wisex

Hello everyone, Long story short I have a windows based gaming PC that I'm interested in converting into a NAS/Server and am also curious if it would be possible to have the PC concurrently work as a steam box for casual couch style gaming? The desktop has an AMD Ryzen 5 3600x and an Rx 580 8GB, it sports a 256GB SSD as the windows install drive and a 2TB 7500rpm Sandism(?) HDD. My family has a host of windows and mac computers and I want them to be able to access all the family photos from their computers as I feel kinda bad that they've barely seen them because they're just on my computer. I do expect to get a second 2tb SSD just to have a back up of the main drive as... its our only copy of all the family photos (plus a bunch of other family photos on a separate portable HDD that we've barely touched... So theres no need for high performance type approaches as its not like we're going to be editing off this computer or anything and I mean... thinking about it maybe it would also be cool if there was a kind of 'streaming' ability as well as we are considering cutting Netflix as well.... Does anyone know of any good tutorial videos of people converting a windows PC to a NAS/ gaming box/ (not obligatory) streaming box?

Ahhh high schoolers going through their libertarian stage reminds me of my time in high school.... ya grow out of it

Stirling engines tend to have a 40% efficiency in which ICE's generalls have about a 25-30% efficiency? in terms of capturing the heat and all.... in a theoritcal sense we would want to seal the PC so as to ensure that the most heat is sent thorugh the stirling engine while ignoring the heat radiating from the metal case itself

Failure of the tubing is actually something I didn't really consider... although 60C would be about a 35 degree temperature differential which would hopefully have these things running pretty well... but you're right that theres definitely more to consider

I did see both of his videos on that project but this is a fundamentally different approach because he's kinda using it how it should lol. What Linus did in his videos is run actual power through the generator to operate it as a kind of mini heat pump. My approach is not to run power through the node but to instead use the computers heat to generate power, and then a benefit is that some of the heat from the water is removed. I would be interested in your baseboard set up though

Do you have any links to those videos? Best I can find is a guy who had maybe 4 generators thermal pasted to some heat sinks while he tried to blow some of the PC's hot air through the fins to create some heat which.... he didn't really accomplish much... hence why I want to do it in a watercooled system

Hello everyone, So this post is kind of an evolution of the last post I had made regarding harvesting the waste heat of a PC using a stirling engine. I think I found something that can probably be a little more practical to harvest waste heat from my PC to use it to charge small devices.... and the benefit that its a cheaper, quieter solution... its called a 'thermo electric generator' or 'peltier Generator,' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOacM-syXGI basically its a two sided pad that can transfer heat energy from one pad to another, cooling one side down a lot and heating up the other (kind of like a heat pump type thing), its basically a mini heat transfer device thats often used for something like those small fridges that keep 3 beer cans cold. The thing with these though is that if you don't run current throguh it and instead put a hot material on the hot plate while also cooling the other side you can actually generate a voltage within the device. Now from what I've been able to find theres definitely some pro's and cons. The pro is that I'd still be able to harvest heat energy, its a much cheaper device that is readily available on Ebay for like $4 a module, it would be significantly quieter than a sterling engine, and it would kind of 'activate automatically' as the temperature differential gets greater as opposed to the sterling engine which would need a manual start when it reaches a certain threshold. Neutral thing would be that I think it would be easier to integrate this into a computer since I wouldn't need to completely seal off the computer but could instead maybe run a slightly more complicated water loop design? Whats the downside though, the main downside is that the 'cooling side' is basically sandwiched with the hot plate as opposed to the totally separate bulb in the sterling engine, this means that I would have to be able to provide a kind of heat exchanger to heat up the hot side, and a radiator to actively cool the cold side as efficiency is affected by the temperature difference of both plates, this can seemingly be accomplished with a basic CPU cooler. My idea was hopefully going to be a simpler one than the sterling engine. My plan would be to run a kind of custom water loop, I would want water to cool the CPU and GPU so as to collect as much heat as possible, the water would then be stored in a large-ish water reservoir of which I would cut some of the side off and try to have a whole section of the warm side of thermal generators with radiators trying to collect as much heat from the water as possible. The goal of the thermal electric generators, aside from making electricity, would be to remove as much of the thermal energy from the water as possible to run it back through the loop. Then I would probably have some other larger radiators on the back sides of the generators to enture that there's a good amount of cooling, perhaps having the cooler stick out the side of the PC case so that it can contact cool ambient air? having the resivoir close to the edge of the computer perhaps? It would probably also be best to have a thermally insulated water container to be circulating the water into?

