Day 35: Donald's PSU

Doing what I do best, troubleshooting faulty PC's

Donald wouldn't start up today. Power comes through, everything starts whirring, but nothing comes on screen. At first I thought it was the fact that I hadn't used all 9 motherboard standoffs when installing the motherboard, and now some parts were shorting out. So I removed the mobo, stole some standoffs from an old Pentium IV PC nearby (I'm sure no one is going to use it...) and reinstalled the motherboard with standoffs all in place. But it still didn't work.

I checked RAM, checked drives, checked graphics card, and noticed that the red CPU led was lighting up and staying lit. Normally it would go off when the mobo gets past the CPU test. These little led's are a wonderful feature of this Asus M5A97 motherboard, allowing the user to instantly know where the board is failing as the PC boots up. There are led's for CPU, RAM, VGA (graphics card), and boot device.

Anyhow the CPU was either broken or not getting enough power. I checked the power cables to the CPU and to the motherboard but still didn't work.

I then removed the entire motherboard and removed absolutely everything except the RAM, the CPU, and two power cables from the PSU - the 8 pin CPU power and the 24pin ATX motherboard power. Didn't work, same problem with CPU led lighting up.

I then opened Walter and used the 8pin and 24pin cables from his PSU, and boom it all worked!

So we ordered a new BeQuiet! Purepower L8 600W (only one of the best most reliable PSU's you can buy) from Scan which should be here soon.

Getting AR up on Walter

Moved the development to Walter in the meantime, luckily all the code was uploaded to our BitBucket version control system so I had the latest code ready to go.

To install the AR on a new PC it involves installing all the component software like Visual Studio, XNA, Alvar, OpenCV etc, and also Cygwin (for the shell scripting part of it).

Cygwin, installed openssh, imagemagick (both), and lftp.

Aaaaaaand it looks like lftp doesn't work over WiFi. Oooooh deary.

Welp, there goes the fantastic lftp mirror command I liked so much!

Finished off the Automated GUI and it works great! Only thing left now is to get Lowry Demo to automatically load new heads, should be a cinch! Oh and also to find a replacement for lftp mirror. It really is a shame that it doesn't work over WiFi, because it is just so ideal for what we want.

And I also need to add exception handling for when a build fails. (VERY IMPORTANT HAMZA DON'T FORGET)

LaRue

You guessed it, a new PC! It's an old Dell T3400 workstation called Atlas50 or something, which for some reason has 8GB's of RAM in it (!). It has a decent dual core CPU and an 80GB hard drive so it isn't ancient. It's a real pain trying to get drivers to install on it though, the darn thing doesn't recognise USB devices (because the chipset drivers hasn't been installed) and I can't connect to the internet to download them (because the ethernet driver hasn't been installed). Gads. Well it shall have to be done on Monday then.

Till Monday!