So I picked up an old two post aluminum network rack from craigslist today. I ended up cutting it down to about four and a half feet so that it would look somewhat “normal” in my small apartment. I racked up the Ubuntu storage box, old terminal server, and my latest addition, the Cisco 3508g switch. Due to the poor performance of my Walmart “rollback” special router, I will be building a custom firewall box in the coming weeks. Most likely it will be a m0n0wall firewall box built out of a shallow depth 1u case and another cheap mini-itx  board. As much as I wish that I could, I cannot justify spending $1000+ on a 2800 series Cisco router just for my home internet connection.

Just got this beast in the mail today. It is a Cisco 3508G eight port gigabit managed switch which you can’t really beat for $30 shipped from ebay. Now its time to start looking for some cheap GBICs to get this thing up and running. Now if only I can find some cheap PoE layer-3 switches to start playing around with VoIP at home.

After seeing the abundance of nixie tube clocks online, I decided to see how hard it would be to build a simple clock using a 8-bit serial LCD that I had left over from one of my other micro-controller projects. Maybe sometime in the future I can work on a more complicated nixie tube design. I am currently using the Arduino Nano micro-controller to get the logic and circuit setup properly. I will attempt to design and etch my own PCB using either an Atmega168 or ATtiny micro-controller once the coding is locked down. Overall this project shouldn’t be too technically challenging, but the programming would be the most time consuming portion of this project. The plan is to have a battery backup to keep the time in a power outage, a temperature probe to display ambient room temperature, an basic alarm function, and lastly a script to automatically sync the time (NTP) when plugged up to a computer via USB. I will be releasing the full source code, schematics, and board layout files once everything is completed.