Projects

There is an expansion on my Amiga labelled SCRAM. It plugs into the side expansion slot. The manual is available for download here.

The most important is to learn stuff!

I want to build a device which can be used as a replacement for the Amiga 500 floppy drive.

Credits:

techtravels.org: My first stop when starting this project. A ton of information and code available. Also Keith has been extremely helpful and explained a lot to me, most of it recorded on this page.

tnt23 megadrive: A project by Tim, similar to what I am trying to do. Tim has a lot of info hidden in the techtravels.org comments.

Status:

I have bought some kit, learnt a bit about stuff and set up this page. Hopefully programming something this week.

Pages:

My Amiga 500 collection

Details about my kit

Information about MFM/how data is stored on disks

Floppy drive interface

Timings and numbers

AVR, Ardunio and SD cards

I want to create a NAS. I could buy one but I am technical enough to be able to create one. I've never needed a NAS before, I'm very happy to use a USB stick to move files.

I need a NAS that can store all my data, including the many many photos we have. I also want to upload the data on the NAS to a remote site.

Requirements:

* Cheap

* Powers off when not needed

* Easy to power on remotely (IE Wake on LAN)

* Can be used from Mac and Windows

Current Hardware:

* 1x 1TB Seagate SATA disk

* 1x 500GB Seagate SATA disk

* 1x 320GB Seagate SATA disk

* 1x 120GB Seagate SATA disk

* Old AMD XP 3200 PC working

If all goes well I think I might do a smaller sized version using the very cheap Gigabyte GA-D510UD mini-itx board (only $115). It has 4 SATA ports and is using an INTEL Atom 510 processor. I can salvage RAM from the old PC above (or buy some more).

I will be using Debian as the operating system. I did consider Windows but it doesn't play too well with Macs. Also I know a lot of linux scripting and administration that I should be fine.

Issues:

* Debian is slow to start up.

* Solutions:

Use XFS file system.

Look into using SSD or some other media for OS booting (lots of reads but few writes).

Also See:

http://www.debian-administration.org/article/Booting_Debian_in_14_seconds

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=31275

http://www.linuxtutorialblog.com/post/tutorial-disabling-unused-daemons-...

http://wiki.debian.org/BootProcessSpeedup

* Debian internode apt-get mirror is a bugger to figure out:

In the Debian installer use: mirror.internode.net.au and /pub/debian/ (DONT USE HTTP://)