise, 9V AC 1.3A). The SNES model has a metal plate with the details printed on it, whereas the older NES version has the details molded on the plastic. Apparently you can use any 9V plug with a Nintendo, AC or DC, as long as it's in tolerance (e.g. don't use a 500mA plug or it will burn out sooner rather than later), but I've never tried.

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I don't think I've posted these...

I don't really mind bare chipsets, but when they run so hot that you can't touch them even for a split second, you know a heatsink is needed. These were running about 50 to 55C when the system is idle and PC case opened!

(Before) bare Southbridge (SB400) of an ASUS A8AE-LE motherboard:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1391897638

(After) covered with a simple copper heat spreader from a PS3 GPU chip.
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1391897638

Temperatures? About 5C lower at idle. Yes, that's not much of a difference (it would help if I soldered some fins on it). But at least it takes a while to build up to that temperature, so the chipset temperature is a little more constant (always better for the BGA). Now, with a small 60 mm fan blowing just a little bit of air over it, the temperature dropped to about 40C idle and 45C max under full system load.

Here is another one I did (this time with a PS3 CPU heat spreader):


It's a SB450 Southbridge on a MSI MS-7191 motherboard. The temperatures with and without the mod were similar.

The metal "bracket" that holds the heatsink on the ASUS board is just a paperclip bent to shape. The second one is made from those metal handles from Chinese food carry out boxes since they are a bit more springy and thicker than paperclips.

Don't worry, though! Those heatsinks are pretty secure . I dropped the PC case on purpose a few times from a small distance (without the CPU heatsink, of course) to see if my ghetto mod would hold. And it did. Good enough for me .

[c_hegge]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

I can't believe I've never thought of holding on a chipset heatsink like that before. I always use thermal epoxy and stick in in position (and use a real heatsink with some fins).

[3d0]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Like c_hegge I stick it in position, never thought to use the holes in the mobo. in such a genius way. You were lucky though, the 2 holes are in the middle of the chipset and facing each other. Most motherboards don't have holes nicely placed around the NB/SB. This is my spare router Dlink Dir-600 after it had the WAN port burned, opened it up just to find the ralink rt3050f IC get so hot, so a little copper penny did the trick.
Btw. the LAN ports work ok, so I installed DD-WRT to make the LAN4 port act as WAN. Works great now!

[TELVM]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

... (it would help if I soldered some fins on it) ...

Yup, a lot. A flat plate means a thick boundary layer and hence poor heat exchange with the air. Heatsinks need fins, the taller the better.

[momaka]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

Like c_hegge I stick it in position, never thought to use the holes in the mobo. in such a genius way.

Genius? lol, okay, thank you .
The only reason I did it that way is because I just couldn't think of any other way. I mean, I know about thermal adhesive pads, but I always forget to buy some when I'm shopping online. Plus, they aren't the best for thermal transfer and I wanted to get this done the same day. Also, my local Micro Center carries Arctic Alumina Thermal Adhesive, but that stuff is $10! No way I'd spend that for a ghetto mod! Heck, I got the whole motherboard for like $15.

Speaking of which, what do YOU all use to glue heatsinks to chipsets and MOSFETs? (especially you TELVM - I've always been amazed by your CPU VRM cooling mods).

A flat plate means a thick boundary layer and hence poor heat exchange with the air. Heatsinks need fins, the taller the better.

Wow, you have a thermal camera?!
Well, at least my "heatsink" is spreading the heat evenly on the chipset. Hence why it's called a heatspreader on the PS3 GPU/CPU .

Maybe I can solder some pennies as the fins. That would be funny IMO . (but probably effective, nonetheless).

This is my spare router Dlink Dir-600 after it had the WAN port burned, opened it up just to find the ralink rt3050f IC get so hot, so a little copper penny did the trick.

Cheap, but effective. I like it .

[TELVM]

Re: The ghetto mod thread

... what do YOU all use to glue heatsinks to chipsets and MOSFETs? ...

Cyanocrylate (Super Glue).

... Wow, you have a thermal camera?!

Nope, I wish I had one . Got that pic from the web.