Is my mainboard dead?
 

I have an old SY-5EHM main board lying around. I wanted to use it as a robot controller. I hooked up a flash drive to it and was going to install Puppy Linux on it so I could use NX to login into the robot and install a Java client later to handle autonomus control. I hooked up a cd to the board and started to boot Puppy. It starts to unpack the kernel and then prints a stack trace back. I switched to Knoppix 5.1 and it just hangs trying to unpack the kernel. I even tried a version of Knoppix with the 2.4 kernel and get a stack trace. Is the main board dead or am I doind something wrong?

P.S. If it is the board, is there anything I can do? The board is old so it doesn't consume a lot of power making it a good canidate for battery conversion. Also, it has several expansion slots, making it a good canidate for old NI analog converts, DIO's, adn relay cards. With usb support and an added LAN card, it does everything I need for a robot controller.

Never Mind. I pulled a ram card I had in there and everything started working. No more Acer products for me.

However, if anyone has suggestions on keeping the processor cool, I am open to suggestions. This board is going to control a submarine. Running a cooling fan strait is not going to do much. I can't exactly cut holes in the electronics bucket either.

Sounds like an interesting project! Have you built things like this before? If you have any links to similar projects, I'd love to have look!

How deep will the sub go? If it's not going too deep, how about rebuilding some equipment for water cooling and running the pipes through the hull, that way you could use the water temp from the outside to cool your elements? (Via ribs/radiators, not recommending you to pump salt water into the cooling system)

Or, if you need the casing to be more tight, use metal ribs like the ones on/in old hi-fi amplifiers, and make a metal connection from the cpu/chipset to the ribs? If you find big ribs, you can make them run in parallel with the hull, so they won't affect speed, but might help stability?

Hi,

Great idea about utilizing the external source for cooling. You can use a heat exchanger to isolate from the salt water. Your weight limitations?

You could use a a larger heat pipe to cool your processor with a fan or fanless depending on the heat pipe size.

For the memory issues you should run 'memtest86'.

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