Bench, rack, and instruments

Workshop overview: workbench with pegboard bin storage, parts organizers, and an open-frame hardware test bench — The workshop: main bench, pegboard small-parts storage, and the test-bench corner.

Electronics and repair bench

I use the main bench for board-level work. It has a programmable bench power supply, soldering and hot-air rework stations, an oscilloscope, and parts organizers stocked with components for restorations and upgrades. The open-frame test bench beside it holds the motherboard under diagnosis, allowing me to bring up and probe boards outside a case.

Electronics workbench with parts organizers, an Apple IIe awaiting repair, and an open-frame hardware test bench — The repair corner: an Apple IIe on the bench, parts organizers in the window, and the open-frame test bench on the right.

Compute

The current systems include a mobile rack with a virtualization host, hot-swap storage, and battery backup, alongside the custom machines used for applied research. The largest is Galactus, the EPYC inference server. I publish measurements from these machines in the LLM Performance Engineering Notebook.

Galactus: LLM inference server build with four AMD Radeon Pro V620 GPUs and an EPYC 7713 in a Jonsbo N5 chassis — Galactus: EPYC 7713, 2 TB DDR4, and four Radeon Pro V620s in a Jonsbo N5 chassis.

Staging and burn-in

I use a second bench to stage machines between arrival and restoration. Network switches and a KVM allow several systems to be brought up at once, with storage for machines on the shelves below.

Staging workbench with an all-in-one Macintosh, laptops, and rack-mount network switches, with tower computers shelved below — The staging bench, with machines shelved below.