John8520
Well-known member
As some of you who venture into the depths of IRC may know, I recently installed Gentoo onto my powerbook lombard. Everything has been doing great, but I got kinda bored just using the bash CLI all the time, plus if I installed xorg I could get proper power management tools, as well as get a shiny new GUI (though I still really prefer CLI, I just want to know when my battery is at 3%). One big way that Gentoo differs from Debian based linuxes (such as Ubuntu) and Red-hat based linuxes (such as fedora core and yellow dog) is that instead of downloading binaries of programs (files that you can up and run the second you download them) Gentoo downloads the *source* files for your specific architecture, and then compiles it special for your system. This way the binaries it creates are optimized for the system that must run them, and so the binaries can run faster and more efficently.
Now, compiling an entire window management system on a 333Mhz computer from scratch is quite a task, so this little thing gets quite hot. It doesn't help that its now summer here, and it'll easily get 80°F durring the day, and about that (or a few degrees lower) in my room. I don't have air conditioning, so my little computers get quite toasty. In this case, the lombard was getting super toasty, toasty enought that you could toast toast. Its fan wasn't comming on, so I was getting a bit worried about it just sitting there with all the heat around the processor/RAM/HDD. Then I came up with a solution!
A few weeks back, I finally decided my 8100 was toast, so I dismantled it. When I took the heatsink off the processor, I noticed there was this weird little copper plate thermally-epoxied to the bottom of it, with two wires comming out. I did some reading and found out that this little plate is whats known as a thermoelectric-cooler. When enough power is applied (this one takes 3.3v at 1.5 amps, more voltage makes it work in-efficiently) it will, quite literially, suck heat from one side of the plate to another. Meaning that one side will get very cold (this is the side with the heat being sucked out of it) and the other side will get very hot (this is the side which has the heatsink attached. The side that gets cold is normally pressed against something like a processor, or whatever else needs to be cooled, and when power is applied, it will quickly move heat from the the source (eg - processor) to the heatsink, where it can be blown away via a fan.
Anyways, what I've done is durring the compile of xorg, I flipped up the keyboard on the lombard, and plopped my little TEC right on the 'book's heat spreader, and then attached a fan to the top of the TEC's heatsink. The tempature (on the heat spreader) has gone from 'holy crap my finger is melting' to 'hey, this is barely warm!'. Thanks to the fan mounted on the TEC, the TEC's heatsink is also very cool, but the air the the fan blows away is pretty warm too, meaning its doing its job well. It is also powered by an LC powersupply, which is the perfect size for the job.
Here's two picture I took of it mounted on the powerbook:
http://john8520.homeunix.org:8888/images/tec-powerbook/
And here's some picture of the TEC itsself:
http://john8520.homeunix.org:8888/images/TEC/
I am aware that most likely none of you cared to hear me ramble on about thermoelectric cooling, but this xorg compile is going to take a few more hours and I'm bored!
Now, compiling an entire window management system on a 333Mhz computer from scratch is quite a task, so this little thing gets quite hot. It doesn't help that its now summer here, and it'll easily get 80°F durring the day, and about that (or a few degrees lower) in my room. I don't have air conditioning, so my little computers get quite toasty. In this case, the lombard was getting super toasty, toasty enought that you could toast toast. Its fan wasn't comming on, so I was getting a bit worried about it just sitting there with all the heat around the processor/RAM/HDD. Then I came up with a solution!
A few weeks back, I finally decided my 8100 was toast, so I dismantled it. When I took the heatsink off the processor, I noticed there was this weird little copper plate thermally-epoxied to the bottom of it, with two wires comming out. I did some reading and found out that this little plate is whats known as a thermoelectric-cooler. When enough power is applied (this one takes 3.3v at 1.5 amps, more voltage makes it work in-efficiently) it will, quite literially, suck heat from one side of the plate to another. Meaning that one side will get very cold (this is the side with the heat being sucked out of it) and the other side will get very hot (this is the side which has the heatsink attached. The side that gets cold is normally pressed against something like a processor, or whatever else needs to be cooled, and when power is applied, it will quickly move heat from the the source (eg - processor) to the heatsink, where it can be blown away via a fan.
Anyways, what I've done is durring the compile of xorg, I flipped up the keyboard on the lombard, and plopped my little TEC right on the 'book's heat spreader, and then attached a fan to the top of the TEC's heatsink. The tempature (on the heat spreader) has gone from 'holy crap my finger is melting' to 'hey, this is barely warm!'. Thanks to the fan mounted on the TEC, the TEC's heatsink is also very cool, but the air the the fan blows away is pretty warm too, meaning its doing its job well. It is also powered by an LC powersupply, which is the perfect size for the job.
Here's two picture I took of it mounted on the powerbook:
http://john8520.homeunix.org:8888/images/tec-powerbook/
And here's some picture of the TEC itsself:
http://john8520.homeunix.org:8888/images/TEC/
I am aware that most likely none of you cared to hear me ramble on about thermoelectric cooling, but this xorg compile is going to take a few more hours and I'm bored!
