The POD landed on Monday, I quickly brought it home, fired up Variax Workbench and connected the guitar… Nothing… I wiggled the cable in the back of the guitar, connected, disconnected… Oh no! I look inside the port and it’s fairly obvious somebody has smashed a 1/4″ jack in there, bent some of the pins, deformed the plastic runners for the pins to slide up and down, it was a gone-er.

Frantically googling I discovered lots of parts that used to be available but nothing that has recently been in stock anywhere.

Went digging around the internet to learn more about this Ethercon / Neutrik interface / socket and managed to track down the NE8FAV which is the same socket used on the PCB of the Variax 600’s (I presume all Variax’s – at least the first generation – use the same port).

Ordered the NE8FAV for £5 (Plus shipping, plus handling worked out to £18 to get it to my door quick smart) and a little bit of soldering later and I’m back in action! So I thought best to get a post on here for anybody else who finds themselves in a similar position.

Disclaimer, if your device is in warranty and/or you’re not comfortable soldering, don’t attempt this repair. It’s fairly straight forward but neither myself or anybody else can be held responsible if you mess this up. – That aside, lets get this guitar fixed!

Remove the 4 screws holding the jack plate into the corner of the guitar, I personally put them down on my desk in a sequence that allows me to put the same screw back in the same hole, just good practice in my opinion.

With the plate loose, gently lift the plate away from the guitar being careful not to pull on anything that doesn’t want to move, the wires and everything is packed in there quite tight so approach this with care and you’ll soon have it out enough to lift the plate away and remove the 2 pin connector and the 8 pin connector (Note that only one wire is connected to the 2 pin connector, don’t panic you didn’t pull anything off!)

With the plate still attached to the guitar, gently tilt the assembly towards you and remove the 2 screws holding the VDI port in place.

The PCB should wiggle out from the back of the plate, I angled the non-PUSH side down first and then slid that forward so I could un-hook the PUSH tab.

With the PCB out you’re rocking and rolling now!

VDI PCB and new replacement socket side by side (excuse the dog hair stuck to the Amazon pouch, two big hairy dogs, that stuff gets everywhere!) as you can see the parts are identical.

Now this is the tricky part, I added a little bit of low melt solder to the 9 solder joins, there’s 8 that you can see in the middle of the PCB and a lonely pin hiding just to the left of the 2 pin socket in the image above.

Once you’ve de soldered the socket, wipe down the PCB with a little Isopropyl and make sure that you’ve not melted the 2 pin JST connector like I did! Whoops!

Carefully fit your new socket ensuring everything lines up and all of the pins have come through the board ready for you to solder them in place.

Time to add some flux and do some soldering, remember, heat the joint and apply the solder to the joint, don’t go feeding solder into the iron. So I like to heat the right hand side of a pin and then apply the solder form the left side. Also keep in mind that these pins go into a plastic housing, so watch how much heat you’re applying and take a short rest between pins.

I clamped mine down and whilst applying pressure to the board I did the single pin near the 2 pin JST socket first to lock that in place and the I slowly worked my way around the remaining 8 pins.

I then wiped everything down with Isopropyl again to remove any remaining flux and the job was done!

New pristine socket ready to go!

Re-fitment is reversal of removal (love saying that), be careful when screwing the socket back in, you’re cutting new threads in plastic so it will need a bit of force but you don’t want to go swinging off it. Also when screwing the jack plate back into the body don’t go cranking on those screws either or you’ll strip the wood and that’s a whole other guide! (thankfully one I haven’t had to write for myself yet!).

I hope this helps anybody who’s in the same position, I would wholeheartedly suggest you get this repair done by Line 6 if that’s an option!

I however wasn’t in a position to and it’s a 22 year old guitar, if it wasn’t a quick cheap fix I’d probably not have fixed it and sold the guitar on (like passing on a bad penny!).

