I'm back after a long break and now with a few more skills
under my hat. My render box had a hard drive failure nearly 2 years ago and I
had not got around to getting it fixed. In the last 8 months I have been
learning some electronics and this blog will now cover my tinkering along with
my CGI and art and graffiti. Last weekend I decided enough was enough and time
to get the render box back in action and did a little research and found out
the hard drive failure was due to bad firmware on the drive. After a little
more research I found out there was a fix involving talking directly to the
drive via TTY. So some more research shows that my Arduino boards use USB
serial to TTY for programming. So I shorted out the reset switch which stuck
the Arduino processor in a frozen state and hard wired the serial pins straight
into the hard drive via a bodged, temporary cable and after 30 minutes of
stressing, viola , one working hard drive and one resurrected render box. So to
mark the occasion I thought I would upload the one bit of CGI related imagery I
have done over the last 2 years and it looks poor but it is very cool. The
image below is a capture from my Xbox Kinect which has scanned my living room
into a full 3D point cloud and then rendered out via MeshLab.
