Stargate

The Zerone Technologies Central Computer, or Stargate Mark 1, was my first desktop computer. I was 17. It was the central computer of my room: media server, web server, and the thing that switched the fans, the TV and the lights.

The hardware

An Intel Core i5 650, 8 GB of RAM, 1.5 TB of disks and a GeForce GTX 560 Ti that I found very cheap, because its cooling fan was failing. An Arduino Uno sat between the computer and the household hardware, running a program I wrote for it.

ztOS and the CORE

It ran ztOS, my own setup on top of Debian. At its centre was the CORE, the Central Operations Register Engine: one program that took every command and decided what to do with it. Around it I wrote the rest.

• The GPU Stabiliser. The cheap GPU overheated, so the CORE read its temperature and drove an external fan through the Arduino.
• A hardware monitor for the CPU, GPU and the rest, live.
• CORE Link, which let me send commands and files to the computer from a phone or another PC over SSH.
• Automatic lights by time of day, voice commands, and a fan that came on when the system ran hot.
• A user check. I repaired an old CCTV camera and used it to tell whether anyone was sitting at the computer.

How it ended

After two years the GPU died. I got it going again for a while by reballing it, and then the motherboard failed too, and I had to take the Stargate apart.

A lot of what I do now started here. The CORE itself went on for four versions; the last one ran on my TUF A15.

Some of its software is still on GitHub: the hardware monitor, the ztOS programs and the DataSync uploader.