Day 2: Donald the PC

Tour!

Today we got into the swing of things

Had a quick tour of a few secret rooms and saw all sorts of gadgetry. Met two newly delivered industrial quality flight cases to carry AR stuff about the School without it breaking (2013's version of the cardboard box), and a TV that randomly invented its own remote controller events. That, or someone was hiding inside one of the flight cases with a spare remote playing a suspicious prank..

Industrial quality flight case. Pretty smooth wheels

Saw the original Augmented Reality system in action, noting the need for more robust marker cards. The current marker cards consist of printed codes on an A4 sheet of paper attached to plastic boards. Printing directly to the boards is very costly, so some innovation will be required here (one of the later tasks).

The current system is actually pretty smooth:
A webcam supplies a video feed that is passed through the AR program and the result is displayed on a large LCD screen. Special physical marker cards are recognised by the program, and it overlays 3D models when and where it recognises one of them. So you stick a marker card into the camera view and see interesting 3D stuff appearing on the screen within the real world video feed! The result is impressively smooth, with some  excessively detailed models.

Donald

The rest of the afternoon was spent troubleshooting Donald, a pretty enthusiast level PC from yesteryear that got tired of booting. Surprisingly the hardware was decent, nforce 650i chipset, Asus GTX560 TI DCUII, OCZ PSU, fancy CPU cooler, OCZ RAM, and all inside an Antec 900. Sort of machine that belongs in a gamers cave rather than in a university! Or at least if it was the year 2008, everything apart from the GPU is a bit old in the tooth.

Troubleshooting notes

Symptoms: lights on graphics card, motherboard and case all light up, all the fans start spinning, but nothing appears on the screen. The mouse or keyboard don't get any juice (no scroll lock caps lock lights work, and the optical sensor on the mouse doesn't light up).

Tried resetting the bios and disconnecting every addon that didn't need a screwdriver (sata devices etc). Removed the single/dual SLI selector, removed the reset switch pins coming from the case, still no difference at all. The motherboard doesn't even get to the self-test - removed the RAM and restarted and it made zero difference, no warning beeps or anything. Seems to all intents and purposes like a faulty motherboard.

Specced up a replacement motherboard CPU and RAM for Donald, a new lease of life for the ageing machine! A state-of-the-art AMD FX 6300 (6 cores) CPU, 8GB of DDR3 ram and a 970X chipset motherboard should provide future-proof performance that matches the current graphics card well. All for £225 from Scan.co.uk.

If this were my machine the next potential upgrade would be an SSD, but that's overkill for the kind of use Donald will see.