Lots of love

Panic

Whilst the X280 is missing a few ThinkPad features that I often look for (removable battery being the key one!) it also only had a single m.2 slot for a PCIe NVMe SSD. However one upgrade I did with my T580 was to add a second one into the m.2 WWAN slot.

Eager to get Windows installed on one drive and Kali installed on another, I ripped the m.2 out of my T580’s WWAN slot and threw it into the X280. Alas it wasn’t detected, as far as I can tell via some Googling, the X280 can only use a PCIe NVMe drive that uses 2 x PCIe lanes. Now I don’t know enough about PCIe to say “Yes or No” to this statement or even know if it’s true, however the NVMe that I had didn’t work.

So I did some more Googling and kept coming back to a Western Digital SN520 drive. Only problem was these aren’t sold new anymore, so I took to eBay and managed to hunt one down.

Success!

Once that landed it was time to rip the laptop apart and get it fitted!

Removing the bottom cover is a fairly simple process, this is one of the nicer Lenovos as far as removal goes actually, it’s literally 5 screws, no plastic to pry, no ports to try and get the cover over etc. Simply loosen the screws highlighted below and you’re good to go!

After removing the back panel the WWAN slot is located just to the left of the WLAN / Wireless card highlighted below

Installing the drive is a doddle, there’s already a screw in the post so simply remove that first and then slot in and screw down your new NVMe SSD.

And that’s it, you’ll need to ensure that the WWAN slot is enabled in your BIOS settings (I believe it is by default) and then you should be good to go!

I got Kali installed on mine and Windows installed on the primary.

As I mentioned I had a bit of a tough time tracking down the WD SN520 drive but it’s the only one I could confirm as working. Good luck and have fun! If you have any questions you can reach out to me via Twitter @PanicAcid

Thanks for reading!

If you haven’t already seen Part 1 feel free to check that out here: https://panicacid.com/building-teenagedirtbag-part-1-initial-setup-and-testing/

Any links to Amazon products will be affiliate links, helps pay the bills and doesn’t cost you a penny, but if you strip the link I will totally understand. I’ll be sad, but I’ll understand.

Following on from the DC29 WWWD (which was my first ever time competing in the WWWD) I had a plan in mind to build myself a bitchin’ wardriving rig for DC30’s WWWD and it was all built around two pieces of hardware, the ZimaBoard and the Alftel 12 slot PCIe carrier board.

I first saw the ZimaBoard on Kickstarter, at the time I was already familiar with the Alftel 12 slot card as I’d seen @d4rkm4tter use it in his Kraken Lite build. But I had no idea what I’d use to run the card with if I managed to get hold of one. The second I saw the ZimaBoard I just knew it would be perfect for it!

Below we have the ZimaBoard and the OpenUPS2 (more on the OpenUPS2 below).

Lets go into a bit more detail on the ZimaBoard, what is it? what does it do? and how am I going to use it in this build?

The ZimaBoard is a Single Board Computer (SBC) created by IceWhale – https://www.zimaboard.com

It comes in three different flavours but when I backed it on Kickstarter I knew straight away that I was going to use it as a base for my next war driving rig, so I backed the highest spec one which is the ZimaBoard 832 this includes:

• Intel N3450 Quad Core Processor @ 1.1Ghz / 2.2Ghz Burst
• 8GB RAM
• 32GB of eMMC flash storage
• 6W TDP
• 2 x SATA 6GB/s Ports
• 2 x USB 3.0
• 2x GbE LAN Ports
• 1x PCle 2.0 x4 (<— That’s the part I really wanted!)
• DC 12V 5.5×2.5mm
• Passive Cooling

Now that’s not an exhaustive list but it’s enough for us, check out the link above if you need some more details on the ZimaBoard

First thing I had to figure out about the ZimaBoard was adding more storage, it comes with SATA cables for you to hook up drives, but I knew I was going to be sticking this thing into a case and I didn’t want to have to mess around mounting a drive on, under, next to or otherwise.

