Brain Surgery

Well, it's not rocket science, at least.

Recently I got curious about using a security camera software package that leverages AI for object detection. To do this, it taps into a Coral accelerator and it just so happened that Tyler had one of the USB ones just kicking around collecting dust, and he leant it to me to try it out.

The Coral USB stick, however, uses USB 3.1 gen 1, for 5Gb/s data transfers. My server, on the other hand, is running on a hand-me-down motherboard from the Core2 Duo epoch, and most certainly does not have any sort of USB3 ports.

So, time to upgrade.

Tyler again managed to come to the rescue here, as he had a spare motherboard laying about. Not a particularly new one, mind you. I mean it was new as in unused, but it's an LGA1151 board which puts it in the 2016-ish era. Still kind of old, but a good decade jump from the previous gubbins.

So that just left me to pick up a CPU, a cooler, some RAM and an extra network card, since my server needs 2 ethernet ports and the card I had been using was PCI (not PCI-E). The new board does not have PCI.

You can read over the parts list if you're interested.

Anyway, the first step before upgrading my server is to put these bits together on the bench to make sure that everything works. I had some minor doubts, as the board might have needed a bios upgrade to be able to work with the CPU I got, and the CPU itself was "refurbished", whatever that means. (I mean it apparently means it comes at a 50% discount, so ok I'll roll that dice).

I borrowed a spare graphics card out of my junk pile for this quick test, and didn't bother hooking up the ethernet card just yet as I had no reason to doubt that it would work just fine.

All the parts seemed to fit together without protest, including the giant AIO water cooler that I got because it was the same price as a regular CPU cooler, and because this server runs in my office all day, and because honestly I just wanted to experiment with a water cooler.

So with that out of the way, the next step is to apply power.

The power supply and monitor were also fished out of my junk pile. It's good to have a junk pile.

But something doesn't seem right, though.

Ah yes, that colour is much faster.

Moving on, it's time to dig the old guts out of the server.

Out with the old.

And in with the new.

So now comes the painful part. I've got to boot up, re-activate my operating system, deal with driver hell, and then...

Wait, no, it's Linux not Windows. I just boot up and it works flawlessly without changing a single damn thing.

So how does the security cam software work? I dunno, I'll install it later and find out then.