nuxx.net – Page 148 – Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

SiI3124 Not Working… Right

Published May 5, 2008

Top view of the Koutech PSA421 on the antistatic bag. It has four internal single lane SATA ports.

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday today. You all made me smile lots. (Yes, I do share a birthday with Karl Marx, and yes, I am now 30.)

I received the SiI3124-based disk controller mentioned earlier, but it didn’t wish me a happy birthday. In fact, it just didn’t work as I hoped. For some reason its on-board option ROM isn’t starting up when the rest of the computer does, so it’s not initializing the disks and making the main BIOS aware of their existence. This prevents me from booting off of them. FreeBSD can talk to the disks on it just fine, but without the BIOS it’s not useful to me.

When I tried the card in my MAME cabinet and it works fine there, so I think something like the following is occurring: The on-board SATA / RAID controller is a SiI3114, and when I disable this via the BIOS, perhaps this somehow disables the SiI3124? Or, perhaps when the controller is enabled, the option ROM from one is interfering with the other? After all, the SiI3114 BIOS still loads and displays. I did also try changing the PCI enumeration order and tried the cards in other PCI-X slots and the lone PCI slot, and none of that produced positive results. The SiI3114 always enumerates first (or not at all?).

As a test I put a classic Adaptec AHA-2940UW (can you believe this card is more than 10 years old at this point?) card in the box and its option ROM displayed just fine. So, the motherboard seems to handle disk controllers in slots, just not this one.

Instead of the SiI3124-based card I really would like a 3ware 9550SXU-4LP, but its $319.99 price tag is a bit hard to stomach. Maybe I’ll just return the card and stick with the onboard controller and software RAID.

Oh, and if you want to see them, there are more photos of the Koutech PSA421 in banstyle.nuxx.net here on page 3 of my gallery.

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Updated Resume

Published May 2, 2008

Page 1 of the latest copy of my resume, updated on 02-May-2008, just after midnight.

Today after getting home from work I decided that I would finally update my resume. It wasn’t updated for any particular reason, but I felt that I should condense it a bit, incorporate the work I’ve been doing for the past six months or so, and generally tighten it up. So, I did.

While I still need to put together the plaintext copy (which shouldn’t be too difficult), and barring any last minute quirks or tweaks that might be needed, it’s done. If you would like to see it, here’s a PDF copy: steve_vigneau_resume_02may2008.pdf

If you are one of those folks who just doesn’t like PDFs, here’s it in two 150dpi PNGs: Page 1 · Page 2

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Southern Tier’s Back Burner

Published April 29, 2008

Souther Tier's Back Burner Barley Wine poured into a glass.

Things have been a bit boring around here lately, with me working at my job, working on the new server, riding my bike, and trying to relax a bit, so I just thought I’d post this photo of Souther Tier‘s Back Burner, a decent (and quite hoppy) barleywine which I drank while watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Danielle on Sunday night.

Today I got GEOM-based disk mirroring working on banstyle.nuxx.net, but in doing so I realized that the on-board SiI3114 controller only supports SATA/150 (aka SATA I) and thusly no NCQ, which disappointed me. To remedy this I ordered part number N82E16816104007 from Newegg.com, a Koutech PSA421 4-Channel Serial ATA & Serial ATA II 64-bit PCI Host Controller which appears to be a reference (or very standard) implementation of the SiI3124 PCI/PCI-X to 4 Port SATA300 chipset. This should fit in the one usable slot in the case and provide the SATA interface that I really want. I just wish it’d arrive sooner.

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Loud and Fast

Published April 26, 2008

The two Opterons 885 CPUs, seated nicely in the sockets.

Yesterday I received very kindly sent FedEx package containing some spare computer hardware a friend of mine had, a pair of Opteron 885 dual-core 2.6GHz CPUs and 8GB of registered RAM, to be used in my new server.

I’ve been having some problems with it all, but I’m not quite sure what the cause is yet. With all 8 DIMMs fitted the machine kept hanging while installing FreeBSD 7.0. Per my friend’s suggestion I’m trying the install again with only one DIMM per CPU installed, as he said he’s seen problems with a fully kitted out machine installing some OS’, for som reason. For the first half of the memory things have gone just fine, so I’ll finish running through the pieces two at a time. After those tests I’ll run Memtest86+ on discreet pairs of DIMMs, then on the full 8GB.

I might also install XP on it so that I can run SiSoftware Sandra on it for a while, as it’s really good at eating a machine alive.

Unfortunately I can only run these tests during the day because the server is simply too loud to do otherwise. I measured it at 74dB while standing next to it at the keyboard, and the noise seems to be three distinct tones (low, mid, and high) caused by the different fans in the box. It’s really not much different from a siren. The noise is enough to bother me a bit while just sitting around the house doing other things, so trying to sleep while it is running would be just awful.

Oh, and some quick testing last night showed that it ran most things in openssl speed faster than my Mac Pro. Hopefully I’ll be able to run the whole DB from RAM.

Hmm, I just dropped the full 8GB back in there, turned on PowerNow! and ACPI 2.0 and I’m building ImageMagick to see how things go. While that runs I think I’m going to go for a bike ride.

