Things that make you go 🤌. Weird computer stuff. Artist and general creative type. Occasionally funny. Gentoo on main. I play rhythm games!
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My favorite thing about my channel is that every time I make a video where I say "oh and then there was this thing that nobody has and that maybe never even made it to market", I get an email from someone who has the thing and wants to send it to me.
So, yes: The Niveus "Ice Vault" did make it into consumer hands. I am waiting for additional photos to find out if it's literally just a rebranded Powerfile as I suspect, but: lol, lmao, etc.
I wonder how much of this is just your audience being the type of person who would own this sort of thing, and how much of it is people watching your videos and going like "hey my mate Greg has one of those"
... probably the former, now that I type it out loud
I mean tbh I dig the Niveus look on it. The smoky plastic of the powerfile aged horribly (bc of how it picked up scratches) but assuming the front of this is anodized aluminum it looks great still. Can't imagine how much it weighs though lol.
The worst part is just wondering if you can use it with the standard powerfile software or if it has some "bespoke" reskinned version that it will only speak to.
seeing something labeled "ice vault" in a server room and being disappointed when it turns out not to be a cooler for, like, work beer or something
Oh god, I remember Niveus. I applied to work there because I was all-in on the centralized media center concept that MCE and Niveus tried to offer (and in true Microsoft fashion, completely fuck up and abandon).
god this is so funny. even if you don't do a video you have to stick this stack somewhere.
no additional photos needed, I just pulled up a random Powerfile/VGP-XL1B on eBay and that bottom plate is identical. same button placement as the Sony unit even. curious if they kept the LCD screen somewhere, probably behind the mirror plastic trim...
Now I wonder if anyone who was a test end-user on a product I worked on over a decade ago ended up keeping the device after it got cancelled.
From what I remember, one particular big box retailer balked at the MSRP and their per-unit cost, so the project was shutdown right as we finished addressing the remaining problems from the final low volume production run before the device was supposed to go into full volume production.
The order to shut down the project came the day before my buddy was supposed to fly to Hong Kong, so he could be nearby if the factory in Shenzhen had last minute issues.
I always meant to do a project with the twenty or thirty engineering units we had around, but never had the time. I also wish I had the presence of mind to grab one of the low volume production run units. All that stuff was just dumped into a box and placed into storage.
It was a shame it never officially retailed, I think hardware hackers would have loved the unit as a relatively inexpensive Linux SBC that came with a touchscreen, battery, and speakers, and had easily accessible GPIO lines controlled by a Cypress PSoC.
It would have been very easy to replace the PSoC image and main application with your own in a firmware update binary. It was the era before we really thought about things like firmware signing for something like that, especially since it couldn't be connected to a network. All the updater cared about was that the payload's CRC matched what the binary declared.
The worst part of the project was the crunch leading up to that year's CES, where the public debut of the product occurred. We worked through the New Year holiday, and I remember at one point being so tired that I accidentally set the toaster oven in the breakroom on fire trying to reheat some pizza.
