Recently I’ve been working on a custom DDL (Digital Data Link) for my various drone projects. Requirements were multiple telemetry streams, one for the flight controller and one for any custom payload, as well as HD digital video. Minimum 1 mile of range, conservatively, and I wanted it to be almost entirely self contained, with only a display device being external. I believe I have accomplished those goals, with this system.

Today I finally got around to getting my WiFi Pineapple Drone, Project Cuckoo, out and flying. This was (is) a fun project partially inspired by the Ubisoft game, Watch Dogs 2. I say partially, as I’ve always had an interest in combining my hobby of infosec/messing with wireless security, and my other hobby of UAS/drones.

Or rather, the connectors can be. It's common knowledge that molex powered risers in multi GPU rigs (used for things like machine learning and mining) can cause problems, and even start fires. SATA powered risers are recommended over molex, however I've had a number of issues with these as well. In this post, I will make a case for why 6 pin PCI powered risers are the better choice over both SATA and molex powered risers.

The PCI-e specification allows for 75w to be drawn off a 16x PCI-e slot. This isn't an exceptional amount of power, but it is plenty to cause problems with inadequate wire gauge and incomplete/incorrect crimped connectors (as are often found in cheap power adapters.) The most common use for SATA connectors, and even prior to that, 4 Pin molex connectors are to power hard drives. Hard drives draw relatively miniscule amounts of power, so most adapters are produced with that in mind. On the other hand, 6 pin power connectors are most commonly found powering larger GPUs. This raises the bar on both wire gauge and crimp quality, while also spreading the load among 3 pairs of wires and crimps, decreasing the load seen by any one wire or crimp connector significantly, leading to better reliability and safer operation.

Welcome to Glytch.tech! I've owned this domain for a while, and finally am wanting to put it to good use. This site will help consolidate my Twitter rants and document projects. I'm starting with this blog, which will be for general brain dumps and build logs of various projects. Within the next month or so, I intend to staple on a Wiki, with pages for each of my projects, sectioned off to make finding information fast and easy. One of my pet peeves when looking for info, is digging through pages and pages of blog when I'm just interested in the meat. Thats the goal with the wiki, while maintaining the option for those who want to read through the whole build log!

This site is intendted to stay pretty light. Everything is statically generated thanks to Jekyll, and hosted on Github Pages, so should stay pretty fast and have minimal uptime issues. The reason for these choices, while they may not be great aesthetically, is maximum availability. I've lived on slow connections and dealt with large web pages. I'm taking some cues from sites like Hackaday which strip out most of the fluff, and give a very basic and easy to load/read experience, so that everyone has access to the things I post. I want this site and the info within, to outlive me. Keeping it as light and basic as possible, is the way to do that.

This is just the intro post, be sure to check out my first proper blog post, and the 'About Me' page. I plan to write more this weekend, and continue to write one or two posts a week, documenting various projects I'm working on.

Massive thanks to everyone who has helped me get this far, and those who have pushed me to document my work better. Here's hoping it helps someone, somewhere