The most important one is how to bodge something to make it work, a bodge is not good looking its not clever and its not elegant but it will work. A bodge must be quick and use whatever you have to hand.
From quick and dirty batch files to boot a RasberryPi directly to a webpage , or hacking together a quick webcam feed that, rather than live feed just refreshes the page every 30 seconds using the browsers reset function, to gaffa tape WD40 and best of all cable ties.
My latest bodge stars a standalone PhysX card (pre nvidia days) that should by all intensive purposes cooked itself many years ago.
The Background
There is a PC that runs an art installation had a software issue so I take a look. Hey why not open it and clean it? its been running for 8 years straight without a break it will be dirty.
The software is the least of my worries, what i see inside is terrifying. I find the PhysX card, the heat sync is falling off , the fan has jammed and the thing looks like its spent a few too many years in a reflow oven. Not to mention the dust, oh hell the dust. but our friends at metrovac have that covered.
I have to fix this thing, the artist is long gone and this is no standard software , i am guessing it wont work on any up to date versions of windows or on a modern card that supports PhysX
The Bodge
First of all the old fan has to go , its dangerous and i don't know how it has not smoked the whole PC. I don't even need to unscrew the fan from the heatsync it falls right off showing whats left of the wiring and the fan mount, the 5v wire is as black as the ground and there is exposed copper, the clips holding it to the PCB are scorched as well and fall off into dust when i try to pop them out. This .... looks terminal.
Under the heat sync i find what looks to have at one time been thermal compound but now it just looks like dry grey paint
After dreading the ebay search to come I think to myself , its a 1 in a million chance that card is alive , but you need to give it a chance, if you don't try you will never know right?
So with a bottle of rubbing alcohol some cotton buds some new thermal compound, the remains of the heat sync a fan from the box of bits and some cable ties i set to work, and this is what i come up with.
- Unknown-1.png (600.17 KiB) Viewed 5108 times
- Unknown.png (745.6 KiB) Viewed 5108 times
I even used ( what was left of ) the old fan cable so the fan is powered by the card. ( solder and electrical tape , another good tool in the arsenal of the bodger)
How the hell the caps did not fry I don’t know.
I have never in my life been speechless but when that thing passed its internal tests I could not even think of something to say.
.
So how about you guys , any bodges your proud of ?
I just wish i had the skill to update our LED screen on the front of the building , its dim and low resolution.
), that was a scene to be filmed, big power drill vacuum cleaner and plastic bags in a rack full with expensive servers running mission critical shit. We had to install a new server, no place in another rack but this one, and mounting holes completely different 
Wanted a down-time but it wasn't granted, so we did it Chuck Norris style 
