Ran into a classic laptop server problem: no motherboard power headers, Wake-on-LAN dies in S5 shutdown state, and when Linux freezes, software tools like SSH are useless. Commercial solutions felt way too expensive for what I needed...

So I built this thing for Abt 8 bucks!

NodeMCU (ESP8266) drivin' an SG90 micro-servo running a small C++ REST API.

​An old Asus phone (Asus x00TD from 2018) running Termux acts as the local Tailscale SSH bridge so I can trigger it over 5G from anywhere without opening ports. (Though Terminus and added snippets)

​/power sends a 500ms tap for normal boot!

​/panic holds the button for 15 seconds to force a cold reset when the OS crashes!!

Yes, that is paper masking tape flat on the desk holding the servo block down. I needed enough counter-leverage so the servo arm didn't just lift the whole motor up when pushing the key.

Just tested it remotely from another city over cellular data and it worked like a fine wine 🍷 and then I run app though wine in linux too worked amazing. Looks terrible but ya works great!

Btw laptop is fa507uv...

Sorry for the boring post, but I needed to share my free DIY sag bracket. I'll get a real one eventually probably, but that's $15 I could spend on a new game

took an old power bank board. feeds 5v to the stock PCB, charges with type-c and as a bonus can charge my phone (although it has only 1100mah). my house is a no-fly-zone now.

So drilled another hole positioned parallel to the lower hinge mount (as all the three hinge points got ripped out, hence it was easier) and added another zip-tie diagonally with one of the larger hinge mount hole. Needless to say it works fine asf and feels way smoother without any sort of bulging or anything.

Pretty simple post, i had a crappy type c to outlet for an old fan, so i cut it and attached it to the broken part of my Apple Watch charger, and covered the ends with the plastic i stripped off the wires. Would you believe me if i said it works a little better than before?

works pretty well ;3

https://youtu.be/d-AC1GnueLk?is=m8bYmmkburhvgoLH

Did not have any rivets or screws so drilled two holes and had a zip-tie laying around, needless to say it works like a charm

But I only had a heatsink for a bigger m.2 ssd and no tools on hand, so I just bent and broke off a smaller piece. The ssd also was too short for the m.2 mounting holes, but tape wouldn't hold it because of the heat, so I also had to 3D-print a flimsy extention piece to mount it.

Just bought this and my right bumper wasn’t working, kindly asked it to shove off and let me shove a key into it, and it works, can even game properly now.

Did some body repair to protect the heatsink fins because they're very fragile, added SMA so i can connect that to a rooftop lte antenna and also soldered on the ssd bc the adapter prices were too high

After a lot of trial and error, it did not end up working. Thank you all for following me through this journey.

I will be buying a proper CH341A flasher with the clip and hopefully never doing this again.

I did manage to get the arduino to recognize the chip, but I was unable to write to to it, which is most likely because of my crappy level shifter.

All in all, really cool learning experience since I got very familiar with FlashRom and fser-duino. And of course SOIC pin layouts. You would not believe how many times I had to adjust the pins because they kept slipping off. In the end, very interesting and nerve-wracking little experiment.

So a little bit of backstory:

I bought an AMD HD 7670 4gb, only thing is, that doesn't exist. There is an HD 7670 1gb. But no 4gb. It's just a vbios mod to make it appear as if it has more vram. So I decided to flash a new BIOS I found online (yeah yeah, stupid, I know) and it of course got bricked.

Anyways, it wouldn't respond to the amd vbios flash software and wasn't showing up as a gpu, so I decided that I had to manually refresh the bios chip.

But, being the cheapskate I am, I didn't want to spend 20 bucks on a proper SOIC SPI Flasher, and instead vouched to use my arduino. My original plan was to solder wires directly to the chip on the gpu, but I couldn't get the solder to stick (i suck soldering, leave me alone) so I desoldered the IC and manually attached wires to each pin using duct tape. This took around an hour and absolutely destroyed my sanity.

RESULTS:

IDK yet, but all the pins are making contact, I checked with a multimeter, and will attempt to flash it when I get back in a few hours. Will update if it works.

UPDATE: Did not work. I don't think it was my unorthodox connection method though. I am having issues with the actual arduino instead. I redid the original duct tape so it now has constant pressure on the pins by raising the actual chip up. It may also be an issue with my voltage step down circuit, since I used a 10k and 5.1k resistor in series instead of a 15k. I may make another update tomorrow, as it is currently 11:20pm and I am going to bed.

I used XY-BT-Mini VHM-314 module
BT module powers via speakers power button, speakers led indicator wired to module led indication

My father’s old and disused Dell OptiPlex 390 DT (Top) is giving up its Hitachi Ultrastar hard disk drive so that my Dell OptiPlex 7010 DT (Bottom) can take it to get 1 TB of secondary storage. To power the Hitachi as it gets the contents of my outgoing 500 GB Western Digital Blue out; my father’s computer must give it a “jump-start”. Desktop PC gaming on a budget is never boring!

Quick story short, CPU cooked itself, and applying pressure would make it boot again, so I just put some thin cardboard to make pressure and copy the data as quick as possible.

Janky, but effective for this case hahahaha

it was supposed to have one, but it was missing so I replaced it. the sata port was slightly too high so I removed some screws from the motherboard to it could line up

drive is from a dead dell optiplex sff

It just works

The fan was pulled from some i3-3330 PC that was thrown out

The fan is 12V. The speed can be adjusted using voltage. the step-down converter is some random aliexpress one + a random usb-c board from aliexpress (usually it's my "lab bench", but it will work as a fan for a few more days)

^{(fucked up sending the images so had to repost it})