Hello awesome people!

Hey, I'm a 26 year old Electrical Engineer who has an appetite for toasted transistors in the morning. It all started when I tried to make a coil gun to shoot my neighbor's dog (didn't work btw, I used components from an old TV set).

I joined the master race by tweaking my 6600 GT I purchased with my summer job to get a few extra frames from Far Cry. It was a eureka moment when I learned that regulators in my cheap motherboard gets overheated during gaming, and it can be fixed by connecting a fan on top of them with zip ties .

Fast forwarding-> ->
I've been working as a mixed signal engineer for a silicon valley company for past 5 years. I've worked on low power IoT designs that consume micro watts of power to industrial designs in the order of kilo watts. I spend most of my time in Asia Pacific creating concept systems and meeting potential customers with them (with a lot of help from sales and marketing because I'm not a people person ). Each year, I spend 2-3 months in North America helping with silicon design.

Enough about me. Now onto how I found this forum:

I bought a silverstone ml08 to assemble a powerful, yet portable system. Then I saw Zaber Sentry at hard forums and realized that I can fit the same hardware I put into the 12 L ml08 in a 7L Zaber Sentry. I started to see all those wasted space inside ml08. I then began exploring even smaller cases ( I like small things. Get it ? Because I'm Asian. ok, never mind).

I saw videos of S4 Mini at tek everything's and Josh's own channel. Searching more about S4 mini led me to this forum where I saw other cool cases. In addition to S4 mini, my favorite projects here are Cerberus, Brevis S, and Hutzy XS.

Kudos to all the great people around here who put their time, effort and money into creating jaw dropping designs that big players in the industry never try to do.

*respect*

 

[CXH4]

Hey, I'm a 26 year old Electrical Engineer who has an appetite for toasted transistors in the morning. It all started when I tried to make a coil gun to shoot my neighbor's dog (didn't work btw, I used components from an old TV set).

I joined the master race by tweaking my 6600 GT I purchased with my summer job to get a few extra frames from Far Cry. It was a eureka moment when I learned that regulators in my cheap motherboard gets overheated during gaming, and it can be fixed by connecting a fan on top of them with zip ties .

Fast forwarding-> ->
I've been working as a mixed signal engineer for a silicon valley company for past 5 years. I've worked on low power IoT designs that consume micro watts of power to industrial designs in the order of kilo watts. I spend most of my time in Asia Pacific creating concept systems and meeting potential customers with them (with a lot of help from sales and marketing because I'm not a people person ). Each year, I spend 2-3 months in North America helping with silicon design.

Enough about me. Now onto how I found this forum:

I bought a silverstone ml08 to assemble a powerful, yet portable system. Then I saw Zaber Sentry at hard forums and realized that I can fit the same hardware I put into the 12 L ml08 in a 7L Zaber Sentry. I started to see all those wasted space inside ml08. I then began exploring even smaller cases ( I like small things. Get it ? Because I'm Asian. ok, never mind).

I saw videos of S4 Mini at tek everything's and Josh's own channel. Searching more about S4 mini led me to this forum where I saw other cool cases. In addition to S4 mini, my favorite projects here are Cerberus, Brevis S, and Hutzy XS.

Kudos to all the great people around here who put their time, effort and money into creating jaw dropping designs that big players in the industry never try to do.

*respect*

Hello, and welcome to the forums! I happen to be going for a degree in computer engineering, and I may be getting an electrical engineering degree as well. I also happened to have found the forum in a very similar way, through TekEverything's review of the S4 mini!

 

[hardcore_gamer]

Hello, and welcome to the forums! I happen to be going for a degree in computer engineering, and I may be getting an electrical engineering degree as well. I also happened to have found the forum in a very similar way, through TekEverything's review of the S4 mini!

Thanks. And all the best for your studies. It's hard to choose between computer engineering and electrical engineering. Most likely you'll end up doing a bit of both in your corporate life! I like both and I get to write embedded code and Verilog in addition to circuit design.
I'll probably join you as a student as I'm planning to quit my job and take a masters degree.

 

[Phuncz]

Welcome ! Interesting job, daily challenges I'd reckon ! For small form factor builds, you've come to the right place and your insight in electronic signaling has already been put to good use on the forum !

