arrow_runner
Veteran Member
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You have to have a 'blog' to enter so that's what this thread is going to be.
I'm going to get as much as I can done, but I don't have any expectations to get every single thing done by the end of the month. This project is really more about the journey than the destination anyway. There's going to be a bit of electrical engineering study/research involved with a few of these steps. I've always wanted to get into EE more but I never really got around to it so that's what the latter portion of this is really about.
To do list:
So far I've done the following.
I also plan on painting the whole shebang at some point. I'm thinking black with yellow trim.
Oh the mess....
You have to have a 'blog' to enter so that's what this thread is going to be.
I'm going to get as much as I can done, but I don't have any expectations to get every single thing done by the end of the month. This project is really more about the journey than the destination anyway. There's going to be a bit of electrical engineering study/research involved with a few of these steps. I've always wanted to get into EE more but I never really got around to it so that's what the latter portion of this is really about.
To do list:
- Replace CMOS battery
- Replace IDE hard drive with CF Card
- Upgrade CPU to a 486
- Overclock the 486/387
- Add a sound card that will support a CD-ROM
- Add a 3.5" Floppy drive
- Add (laptop) CD-Drive
- Add network card
- Add wireless G wifi access
- Increase ram from the stock 2mb. (This is a trick because everything is proprietary and hard to find)
- Enable > ~520mb hard drive drive (1-4GB Compact Flash)
- Replace the power supply with Li-ion or lead acid batteries and make a charging circuit so the system uses a standard laptop charger.
- Convert the keyboard to wireless
- Add a wireless mouse (I still need to check if there is a second serial port this can go to)
- See if the expansion bay can be modified to allow for a third ISA card (VGA Card)
So far I've done the following.
- Replaced the old CMOS battery with a coin-cell (I was SOO tired of resetting the hard drive config...)
- Install 4GB CF Card (formatted to about 400mb)
- Upgraded CPU to a CX486DLC
- Removed the stock 40MHz Crystal and installed a socket to try different crystals for overclocking. I have a 48MHz and 50MHz currently and have confirmed that the 48MHz did speed up the 386DX that was in the computer. No benchmarks yet.
- Installed a Sound Blaster, haven't tested it's CD-ROM connection yet but I have about 2 different ones if this doesn't work
- Installed a 3com network card and dos TCP/IP stack
- Tried 3 different untested 3.5" floppy drives and all 3 give the same errors...
- Added 2 standard molex and 1 floppy power connection inside the expansion bay
- Modified a Linksys router for installation in the expansion bay - The 386 can ping it but the telnet program on it won't connect for some reason. I haven't tried another one yet. The router has Lynx installed on it so I'll have WWW access once I can Telnet to the router succesfully.
- I've traced about 90% of the ram expansion module port to the motherboard (to see about making a ram expansion card myself since they're pretty rare)
I also plan on painting the whole shebang at some point. I'm thinking black with yellow trim.
Oh the mess....