3D Printing to the rescue! As soon as I had the ZimaBoard in hand I went straight over to Thingiverse and started looking for 3D prints and I found a delightful print (you can find that print here) which bolts into the bottom of the ZimaBoard and incorporates the PCB of a SanDisk SSD into the base.

This print was great for me as it turned the ZimaBoard and SSD into one nice compact unit.

So I’ve now got some more storage on the ZimaBoard, but what comes next? Well for me that was a new OS. The ZimaBoards ship with CasaOS but for my application it’s a bit too bloated, has a webGUI and other gubbins that I didn’t need.

In comes Ubuntu Server, it’s what I’m used to, noob friendly and there’s plenty of documentation out there on the interwebs for it.

That’s OS selection and installation done, which is super easy on the ZimaBoard, make a bootable USB, hook up a keyboard and display and you’re off. Installation was a breeze and Ubuntu liked the hardware without any issues.

Once I got into Ubuntu there were a few things I setup, mainly to improve the boot speeds. I noticed straight away during boot it’d hang waiting for DHCP on the second NIC. This wasn’t ideal as once this thing is out war driving it might not have either NIC hooked up, to combat this head into /etc/netplan/ and edit your netplan yaml file (should just be the one in there post install) and add optional: true

Then I wanted to tweak GRUB as it had the default time out set on it which again further delays boot, which when I’m out war driving, I don’t want or need. Getting the rig up and running as quickly as possible is the goal.

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Change the default time out from 0 to 1 with GRUB 0 = Default which is 10 seconds (I think!). If you change it to 1 you’re going to get through that timeout in 1 second, which I’m no mathematician but 1 second is quicker than 10 seconds haha.

Once you’ve edited that you need to update GRUB with the following

sudo update-grub

Reboot and see if everything starts quicker – it does?! Success!

So that’s Ubuntu installed and starting quicker, the next thing on the agenda was to install Kismet. I’m not going to go into detail on installing Kismet because the documentation will do more for you than I ever can.

Personally I always install the nightly builds as Dragorn (@KismetWireless) is always adding new features that make my life easier when it comes to war driving.

Head over to the docs, find the build that suits your install and follow the instructions to install via git https://www.kismetwireless.net/docs/readme/packages/

Once we’ve got Kismet installed we need to give it some WiFi, now at this point I didn’t have the Alftel 12 slot, they’re an expensive and hard to find bit of kit so for testing purposes I used a single AX210 card in a PCIe carrier slot.

I can’t find any pictures of Kismet running with just this one radio so you’ll have to take my word for it that it worked ha ha.

After confirming that Kismet worked a treat on the ZimaBoard with just the one radio, the next stop was GPS – we need GPS for war driving as that enables us to log where each SSID was seen.

For GPS I use a cheap and cheerful external, magnetic and waterproof USB GPS receiver which you can find on Amazon here it’s a u-blox based device and I’ve had great success using them with GPSD.

That’s right, I said GPSD, this seems to be the easiest method for getting GPS data into Kismet and I switched to using it after Dragorn recommended it after I had some GPS issues with my previous build.

Again I wont go into too much detail on installing and configuring GPSD itself as they have their own documentation that you can find here.

Once you’ve got GPSD installed you need to tell Kismet to use it for GPS. To do this edit your kismet_site.conf file and add the following line

gps=gpsd:host=localhost,port=2947

This line tells Kismet that we’re using GPSD for GPS and it’s running locally on the same machine that Kismet is running on.

Give Kismet a quick restart and check if we now have GPS

sudo systemctl restart kismet

Reconnect to Kismet and if everything has worked properly we should see some GPS coordinates in the top right.

So now we have a working war driving setup with GPS and a Radio, time to make it mobile! Checkout Part 2 for how we power this setup and shove it into a hard case.

Building TeenageDirtbag – Part 2 – Mobile Power and Case Design