 

[BirdofPrey]

Well now that you have inserted my foot into my mouth, hello.
That Zaber Sentry looks like a nice case. it's very tight and a formfactor I like (never cared for the cubes; I ended up getting a Node 202 for myself)

Speaking of school, I've been meaning to go back to school to study biosystems engineering.
I have an interest in hydroponics/aquaponics and urban farming, especially closed environment agriculture, and luck would have it the University of Arizona has a good program for that which means in-state tuition. I might minor is computer systems since all that sort of stuff has to be monitored (and is also of interest to me).

 

[hardcore_gamer]

That Zaber Sentry looks like a nice case. it's very tight and a formfactor I like (never cared for the cubes; I ended up getting a Node 202 for myself)

I like console form factor too. I considered RVZ02, ML08 and Node 202, and selected ML08 because it had a carry handle. Carry handle isn't very useful btw; the case is thin enough so that I can easily pick it up even without the handle. I believe Node 202 is even smaller.

Zaber Sentry is on my watch list as a future "upgrade".

Speaking of school, I've been meaning to go back to school to study biosystems engineering.
I have an interest in hydroponics/aquaponics and urban farming, especially closed environment agriculture, and luck would have it the University of Arizona has a good program for that which means in-state tuition. I might minor is computer systems since all that sort of stuff has to be monitored (and is also of interest to me).

Biosystems and computer engineering is a good combination. I remember my colleagues at San Jose working on an "Internet of Plants" system which monitors soil conductivity, plant growth etc. using solar powered Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons and report the data to a central processor. Very interesting project.

 

[BirdofPrey]

I like console form factor too. I considered RVZ02, ML08 and Node 202, and selected ML08 because it had a carry handle. Carry handle isn't very useful btw; the case is thin enough so that I can easily pick it up even without the handle. I believe Node 202 is even smaller.

Zaber Sentry is on my watch list as a future "upgrade".

I skipped out on the Silverstone ones mainly because of aeshetics. Especially that crappy clear plastic window vent thing.
Finding cases in those dimensions is very tricky, most of them are actually HTPC cases that are meant to fit an mATX with low profile cards rather than a full size card on a right angle riser, and I didn't feel like cutting up a case.

Sentry has been on my radar for a while, and I might pick one up, but I've been waiting for a while, and haven't seen anything new on it.

Biosystems and computer engineering is a good combination. I remember my colleagues at San Jose working on an "Internet of Plants" system which monitors soil conductivity, plant growth etc. using solar powered Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons and report the data to a central processor. Very interesting project.

Indeed. The sort of automatic and possibly remote monitoring is something of interest to me, and, again, I have an interest in hydroponics which has to be monitored a bit more closely since there's no soil to moderate nutrient uptake (nutrients have to be added in lower doses much more continuously to avoid starving or poisoning the crops, and unlike dirt, you have to worry about it getting dirty), and that's just tank types, ebb and flow systems and aeroponics have to also manage when to apply how much moisture. Proper timing and monitoring of dissolved solid levels benefits greatly from an automated system.

Also one of the things I'd REALLY love to be able to do is work on space based habitats and agriculture (hence the closed environment agriculture part), where unattended operation is of great of use especially when you consider proposals for sending people to Mars that require agriculture to be set up in advance of people arriving, and regardless of systems, one of the bigger challenges with closed habitats is what to do with human waste be it solid and liquid excreta or exhaled CO2, and those happen to be agricultural inputs. There's also terrestrial uses, of course between urban vertical farming or greenhouses in the middle of the desert or tundra, and constructed wetlands are good for sewage processing.

 

[jeshikat]

Welcome! There's lots of misinformation floating around the PC hardware community about PCIe extenders and PCIe in general so it's good to have someone with an in-depth knowledge of these things.

 

[EdZ]

If you're interested in monitoring and control of systems (e.g closed-loop hydroponics), then you might want to look into a Cybernetics or Systems Engineering course. Having some knowledge of mathematical control theory will make modelling those sorts of sensitive multivariable systems a lot easier.

 

[Soul_Est]

Welcome to the forums! It's great to read about what brought you here and I look forward to reading more of your replies in the various threads.