Category: English

Some of you may have come across an article about the Fujitsu FUTRO S520 Thin Client. This got me thinking – could I use a thin client with slightly better performance as my main computer when I’m not gaming? Let’s take a closer look.

I won an auction for two of these thin clients on allegro.pl, paying 100 zł (roughly 23 €) per piece. What immediately caught my interest in this device was the Ryzen Embedded R1505G CPU, which should suffice for my non-gaming needs.

Recently Dell Optiplex 3000 Thin Client has become widely available on the second-hand market at affordable prices. As compared to the previous generation of low-power terminals (like my previous Dell Wyse 5070 Extended), it has an improved performance and decreased idle power consumption. It features a passively cooled Jasper Lake Pentium N6005 CPU (4 cores, up to 3.3 GHz) and supports DDR4 RAM. Built-in eMMC disk can be used for storage or an optional NVMe SSD installed in the M.2 2230 slot.

What could go wrong if you buy a broken retro machine for cheap just to repair it and make it shine again with VIC-IIe colors and sing with glorius 3 channel SID chip? It’s not as easy task as I thought earlier and this repair went for much longer and costed me way more as compared to my previous Commodore 64c repair. Despite all the time, money and effort I put into it I don’t regret it at all. This repair allowed me to learn A LOT about electronics and electronic repair.

My mighty fixed Commodore 128 in it’s full glory.

A few years ago I bought the original dual port Airspy HF+ and was amazed by it’s reception quality. I’m using this sdr receiver up to this day for both HF and FM DX-ing and couldn’t find any other affordable yet so good receiver. Back in 2021 I bought Airspy HF+ Discovery as a replacement in case my dual port receiver is struck by ESD during lightning storm or something else.

Most noticeable differences are lack of metal casing which if present, could be useful in noise and interference reduction, and it has only a single SMA port which is fine for simple setup with single wideband scanner antena, but it’s definitely problematic for someone using separate HF and VHF antennas for better gain and performance. Similarly to dual port model, this device also uses micro-USB port which can potentially cause some troubles. If you stumble upon a connection problem when your computer doesn’t detect a device, or does detect but for some reason SDR software can’t connect to it, please check your usb cable. In my experience even good looking cables with no visible damage to the plug can be faulty, that’s why I’m using my trusted high quality cable filled with ferrite chokes/beads.

During last Black Friday I bought Raspberry PI 4 on Aliexpress for just $36. After initial tests I’ve found out that a good cooling case is definitely a must have. The SoC quickly reaches 80°C under a full load and then throttles from 1.5 to 1.0 GHz per ARM core to maintain the temperature limit, so I ordered a very nice Chinese aluminum case. I love PoE devices – my new toy must also support Power over Ethernet – and it does!

I took a cheap LM2596 DC converter and installed it together with the board in the aluminium case.