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Trail at River Bends

Published April 24, 2008

I actually managed to leave work early enough today that I was able to go for a nice bike ride after work. It was only 1:16 and just over 16 miles long, but it felt good. I made my way from home over to River Bends Park in Shelby Township, then headed down the foot / bike trail through the woods. This is a 2.5 mile winding trail with some nice hills, sharp turns, and interesting things to look at. I found that the tires I have are pretty okay for this sort of trail riding, except on parts of the path. Oh, and I also found that moving quickly through a swarm of bugs while breathing heavily through one’s mouth is not particularly pleasant.

Since I’m uncomfortably stinky, and because I finally stopped at Trader Joe’s on the way home and purchased more deodorant (I’ve been out for a week), I think I’ll go shower. Oh, and my new server was actually delivered today, so I think I’ll unpack it and grab photos of it post shower. I also might try a new (to me) Southern Tier beer called Back Burner, but I’m not sure… Maybe I’ll just let that wait for tomorrow. I’ve already got enough things I still want to get done tonight.

Oh, want the KMZ of today’s ride? It’s here: 24-Apr-2008.kmz, and here it is in Google Maps. Please excuse the two tracks. Google Earth can’t merge tracks (I imagine there is a good reason for this), my GPS decreased the resolution when saving the current log to a file, and it seems that multiple Active Logs had to be created to deal with the number of points I was generating today. Oh, yeah, I decided to try doing one-per-second points which, as you can see, has resulted in a much smoother route plot. It’s too bad this relatively short ride filled 49% of the memory on the GPS. Maybe I really do need an SD based GPS data logger…

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/mode +w #beer

Published April 23, 2008

Victory's Hop Wallop poured into a glass. It's a somewhat syrupy, very hoppy beer. I like it.

Tonight I ended up staying at work until about 8:20pm helping a coworker out with something. It’s not set and he’s on vacation tomorrow, so I’ll end up working on it too. Ah well.

Since I got home too late to go ride my bike I ended up boxing up Ivan’s P3, making a frozen pizza, then watching some TiVo’d stuff and WTVS-HD before wandering back up here to my computer. So, why did I box up the P3? Well, remember the failing PLED post? Yep, it’s bad. While the first one didn’t display very well, the second doesn’t display at all.

I had actually emailed the pictures of the questionable display (1, 2) to the tech support people at Crystalfontz to see if what I was seeing really is indicative of a failing PLED. One of the tech support people replied, confirming that it is what I thought, and suggesting a replacement display. If you’d like to read the whole thread between the tech support person and I, it’s archived as a PNG here.

So, now Ivan is sorting out grabbing a new LCD and then I’ll get back to work on his P3. For now I’ve boxed it up and it’s sitting in a safe place, above ground level, not below any water pipes.

My next (current?) project is now a set of PCBs similar to the RS232 to Eaton Leonard Level Shifter boards which I did last year, but instead accepting ~7VDC – ~40VDC (or straight 5VDC) for the power, with the conversion being handled by a reference implementation of a switching supply. (This is the supply whose ripple is shown here.) The parts are ordered for the first run of them, I just need to wait until they arrive, confirm the footprints, order the PCBs, test, and build.

But for now? I rest.

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Tyan Transport GX28 (B2882)

Published April 22, 2008

I just hit submit at Newegg.com to complete the purchase of a Tyan Transport GX28 server with a Tyan Thunder K8S Pro (S2882). As item number N82E16856152008 the barebones server was only $409.99, with $31.24 shipping. Thanks to a friend helping me out with some RAM and some disks which I’ll be able to make redundant I’ll likely end up with a 1U server with a pair of Opteron 800-series CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and mirrored 500GB SATA disks.

This all brings about an interesting question of where to host the new box. I’ve discussed this before, and the more I think about it the more I want to get my box out of Waveform. Things are working fine for now, but I question what will happen if or when the box does start to have problems. The provider I’m most seriously looking at would run $100/mo

So, now I just have to wait for things to be shipped and delivered and then I can start assembling it all. I imagine I’ll let it cook for a few weeks to a month before installing it. It’ll be running FreeBSD 7.0, likely with a custom kernel and world rebuilt specifically for the CPU. I think I’ll also want to give the new ULE scheduler a go, particularly after seeing this presentation (PDF) about where FreeBSD is going.

I’ll continue to stick with lighttpd, although I hope that the OpenSSL bug in 1.4.19 is fixed in ports soon. Disks will likely be mirrored with gmirror, although I will investigate the on-board hardware RAID. I’ll probably also stick with MySQL for the db and Postfix for mail. Basically, nothing will change in that regard.

I may opt to eliminate some individuals I currently host from the box, mostly because I never have contact with them. I don’t mind hosting people, but when the sites sit mostly unused and I have almost no contact with the individuals who use them (except when there are problems, of course), it’s a bit frustrating to keep up maintenance on apps running on the sites. Also, this new provider has stricter limits on bandwidth (1mb, 95^th percentile), and I need to be a bit more careful about how it is used. Anyway, if I’m opting to remove your site from hosting I’ll contact you outside of here and provide you with a chance to get your data.

