Case Mod - In Progress Project: Fallout Terminal, Completed 24-5-08

I want one now. The civil defense logo on the side is the sh*t!

 

Here you go!

 

If you do go looking for a meter, look for the ones made by Landers, Frary, and Clark. They're a slight bit wider than 4" so things fit better. The Victoreen Models are narrower, internals are just barely 4" wide and some have a raised bump on the inside that would need to be ground down to make anything fit. Oh yeah, model CDV-715 is what I use. There are literally tens of thousands of those out there. There's also the CDV-717 which has a removable bottom for a remote ion chamber. If I ever needed one of these for the intended purpose, that's the model I'd want. Screw walking into the fallout to get a reading. The CDV-700 is the real geiger counter version, and since it's actually useful I've stayed away from modifying any of those.

One of these nights I'll get around to pulling the board and adding the headers for the HD activity hookup. It originally came with onboard LEDs for power and activity. Those have been removed, and I'll be using the solder points to add the header.

 

awsomw idea whit the meter moving!

 

And an update for May 17th. Got the audio jacks soldered and installed.


Just Line-In and Line-Out right now, I don't really need the mic hookup on this one.

In the process of installing Windows 98. Just want to get it running something while I work on the "real" software install. Found some issues to deal with.
- It does not boot from USB at all, so I had to hook up a CD drive to the onboard IDE
- With a slimline DVD drive, the 10 watt wall wart didn't have enough juice to copy files from the CD to the compact flash card. System kept rebooting.

I was able to boot off the CD, then fdisk and format the flash card. But then I had to shut down and copy the installation cabs over using another PC. So far so good. Starts, boots off the flash card, and I'm about halfway through the 98 installation. Slow, but the flash card I'm using is also very slow. Once 98 is installed, I'm going to do some performance testing, then probably clone the flash card onto a faster one and see if that makes a difference. The next step will probably be to install Win2K, just to see if it makes a negative difference. Rumor is it may run better, but we'll see. Eventually I'll throw together an embedded or stripped down XP install, depending on what drivers I can find. I know the audio drives are iffy at best under XP. From there I'll probably start messing with flavors of Linux, find what gives the best performance for the thin client and basic browsing tasks while still supporting all the hardware. That's the tough part right now, the MediaGX/Geode platform has had three different owners and none of them did much in the way of support.

Oh yeah, got the HD activity circuit wired up, too. At first I thought it wasn't working, but after getting everything put back together the needle started twitching with any access of the flash card. Creepy thing is that the ONLY noise this box makes is the needle moving. There are no other moving parts, and the casing muffles or blocks any component squeals that might occur. I'll get some video of the needle bouncing one of these days, but feel free to enjoy these videos from my HD cases and a remote power/reset console I built a few months back.

Videos of meter needles showing HD activity
Original firewire HD case
USB 2.0 HD case
Original transferring to USB HD case
Control Console

 

Managed to get 98 installed and working. Going to have to redo my audio cables, noisy as can be and in need of shielding.

Also started messing with Windows 2000 and remembered why I didn't use that the last time I played with one of these boards. Found all the drivers, got everything setup, then hosed it all with the installation of the audio drivers. Now it bluescreens on boot.

Tomorrow I'll mess with a new, faster flash card and see if I can get 2k running with audio and NOT a bluescreen. Maybe even mess with XP, but the drivers for that are even worse.

 

my physics teacher in high school had 12 of these in his class room. he collected them from schools in our area when they got rid of the ones they had been issued during the cold war. i should have snagged one from him. that man had and knew EVERY thing.

and after that little side bar i love the case this was a brilliant idea

 

I wonder how many of these were really made, I've seen them everywhere. There's an Area 51 nut that's been on History Channel and Discovery that has one on the shelf behind his desk, as if it's some kind of high-tech instrument. Guess it might have been back in 1962-63 when most were built.

This one is pretty much complete except for software. Now I just need to take some glamour shots and video of the meter in action.

And regarding software, I've had 98, 2k, and even XP running but can only get audio working without crashes in 98. Still need to make an attempt with Linux, as soon as I find a distro that doesn't need a bunch of tweaking to work with the goofy CPU/chipset. The Geode/MediaGX is a sort of mishmash of 486 and Pentium architecture and also uses the CPU for most of the video and audio processing. That said, with all drivers loaded, 256MB of PC133, and a fast flash card for the HD, it's a pretty decent system for browsing the web and only uses about 10 watts of power.

 

And I'm calling this one complete, so here are the final photos as well as a video.

Still fighting with the software side, but that's pretty uninteresting stuff. Maybe I'll snap a few more pics when I get this on the terminal server, we'll see. I do have matching peripherals from the Pentium-M system I built a few years back, so that might be interesting to see it all in action.

Anyway, onto the pictures.

The boring front side


The back side with ports



Internals.




And the video. 1 minute, ~4MB, with sound so you have an idea of what noise it doesn't make. There's some background noise from a ceiling fan and two other running PCs, but the only noise this system makes comes from the needle and the onboard speaker. Well, maybe the switch if you want to count that. Video is power plug in, power on, then booting until the time it crashes during the boot of Windows 2000, then shutting it back off.

Click me for WMV video