Saturday, December 12th, 2020
Still no Digital Mavica parts so today, I dug into the PCs
and monitors I picked up on Friday. The digital signage unit was
the most interesting for me, as I haven't messed with any MiniITX
parts before. It reminds me of a Raspberry Pi, if someone were to
supersize it and make it x86 compatible. The board is a Zotac
H67ITX-C-E, which is an LGA1155 model with one 16x PCIe slot, one
mPCIe slot, two DDR3 slots in dual channel configuration, and six
SATA 3.0 slots. It came with a single stick of RAM, an i3-2100
CPU, and an mPCIe WiFi module, which was connected to the
backplane but was missing antennae. Most interesting was the PSU
it came with - something called a 'picoPSU,' it's a 24-pin ATX-
compliant adapter that connects to a 12V AC/DC power brick, and
it is absolutely tiny, smaller than a deck of cards.
Unfortunately, I don't have the intended adapter, and after
looking up the specsheet to check, it looks like all the power
bricks I have on hand with the correct barrel are all way too
high powered for it.
I did a complete teardown so I could find all the part
numbers for everything, and then built it back up for testing
with a couple sticks of Corsair XMS3 1600MHz DDR3 and the 400W
PSU from my LGA775 WinXP machine. I also grabbed a spare SATA DVD
drive and installed the signage unit's original 2.5" HDD as well
as the other two SATA HDDs I picked up yesterday, and connected
it to one of the monitors I got at the same time.
The signage unit appears to have had Win7 installed when it
was in use, but now it immediately bluescreens upon boot - this
is actually a good sign, because it means the HDD is being
detected and read, so the SATA port is fine and the HDD at least
has a chance of being okay. I rebooted, and jumped into the BIOS
settings to change the boot device to the DVD drive, and booted
up a Linux Mint Maya DVD - this seemed like the easiest version
for this machine to run that I had on hand, ready to go. I
checked out the contents of the signage unit's HDD, and it seems
that immediately upon boot it is trying to reach an external
server for information as to what to display on the sign, so that
may be the reason for the blue screen. At any rate, the few files
that were on the device appeared to be fine, so I reformatted all
three drives, which went smoothly.
Having verified the HDDs, the mobo, the CPU, and the monitor
were all good, I tore everything back down to put into storage
until I can come up with a good project for this stuff, and moved
on to the Compaq Presario tower. Normally, I would try to salvage
the tower case itself, but this one was in really bad shape,
broken in spots and extremely gross all over. The slide-out
design of the Presario case kept the worst of it from the inside,
but everything was still covered in thick layers of dust and
nicotine.
Despite this, there were no obvious signs of heat damage and
the caps all looked to be intact, so I went ahead and gutted the
machine, minus the breakout board for the front panel LEDs and
power button, and the PSU. On account of the dust, part numbers
were not readily available and will have to wait until I clean
everything up tomorrow, but the mobo is a Socket 7 with three RAM
slots, four PCI slots, one ISA slot, and USB support through the
back panel and a breakout board which includes a game/midi port.
That USB breakout board not-with-standing, nothing on the mobo
appears to require proprietary parts or connectors, and it seems
to be of standard ATX dimensions. Hopefully, testing tomorrow
will go well and I can use some of these parts to scratch the
retro-build itch I've had lately, haha.
-Prokyonid