The Waterbox is my nickname for an external water-cooling apparatus I created over the first half of 2004. Intending to watercool my computer so that I could overclock it further, I designed the Waterbox as an attachment to sit below my current case, which was acrylic (Plexiglas). So, in order to maintain the theme, I had to learn how to handle acrylic.

The basic components going into this project are:

• A piece of acrylic (cut into 7 sections)
• An Eheim 1250 pump
• A BlackIce Extreme Chrome radiator
• Three Y.S. Tech 120×120x38mm fans (thicker and more powerful than most 120mm fans)
  • 7-12VDC, max 2800 RPM @ 125.5 CFM / 7.92W / 45.0dB
• Some acrylic adhesive
• Plenty of Plumber’s Goop
• ClearFlex tubing (which connects to a Maze4 waterblock up in the computer)

I also designed a pretty ideal layout for the Waterbox. In the back, there’s a large reservoir. The reservoir is separated by an inner partitioning wall which has two holes in it. One is the inlet for the water. The other is the outlet to the pump. It’s designed so that the pump butts right up against the partitioning wall, saving space and the complication of a short run of tubing. This also has the benefit of giving the pump as much water as it wants, since there’s no restriction ahead of it.

The pump itself, in addition to fitting into the inner wall, is attached to the bottom of the Waterbox by four rubber-insulated bolts. This is to hopefully minimize some of the vibration from the pump. To the front of the pump are two of the 120mm fans, mounted to the sides and both blowing outwards. And at the very front of the Waterbox is the radiator, with the third fan just behind it in a pull-configuration. This brings fresh air in through the radiator, providing maximum cooling to the water inside. The two side fans maintain a negative pressure which should provide a bit of extra vacuum to the intake fan. The whole configuration should change the air in the Waterbox very rapidly, and provide a bit of passive cooling to the pump as a side effect.

Water pumped by the pump goes straight up, through the top of the Waterbox and the bottom of the computer, straight to the waterblock on the CPU and back down. It then goes to the radiator to cool it, and is dumped back into the reservoir until it is needed again. It’s a simple pump -> CPU -> radiator -> reservoir -> pump configuration.

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A cantenna is a nickname for a type of Do-It-Yourself directional waveguide antenna. It is so named because it is made out of a metal can of some kind–coffee cans and large soup cans are popular. These antennas allow you to focus your WiFi signal for higher gain and greater range, and generally cost a lot less to make than it would be to buy a comparable directional antenna.

I built the main part of this cantenna a couple years ago, but did not have the card and dongle part to use it effectively. The can was a pineapple juice can that was about the right size, and which I already had around. Into the can, you mount an N-Type Panel connector. This requires one large center hole and four mounting holes, but the can isn’t difficult to drill through.

There are two important calculations to make. I simply used an online calculator to find the ideal specifications for my can. The one at http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/cantennahowto.html seems to do the trick, although I’m not sure if this is the one I used.

The can I’m using is 4.125″ in diameter and 7″ long. Using that diameter, the above site tells me:

Cutoff Frequency in MHz for TE11 mode: 1676.91
Cutoff Frequency in MHz for TM01 mode: 2190.27
Guide Wavelength in Inches: 6.67
1/4 Guide Wavelength: 1.67
3/4 Guide Wavelength: 5

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In a visual sense, what you’re looking at now is already version 2.0 of the site. I was not quite content with the all-black look I’d come up with first of all, and started to really like the WordPress theme (WuCoco by Mike Lococo) that I’d settled on for the back-end. So, I pulled out Photoshop once again and modeled up a new page with a dark gray background and two panes sitting on top of it–a black header and a white content pane. This makes things stand out more visually. The panes each cast a subtle shadow on the background and have rounded corners that soften the look. Enjoy.

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I finally figured out how to integrate the user-management system from WordPress into the photo gallery. (It was a royal pain–for more information, check out the Project post for this site.) So, now, you have to register to view the pictures. Yes, it’s an inconvenience, but you only have to do it once. After that, it can remember you and you won’t have to log in again, even. I’m also uploading a ton of new stuff (or old stuff, really) to the gallery, so check it out!

