Going for the self reply record...

I've built the cable. Connections made are in my first post in this thread. My monitor detects the signal but because of some of the cables I haven't connected (VGA Pin# 4,9,11,12,15) the monitor is in powersave mode (ie: no picture). Or at least that's why I think the monitor is in power save mode (it tells me it is).

Advice on which 5V CN2 Pin to connect to VGA pin9 is welcomed. Or any of the other pins for that matter.

Anyway its bedtime. Good night folks. More fiddling tomorrow. Cheers

How about some pics

_________________
Sean
"I do not like the cone of shame."
Boom Boom Room

I was going to but.... of a blank screen?... I'll post when I've got something worth showing.

according to google, the VESA power save is triggered by at least one of the sync lines being off. are you sure you have those ID'd/connected properly?

the sense lines and optional 5v supply are only used for DDC type communication -- i don't think those should have anything to do with no signal/power save.

I meant of your "DIY cable"

_________________
Sean
"I do not like the cone of shame."
Boom Boom Room

mkawa: I've seen the same information but my multimeter shows it as connected & the reading is identical to my early probing (Voltage). I'm pretty sure with a pre-modern-age monitor I'd be seeing a picture... but with my newer LCD monitor I'm not so sure... that said I'm not ruling anything out.

MaximAvs: All in good time... it will be posted. It's just a VGA plug connected by ribbon cable to a crimp connector that fits in CN2

Alright,.... ..... I got it working...

Seems I crossed the HSync & VSync (no harm done thank goodness).

I'll have to review earlier postings to see if I need to make corrections.

Spent a few minutes in the Bios,... (No Obvious DualCore Enable Feature - Damn!).

Booted into the Windows PreInstallation Environment... looks like its loading off of an onboard USB disk (cool!)... I might have to leverage that space in my solaris/zfs exploits (solaris can't yet boot off of a raidz pool)... that is if it's not write-protected... I hope its big

Anyway I'm psyched! a co-worker's been teasing me about taking over the world with this little server (I can't shut-up about it sometimes)... I have begun!

So I'm thinking I might post video of the whole thing (bios etc) to YouTube... but I've never done that before so I'll have to figure that out...

awesome!!! when you have a chance, could you write up a parts list?

Earlier I said that I was mostly watching out of curiosity. Begining to think this would be worthwhile just for the ability to set the MSS up to "restore previous state" after a power interruption!

But forst the memory upgrade, 1640 chip and a 1 TB drive.... Then the ^%*(@ income taxes... This one may be a while!

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

You know... on boot up it shows a CPU count. (1)

I wonder if the reason the reason the dual core chips haven't worked is because of the windows home server install wasn't expecting a second core...

Video is captured. Working on the YouTube end of things.

Screenshots...

How about... Video.

YouTube (A bit blurry)
Okay... scratch liveleak "This media item has been removed due to copyright/terms of service violation." (wth?)
Somehow "How To Hack A Parking Meter" is not a TOS violation but my vid is... and now I'm banned from liveleak... go figure.

Very cool! Now you have to figure out how to mass produce those things so you can sell them.

As stated before... not interested in making or selling these. I'll provide a how to but that's about it. The price of admission is you'll have to DIY.

Parts List:

1. 1x XFX Low Profile Kit (I scavenged the VGA connector from this, and later soldered a longer ribbon cable to it)
2. 1x 26 position 2mm pitch Connector Housing
3. 15x 2 24-28AWG Crimp Connector Terminal (Fits into the housing)

Product Links
The Connector Housing I got (10)
The Crimp Terminals I got (100)

An Alternative Connector housing
and its matching connector terminal

There may be other alternatives...

If you're trying to find your own on digikey start with the search "conn housing 2mm 26pos", find the connector you want, pull its datasheet which will tell you what terminals you need. When selecting terminals keep in mind that ribbon cable is 28 AWG.

Tips:
The metric terminals I got needed a special $300 crimper. I thought my standard $13 DSUB crimper would do the trick. It Didn't. It was able to clamp the crimp the "strain relief" part of the terminal (the part that grabs the insulation) but it couldn't make the electrical connection. I ended up soldering the wire to each terminal. It's possible terminals from another company may work with a standard crimper.

Additional TidBits
The second 'extra' connector attached to the cable in the vid is just to hold the terminals I haven't connected yet. I preferred this to letting them hang loose.

The XFX Low Profile adapter cable is about half the length as the one pictured (ie: will not reach the outside of the case once re-assembled) and it also didn't come with the two screws needed to secure a monitor cable.

Congrats on getting that working!

The BIOS doesn't support dual core processors, you'll never get that working without a BIOS update.

The onboard flash is 256MB, and is write protected (though an enterprising individual could probably find a way around that).