It doesn't take a lot of energy to get them going, but the greater the temperature delta the more torque they can usually have, they'll reach a certain speed but they can definitely power individual loads and what not I think... at least I've seen people run arduinos off one without a voltage regulator and stuff

Yea on air cooling, I really just have stock materials really

Yea thats a good point, apparently my PC idles around 40-50C when I'm going about my daily tasks, and according to some of the specs I'm seeing it wouldn't generate all too much really.... when I'm gaming then yes there can be a lot more generation as well... the water cooling is probaby just an alternative to the original plan which was just sealing off the PC case which would just warm up the metal case too, at least with the water loops I'd be able to concentrate the heat a lot better to have it dissipated where I want it

Funny that I just see your message because I've been looking into that today. My second plan was to see if I could water cool the CPU and GPU but instead of having the blocks connected to radiators I could have a water resivoir that has a bunch of thermo electric generators with radiators sticking into the warm/hot water in an attempt to remove as much heat from the water as possible in the attempt to to create as much charge as possible while also being able to effectively cool the components. From what I've seen online one 40x40mm generator can create about 1V at abuot 300 mA when theres about a 20 degree C delta between the cool and hot ends...So assuming you keep your house at the usual 25 degrees celcius you can totally trickle charge a 6v battery that runs to a small inverter that can charge a phone and stuff, just make sure you have a bunch of them connected in series to up the voltage... and if they make a video if I could get a shoutout that would be really cool lol

Thats true, from what I've seen online a sterling engine is better for heat sources that don't variate so much, then again I would probably use this to trickle charge a battery to charge my phone with, more of a personal experiement than anything

Hello everyone, As energy prices have started soaring here in Florida, we've been trying to find ways to reduce our power usage. Right now the gaming PC I have really just achieves in warming up whatever room I'm in when I'm putting heavy loads on it, be it gaming or video editing... What if it was possible to harvest some of that heat to turn it into kinetic energy that can be harvested to make electricity? The Stirling engine is an old tech that uses the temperature differential between (usually) two plates to push a piston that rotates a fly wheel, the rotation of that fly wheel can be connected to a small generator that can probably be used to charge something like portable batteries and such? For the best efficiency the case would have to be entirely sealed and heat generating components would probably need passive style coolers on it so that any air current inside the case doesn't affect the operation of the stirling engine... I don't mind my PC running hot but would the power dissipation from the stirling engines be enough to have any noticeable power offset (perhaps with reduced AC useage as well)? Would it just be like having a PC with no case fans and passive heat sink coolers? How much power do you reckon would be possible to create with one sterling engine alone(or multiple?)? perhaps having the PC in a separate room to avoid the noise of the sterling engines would also be the best option? Ideally my plan would be to get a few of these engines to charge up a nice battery bank that I can probably charge my portable electronics with... I would share the engines that I'm looking at as a consideration but I wanna get everyones feedback and criticism of this project... also I don't know what the rules are regarding posting links for buying things?... So would this be a possibility? One like this (the first video) would probably be the best one to mount on top of the case, these can be found for about $40 on amazon, but some similar models with already included generators can be found for about $20 on aliexpress...

Ok hot take here, I don't feel bad about these tech companies having their IP stolen or having companies sell their IP's via strong arm tactics or whatever... I'm not going to lose sleep over a company no longer having a monopoly over a certain technological process, and this goes for everything honestly.. Like oh no Chinese companies forced an insulin company to open their IP to the market, woe is me now theres not a monopoly on insulin production in China and they have to compete??... Curving the power of monopoly corporations is a good thing

I don't care about high refresh rate, I'm a lot happier with my 1440p 75hz panel that has excellent color contrast and color reproduction as opposed to having some shitty TN panel with crappy brightness all for the sake of getting 150hz or whatever.