Anyone had their gear die?

[axewater]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

came home back in holland ... my internet connection died ... my wifi access point died, my xbox 360 died, and my data storage server died. it's so depressing i don't even want to get into the details of each of them, but it was NOT a power spike or anything coz some of the shit wasn't even connected to anything while i was away.

[not5150]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

It's ok, I talked with Parallax support and it seems that the components themself are damaged. LCD won't show text in test mode and the reader won't go red with just plain 5V. I just gotta get over this hump of work then i can dump it in the x-ray machine and look for cracked traces on the board.

For green lasers you should get out candlepowerforums. You can make some pretty impressive green lasers for 40-90mw by modding cheap $40-60 laser pointers. Mostly just turning a potentiometer!

Thanks for the candlepowerforums... for LED flashlight fans there's a post in there about the WISE LED flashlight - http://www.wiseled.com/index.aspx?articleid=927

Holy moly that looks bright...

[0x58]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

No damaged equipment for me.

I however always get the special treatment at the Airport when I pull out two laptops. Then again my bag is filled with so much electronic wire from power supplies, and other stuff I am carrying with me (Wireless access point with a huge heatsink :P) that I don't blame them :D.

[astcell]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

For green lasers you should get out candlepowerforums. You can make some pretty impressive green lasers for 40-90mw by modding cheap $40-60 laser pointers. Mostly just turning a potentiometer!

40-90mw? Nah, I'm never going under 100mw again. Too much fun. :>

[maelstrom]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

PM me an email address, and I'll send you a copy of the schematic and layout diagrams, so you can get it working again.

It's ok, I talked with Parallax support and it seems that the components themself are damaged. LCD won't show text in test mode and the reader won't go red with just plain 5V. I just gotta get over this hump of work then i can dump it in the x-ray machine and look for cracked traces on the board.

For green lasers you should get out candlepowerforums. You can make some pretty impressive green lasers for 40-90mw by modding cheap $40-60 laser pointers. Mostly just turning a potentiometer!

[astcell]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

ASTCell and I were playing around with his insanely bright 125mw green laser at Defcon and I stupidly shot a picture while the laser was shining through the lens. When the camera would turn on, I thought for sure that the laser killed it.

I found a 500mw for about $7K. I think that would just blow a hole through your camera.

[Diesel]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

Same thing here Schuyler. No lock stuff but radio equipment, etc. The guy looked at me coming in line, smiled, and said come with me. Haha. "One of those hackers!" he said. I was like "What are you talking about?" but with a DEFCON shirt on it was hard to prove my case. Went through ALL of my shit. Anyway, he was really cool about it and we chatted about Military ECM since that is what he did in the Navy. I told him he should speak on it next year, he laughed and said "Give me you email and we can set that up." I said "Good luck with that." We both laughed and I was on my way. Cool guy though so not all of them are A'holes.

Diesel

[Thorn]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

On return the rfid reader from the Wifi Village stopped working properly, I haven't had the time to check the circuit but failing all else I'm probably going to try and play with John Westhues design sometime.

PM me an email address, and I'll send you a copy of the schematic and layout diagrams, so you can get it working again.

[Schuyler]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

No kiddin...flying out of Dulles, they didn't hardly check my bags. Out of Vegas, I got to go in the 'special' line :D Carrying that stuff was the suck.

Anytime I fly for locksport stuff I get slammed at the airport. This time I had 100 padlocks in my carry-on and the guy pulled out each one, opened the boxes, laid them out in 4 different trays, rescanned and left me to pack everything up. I expect it though, and come early, and tell them what they're about to scan, as I can only imagine how it looks under x-ray. I felt bad for these guys though, as they had just closed the line behind me, so as their last guy I kept them there for almost 15 extra minutes. :P They were really nice about it though. Good guys.

[maelstrom]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

I was messing around with my N800 to store the speaker schedules since I lost my paper schedule somewhere along the way, probably when i put it down to try and pick some locks in the LP skybox and destroyed both the browsers I had installed. So much for using the beta mozilla browser. On return the rfid reader from the Wifi Village stopped working properly, I haven't had the time to check the circuit but failing all else I'm probably going to try and play with John Westhues design sometime.
I also found that an airlink card I picked up at Fry's was a dud, but for $15 I'm not really annoyed with that one.

[panadero]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

No kiddin...flying out of Dulles, they didn't hardly check my bags. Out of Vegas, I got to go in the 'special' line :D Carrying that stuff was the suck.

[Schuyler]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

I was lucky enough to have my 360 die, right before the GH2 heats were going to start. Danny ran to Best Buy to get another one. No shit, straight out of the box, that one had the red ring of death. We got my old one running at least for the rest of the day. When we returned the one back to Best Buy, the chic said she was getting tired of seeing 360's...damn you Microsoft!

My 360 didn't want to play nice the 2nd day either, so Dan got an Elite at Fry's, used it for 6 hours and returned it Sunday, no questions asked :)

panadero

Hah! Sounds like you won't even need to bring one with you next year.

[panadero]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

I was lucky enough to have my 360 die, right before the GH2 heats were going to start. Danny ran to Best Buy to get another one. No shit, straight out of the box, that one had the red ring of death. We got my old one running at least for the rest of the day. When we returned the one back to Best Buy, the chic said she was getting tired of seeing 360's...damn you Microsoft!

My 360 didn't want to play nice the 2nd day either, so Dan got an Elite at Fry's, used it for 6 hours and returned it Sunday, no questions asked :)

panadero

[adam]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

during the setup of actf, 1 hour and 23 minuets after day1 of con had started "and an hour behind schedule" we had...

1 switch
2 ports on another switch
1 port on ANOTHER switch
3 cat5 cables
and one of our contest computers (we fixed it around 2 or so hours into the contest)

this happens pretty much every year :-P

[Schuyler]

Re: Anyone had their gear die?

Nothing ceased operation for me, but my Schlage Primus fingerpin picks did go missing, along with a BiLock QCC control key.