For now I wait, then build. This could be pretty nifty. Oh, and the colocation provider offers IPv6 at no extra charge, so that ought to be fun to play with as well.

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Failing PLED?

Published April 22, 2008

Last night I made quite a bit of progress on Ivan’s P3, getting it up and running, but I did run into a few problems. First, as can be seen above, the PLED which came with the enclosure seems to be failing. It will either display no text, one line of text, or (rarely) both lines, and every time pixels seem small and dim, with the edges of the display fading to nothing. Only a power cycle of the P3 seems to (re-)activate non-working parts of the display. As the P3 still functions even when nothing appears on the display, I believe that it’s actually the display elements of the PLED which is failing.

Here is the PLED in my P3 from 2006, and when it is compared with these two images (1, 2) of the PLED from Ivan’s P3, it seems pretty obvious that something is wrong.

Thankfully there was a spare PLED in the package of parts I received, so tonight I’m going to try that one instead.

Second, I’m not happy with the cables I made for connecting the tempo and data pots to the mainboard, so I’m going to remake them. The tempo pot connection seems to be a bit flaky, so I’m not sure the pins are properly seated in the connector. The cables are also short enough that they are difficult to connect, so I’ll probably redo them with braided 24 gauge hookup wire or something like that.

Finally, the v1.5 mainboard construction notes indicate that when the P3 is being set up for MIDI sync, D2 and D3 should be replaced with 220pF caps in order to add a bit of extra capacitance to the lines to work around false triggers. I didn’t have any 220pF parts, and none came with the kit, so I instead used 330pF parts. I don’t believe this will be a problem, but I made a post to the analogue-sequencer group asking for confirmation.

Beyond those three problems, the build is going quite well. I’m very happy with how both the step board and keypad came out. The IDC ribbon cables, their connection, and power input stuff also worked out great.

I was also able to get the latest bootloader and v3 firmware on the P3, which means that as soon as the other issues are sorted out I can get the MemX and latest v4 beta installed. After that it’ll just be time to install the knobs, test it out, and ship it back to Ivan.

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Good Progress on Ivan’s P3

Published April 21, 2008

Detail of the bank of 12 resistors in the lower right corner of the mainboard PCB. I like how these look once fitted.

Today I made a bunch of progress on the Sequentix P3 I’m currently building. Before today I’d only checked out the parts to be sure most of them were there, looked over everything, and did some general setup to be sure assembly could progress. Today I started fitting pieces, and I’m definitely more than half done at this point.

Because this P3 uses a slightly older board set (v1.5) I had to use this set of older DIY Sequentix P3 directions, but this didn’t prove to be too difficult. While I was able to complete the mainboard, I had to make some slight modifications. It seems that the v1.5 P3 board set only supports MIDI sync or DIN sync. One must read carefully through the main board and IO board pages to figure out what extra components to add, which to leave out, and what to do differently. In short, I had to leave out some parts from the mainboard and fit two capacitors where diodes once went and add in an extra pullup resistor on the bottom of the board.

The two capacitors on the top of the board are intended to add a bit of capacitance to the input lines of the PIC which handles MIDI sync. It is suggested that 220 pF parts be used, but as I didn’t have any of them I fitted some spare 330 pF parts. I don’t think this will cause any problems, and hopefully it won’t. The extra resistor on the bottom of the board is to help work around slow rise times on the MIDI output caused by additional capacitance brought about by the inclusion of RFI filters on the IO board.

I’m hoping to be able to power it up for the first time either tomorrow or Tuesday. How late I get home from work will determine how much I’m able to get done each night.

Here’s a few more photos of parts from tonight:

· Completed Mainboard w/o ICs: Top / Bottom
· Completed upper and lower pot boards.
· Pots for the P3, plus spares, with lugs removed and thick 1/4″ washers fitted for spacing.
· Completed IO board, set up for MIDI sync.
· Completed function switch board.
· Twelve resistors.
· Incomplete keypad board with 1N4148 diodes fitted.

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GPS Logger and Bike Riding

Published April 20, 2008

As shown earlier and resulting some KMZ files, I will frequently clamp my GPS to the handlebar of my bike and log where I’ve ridden. The problem I’m finding is batteries… The older Garmin eTrex Legend that I have will chew through a pair of disposable AA in an hour and a half, and good rechargables don’t last beyond three. This is short enough that it’s starting to become a hassle to use the thing. On top of that, dumping the data into a computer sucks down even more battery.

I’m thinking that my next electronics project should be a low power GPS logger that either writes to some local flash, or to a microSD (or whatnot) card. I think that one of the random modules from SparkFun, a PIC, a off the shelf FAT library, a FT232R could make it all work nicely. It could recharge via USB and have a couple basic buttons and LEDs for resetting saved logs or whatnot. All I’d need to do is ensure that it’s in a standard format (shouldn’t be hard) and GPSBabel will be able to make it anything else I’d want.

Now, since I just rode ~21 miles, I’m going to go shower then get back to work on Ivan’s P3.

Oh, and look at this: FTDI’s USB to USB null modem cable (PDF Flyer). I could really use one of those too.

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