Equipment

One of my hobbies is buying and selling items online; this has led quite a formidable collection of gear over the years that someone else once paid several million dollars for. These pages will slowly get populated with useful information.

Lasers
High Framerate Imagers
Low Framerate Imagers
  • View Camera - Not really an imaging device so much as a mechanical device
  • Fairchild Imaging Peregrine 3041 - 4MP square (31x31mm) deep-cooled scientific camera
  • Andor Ikon-L - as perfect as CCDs get, 90% QE, -105C TEC cooling, and 750mm^2 of imaging area
  • Andor Ikon-M - the quarter-scale version of the above
  • Sinarback 54H - medium format back based on the "classic" KAF-22000CE CCD. The live preview runs at 1 fps and requires a rapidly blinking LCD shutter to work, but those piezos make some beautiful images
Infrared Imagers
  • FLIR A65 - 30 fps 640x512 microbolometer, about as good as uncooled detectors get
  • Amber Enterprises AE4256 - 1st generation 256x256 InSb focal plane array, 256x256@60 fps. The controller involves some kind of DOS-on-a-card computer and a ton of TTL logic, the sensor is cooled by an LN2 dewar
  • L3 Wescam MX-20 IR imager -640x512 InSb FPA cooled by an integral Stirling crycooler. Outputs video through HotLink (a protocol similar to SDI)
  • FLIR/Indigo Phoenix - a very similar FPA built by Indigo, later FLIR
Fab Tools
  • Semics Opus 2 wafer prober - half a million dollars of high-speed stages and encoders. Very heavy and not actually that useful, a lot of the value-added features (automatic wafer loading, automatic alignment) are not needed in a lab setting.
  • GCA 6100C i-line stepper - a classic arc-lamp based stepper, currently undergoing refurbishment and conversion to manual operation
  • Tegal PlasmaLine 200 - a vintage, but very robust, tube-based barrel etcher

2021 Computers
  • Supermicro H11SSL - AMD's latest and greatest, currently rocking a bootleg 7742 with software overclocking
  • Asus Z11PA-D8 - Intel's latest and greatest. This one's in my home server, currently running an incredible shitstack of open-source software that somehow works
  • "The latest Intel desktop platform" - I had originally intended to maintain a yearly upgrade cadence to Intel's top 'small' platform. Unfortunately, Intel stopped releasing meaningful upgrades, so this guy is stuck on an old 8700K. Hopefully once 10nm gets fixed the upgrades will resume.
  • Supermicro X9QR7-TF+ - Quad-socket 2011. This one barely makes it into the 2021 fleet thanks to its hundreds of gigabytes of RAM; the CPUs are nothing to brag about and are probably slower than a 5950X
  • Supermicro SYS-2026TT - 4N2U dual 1366. Part of a Xen virtualization cluster that works too well to upgrade
Retired Computers
  • Tyan B7015 - The ultimate miner, dual socket 1366, four PLX PCIe switches, and eight x16 slots. The miracle is, it actually works! Currently populated with eight Tesla M2075's and running Ubuntu
  • SGI Altix UV100 - Up to 96 sockets of Nehalem-EX under one system image. Not actually fast; the target customers are folks whose workloads are interconnect-latency bound and don't fit in the RAM of a single node
  • IBM X3950 M2 -  Another gigantic NUMA system, 2, 4, or 8 4U quad-Dunnington nodes lashed together with a custom IBM interconnect
  • Sun SunFire X4600 M2 - Octal Barcelona (Opteron 83xx). An incredibly beautiful server, top-notch build quality and serviceability. No longer particularly fast, but can be cheaply loaded with 256GB of RAM and is a wonderful box for virtualization
  • Tyan S4985 - Octal Opteron built out of two motherboards stacked on top of each other. I got this thing so far as to POST, and then lost interest
  • EVGA SR2 - the one and only king of enthusiast motherboards; I've owned three different ones and have loved them all. Dual-socket 1366, claim to fame is the unlocked base clock and voltages in the BIOS. (2016 update - wow, still fast half a decade out!)

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