linuxworks
Member of the Trade: Sercona Audio
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2008
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the last few days I've been working on this gadget to help computer power supplies cope better with power on surges (having lots of drives all turn on at the same time is never good for your PSU).
today I noticed there were more than the normal amount of hits on my photo page. turns out the guys at MAKE featured my invention:
Make: Online : SPINmaster, a DIY staggered hard disk spin-up manager
basically, its an arduino that sequences a bunch of relays and slowly brings the drives online at power-up time. after the last drive is up the reset 'button' is released and the system is allowed to finish POST.
after the system boots, the user could connect to this board via USB and turn any of the relays (drives) on/off. yes, its dangerous but it could be useful as long as you unmount ('eject') the drive before you spin it down via the relays
the relays are DPDT and simply switch the 5v and 12v lines to the drives. its just that simple.
since many of us have NAS boxes and these NAS systems typically have underpowered PSUs, this device might help avoid the 'PSU pop' I'm hearing more and more about these days.
its all open source code and hardware. use it if you want. if there's interest I could get pc boards made.
today I noticed there were more than the normal amount of hits on my photo page. turns out the guys at MAKE featured my invention:
Make: Online : SPINmaster, a DIY staggered hard disk spin-up manager
basically, its an arduino that sequences a bunch of relays and slowly brings the drives online at power-up time. after the last drive is up the reset 'button' is released and the system is allowed to finish POST.
after the system boots, the user could connect to this board via USB and turn any of the relays (drives) on/off. yes, its dangerous but it could be useful as long as you unmount ('eject') the drive before you spin it down via the relays
the relays are DPDT and simply switch the 5v and 12v lines to the drives. its just that simple.
since many of us have NAS boxes and these NAS systems typically have underpowered PSUs, this device might help avoid the 'PSU pop' I'm hearing more and more about these days.
its all open source code and hardware. use it if you want. if there's interest I could get pc boards made.
