28 January 2014

28th of January

Farm news
We had a few hot days and then the Australia Day log weekend cooled off a bit. I managed to get a couple of days use out of the GPUgrid crunchers. It's been fairly warm during the day, so I am crunching at night. That is except for the Raspberry Pi's.

There is a parcel waiting down at the post office I suspect it's the 5 volt fans. Looks like I might be doing some soldering on the weekend. My initial thought was to wire them up to the GPIO pins on the Pi but being worried about frying the poor thing I might just grab an old USB cable and wire it up directly to a USB connector which I can then run off a power supply, at least until I can find out how much current the fans draw. I might also want to throw a resistor or 2 in line to reduce the fan speed as 4000 RPM is probably overkill and noisy.


Asteroids project news
They are doing another server upgrade, RAID disks again I believe, so they shut down on Monday and won't be black online for at least 3 days. They also ran out of work on Sunday, probably because everybody was trying to get enough work to see them through the outage.

18 January 2014

18th of January

Farm news
Not much to report, the farm has been off due to the heat, well all except the Raspberry Pi's who are still going. We're in the middle of a heat wave as it's our summer.

Speaking of the Pi's I have ordered a couple of small (60mm) 5 volt fans. The idea is to cut a hole in the top of the case and mount the fan on the top of the case. I am planning on powering them off the 5v GPIO pins.


Parallella news
They had a couple of companies inject some funds and as such are able to continue to make the boards. At last report they were up to donor number 90. At the moment they are waiting on boards and other components to become available. The next batch of boards are expected around the 28th of January (too late for Australia Day) and there will be approximately 1000, so it's still going to be a couple of months before I see mine. One of the moderators at Einstein@home has received his so there might be some apps available by the time I get mine.