Ersterhernds iMac G5 (iSight 20 A1145) Project

[kiwisincebirth]

Nice work Ersterhernd - as always!

Agreed, well executed, and good writeup throughout the project.

I've bought a non working 17" G5 iMac (A1058 model with back access) last week. I've only paid 16 bucks.

Currently I'm working on my own Arduino based SMC. I have the ambition for writing as much own code as possible. The backlight works so far and I'm able to control its brightness, The original fans work and can be controlled from one wire temperature sensors via the Arduino. However, the TMDS to HDMI mod is not yet done.

I will start a new thread later...

Can't wait to see what direction you take this. Good Luck

On another note, both you and Kiwi seem to be well onto the Arduino platform, perhaps I should break out the textbooks as well...

I would agree with MacTester give it a go.

For me it was a simple choice, The complexity of my project requires multiple threads of execution, to control the multiple output devices. To do this the PicAxe language would have been very hard to do, and problematic to debug and maintain.

Simply controlling one or two functions in a Picaxe is perfectly fine, but doesn't scale to large projects. Remember most modern OS's are based in C, C++, So anything you learn in Arduino is transferable to many other programming situations.

At the beginning I had some problems with the C++ language, but now I will never go back to the Picaxe.

A good testimonial

Kiwi

 

[ersterhernd]

Agreed, well executed, and good writeup throughout the project.

Can't wait to see what direction you take this. Good Luck

I would agree with MacTester give it a go.

For me it was a simple choice, The complexity of my project requires multiple threads of execution, to control the multiple output devices. To do this the PicAxe language would have been very hard to do, and problematic to debug and maintain.

Simply controlling one or two functions in a Picaxe is perfectly fine, but doesn't scale to large projects. Remember most modern OS's are based in C, C++, So anything you learn in Arduino is transferable to many other programming situations.

A good testimonial

Kiwi

Thanks Kiwi. Yes, your project is very complex and the SMC you are creating is nothing less than brilliant. I chose to keep this (and my 17" G5) much simpler, using only 2 basic Picaxe circuits; one for the LED and the other to trigger the Apple Startup Chime.

Although I'm not active in programming anymore, I developed a VB6 application about 12 years ago that ended up being nearly 100K lines of code. It monitored all placings at two of our provincial horse race tracks each racing season, and divided up over $2 million of award monies for broodmare and stallion owners. It took 16 months to develop and I maintained it until just last year.

For this reason, even though I have no C++ background, I'm tempted to pick it up and learn the Arduino application of it. You have been the primary inspiration from this, and obviously its catching on.

I'm very interested to see how warm your system runs when its completed and sealed up. This 20" often gets into the mid to high 70 degree range, even if the fans are switched from 3.3V up to 5V which makes a lot more noise. The difference between the 17" and 20" is stark, especially under load.

Looking fwd to both your project completion and now MacTesters as well. Glad the G5 is becoming more popular, its truly a great system to mod.


Ersterhernd

 

[Uwillparish]

ERMERGERD, INCREDIBLE, AMAZING, I CANT EVEN DESCRIBE IT!

But seriously, Amazing job

 

[ersterhernd]

This is a video summary of the project that I made today. I'm very happy with the build after several days of full-on use.


YouTube Link



[video=youtube;oMJm00lnaOQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMJm00lnaOQ[/video]



Ersterhernd

 

[ersterhernd]

Updated the 20" G5 to Yosemite tonight. Went reasonably smooth with only a couple of minor challenges. Its running on the 2nd partition of the mSATA SSD installed in the system, Mavericks 10.9.2 is on partition 1.

A quick overview of the steps to get the DC3217BY NUC running 10.10 of OSX...

1. Create USB Installer with Unibeast
2. Place DSDT.aml and SMBIOS.PLIST into /Extra on USB
3. Boot to Installer - no extra flags needed and completed the installation successfully
4. Replaced AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext with the one from Mavericks
5. Copied the boot.plist from /Extra in Mavericks and added the kext-dev-mode=1 kernel flag
6. Tried boot but machine hung on a memory allocation error after AppleKextExcludeList.kext loaded
7. Renamed AppleKextExcludeList.kext (in S/L/E) with a .bak extension as a workaround
8. Booted successfully to Yosemite desktop with -V flag (took extra time due to step 7 change)
9. Rebooted successfully with minimal delay but with a minor boot screen graphical glitch.


**UPDATE (Oct 20/14) : The kext-dev-mode=1 kernel flag in /Extra is not required. I took it out. The AppleKextExcludeList.kext reappeared and caused the memory allocation error again. This time, I went into the kext and emptied out all the entries in the Info.Plist inside the kext. Seems to have fixed it. The boot screen (Apple Logo & Scrollbar) glitch was fixed by using the blackIOGraphicsFamily zip file from this post. Installed the modified IOGraphicsFamily kext with Kext Utility.



The G5 20" Yosemite Installation. cDock app is used for the transparent dock.

Ersterhernd

 

[MacTester57]

The G5 20" Yosemite Installation. cDock app is used for the transparent dock.

Nice! I like the new dock "as it is"

MacTester

 

[ersterhernd]

Update: The G5 20" build has been updated to the Clover bootloader through UEFI. This allows a totally vanilla installation with kext injection & modification done by Clover at boot time. I'm very impressed with Clover, it was worth spending a couple of days to familiarize myself with it. I did a clean install of Yosemite in this system, then installed Clover to the EFI partition.


Cheers!

 

[jctjepkema]

Wow i think you have done a very good job! I really Love it!
I have a question if i may ask!
How did you recognize it when the intel nuc is in sleep mode. I am currently working on my powermac G5 build, which i want clean on the inside and on the outside. I also want to add de glowing LED, my first thoughts where doing it through PWM using Arduino. But then how do i recognize if the MotherBoard is in Sleep Mode and not Off.
Thanks in Advance!

 

[ersterhernd]

Wow i think you have done a very good job! I really Love it!
I have a question if i may ask!
How did you recognize it when the intel nuc is in sleep mode. I am currently working on my powermac G5 build, which i want clean on the inside and on the outside. I also want to add de glowing LED, my first thoughts where doing it through PWM using Arduino. But then how do i recognize if the MotherBoard is in Sleep Mode and not Off.
Thanks in Advance!

Hello, this post should answer your questions.

http://www.tonymacx86.com/imac-mods/102250-ersterhernds-nucimac-g4-16.html#post663073


Cheers!

 

[jctjepkema]

Thank you very much!!