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We found an effective way to keep ourselves busy and have a ton of fun up at Beaver Island was to have a project we could work on. We discovered this quite accidentally with Protar, so we quite intentionally came up with a plan for this trip. We decided to build a spudgun, of sorts. It’s not your typical spudgun, which utilizes hairspray, propane, or some other explosive gas/vapor as a propellant. We decided to go pneumatic. This meant our gun would have a barrel, connected to a valve (as high-speed as possible), which loops back to a compression chamber. We also opted to fire golf balls, rather than potatoes. The simple design allows us to fire pretty much anything that fits down the barrel. To arm and fire the gun, you first load the projectile into the barrel (it’s muzzle-loaded). You then verify that the valve is closed, and then pressurize the chamber with an air compressor. When you’ve reached your desired psi, disconnect from the air compressor, aim, and rip the valve open as quickly as possible. Voila!

To begin building the spudgun, we raided Jeff’s parents’ hardware store for the necessary supplies. Among these were a valve stem (like you would normally see on a car or bicycle tire), various chunks of Schedule-40 PVC pipe, fittings, end cap, etc., PVC cement, a valve, spray foam, and JB Weld. Since we didn’t know what the hardware would have for piping and valves before we got there, we determined what we could use on the spot.

Here, Tom and Jeff are discussing this matter, while Tom holds some of our other supplies and Reid looks for parts we think we need.

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>This site is now available, in archival form, at http://liquidnitrogen.us/cmuphitau.<

This project was undertaken around August/September 2005 for my fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau. This represented my first serious foray into web design, and in some ways, a significant challenge. I went about it in the most logical way I knew how: I tried to recreate some of the techniques I’d seen the web techs at work doing.

I outlined on paper, first, some of the important things to include in the site, some of the things to avoid, my goals for the site, and did a rough sketch-up of what it might look like. Later, I started designing it in Photoshop, incorporating elements and tying things together. One
important capability of the new site was that it needed to be easy to update. I devised two separate systems to do this: First, main page news would be handled by WordPress, a blogging software. Second, the secondary pages would be static, but use a content page and a layout page. The layout page imported the content page, so to change the content, you just go to the appropriate file in the content folder. Inside was a simple table with the text for the page. Easy to update/maintain, and more difficult to screw up.

WordPress turned out to be trickier than I thought. It’s an all-encompassing package, with its own theme and layouts. It’s its own page, and by default, doesn’t render in a way that would be easily included into another page. So I had to find a stripped-down theme, and then customize it further to fit my particular needs. This meant PHP and CSS editing, neither of which I had experience with. It was tedious, but I eventually got it how I wanted.

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November 8, 2006: Registered domain and got hosting. Laid some basic foundation work, such as installing Wordpress and SPGM. Conceptualized a design, then began creating the look of the site in Photoshop.

November 9, 2006: Finalized design, imported to ImageReady, then sliced and diced. Exported to web. Exported the menu system to its own file, to use as an ‘include.’ Spent time integrating SPGM, resizing pictures and uploading

November 10, 2006: Continued integrating features; decided to keep the SPGM colors, but customized one picture to make it ‘icy.’ Resume now links to the appropriate Word file, Projects page required creating a page, then finding and customizing PHP code and an SQL query so it would give me a listing of all the Wordpress entries in the Projects group.

November 16, 2006: Captioned and resized the Beaver Island pictures. Attempted to add the SPGM-Vid extension to the SPGM gallery, so that it would support me including the Beaver Island videos, but it didn’t play well. Reversed my changes and began the 100MB upload of the pictures.

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Site construction is going well, so far. The domain was registered two days ago, and I got some basic things working, like Wordpress and SPGM. I designed the main page yesterday in Photoshop. Today I sliced everything and exported it in ImageReady and fought with PHP for a while until it would do a PHP include for the Wordpress Loop (the posts), so that I could have a static main page with dynamic content included, all with the same theme. It may be further tweaked yet, but the look is shaping up so far.

There’s still a lot to do. The Photo Gallery is in place, but not the look is not customized at all. It will get a complementing theme applied to it soon. The Projects, About Me, and Resume categories have not yet been developed. Content pages for them are on the way soon as well. The projects will be a significant undertaking, as I have over a dozen different ones that I would like to write mini-articles about. But the content is coming soon.

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Welcome to the site. Herein lies a cacophony of things I feel are worth sharing with others. That includes a selection of pictures, pictures and descriptions of some projects that I’ve worked on, my resume, and info about myself. If you’re here, you probably already know why, so enjoy.

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