Thanks for all the help mate, got it working, see update.

oh bugger. The results were underwhelming to the say the least. NOTHING happens. I was expecting I might have trouble getting things working right away but I must say I wasn’t expecting literally nothing to happen.

I have the card in the PCIe slot on the chassis, the ATX PSU screwed in place and the cables from the PSU plugged in to the chassis 24 pin and 4 pin slots. I turned on the chassis’ own switch, the PSU’s switch and also plugged the thunderbolt cable in and nothing. No fans whirring, no smell of anything frying, no sound indicating I’d just broken 3 expensive pieces of equipment at once, just nothing. Any ideas? The chassis in question is this thing https://peladn.com/products/graphics-card-docking-station-1 and the PCIe card is this thing https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/au/products/decklink/techspecs/W-DLK-32 .

It’s all hooked up like this https://imgur.com/a/nothing-happens-PftKNUk

Thanks so much, this is very encouraging. The eGPU chassis has it’s own little built in power switch. It also has a 24 pin socket that it needs to power itself so hopefully I don’t need to do anything complicated like simulating anything as I’m a little lost by that idea. The power supply itself has a power on/off switch as well.

In the interests of brevity I may have given the wrong idea of the setup. I’m trying to make use of an old Blackmagic Decklink mini-monitor 4k pcie device. I now use a laptop with TB4 ports, rather than the PC this card used to sit it. This card is actually not a GPU, which this eGPU enclosure is supposed to be for, but I’m hoping it will work just the same. It’s a TB4 eGPU chassis that takes an ATX power supply and has a single PCIe 16x slot. The card is actually a 4x slot but I think it should work. Anyway there’s only the one power supply, this old 600w PSU that I’ve cannibalised from my old PC.

The manual, entirely in Chinese and only a couple of pages long, says to connect the enclosure to the PSU and the PSU to the GPU. That’s all. Although even if it were a more rigorous manual I don’t know if they could really provide much guidance here. It’s designed for you to use whatever PSU you want, either ATX or SFX and just hook it up.

I’m just asking because I haven’t done a lot of PC building before and am not familiar with the ins and outs of types of PSU connectors. In this case, I’m unsure why the PSU manufacturer group these 2 connectors together but gave the customer the option to separate them.

I need it to dual purpose as central storage for editing though. That has no chance of working wirelessly. Whether NAS or DAS it’ll have to be connected directly to the lappy to ever work for editing, but the N part of being NAS could be handy for the wireless streaming of compressed media for entertainment purposes. I can do that with DAS and using the laptop as the server part of the operation, but it might prove to be smarter to directly attach a NAS by cable to the lappy for editing and let it connect to wifi itself for serving up media to watch in the rest of the house. In that second scenario I guess I’d have the NAS running jellyfin or emby or whatever and running that NAS 24/7. Just not sure on which arrangement makes more sense and is most efficient and cost effective.

The laptop can definitely handle it, both on paper and in practice in the actual scenario we’re describing as well as for more demanding editing tasks, it does this task absolutely flawlessly as one might expect, I’m just unsure if I want to keep it running 24/7 for the home media streaming hence the possibility of a NAS or your router suggestion. But I can’t picture a router having the resources to handle transcoding or really running much of anything. Granted though, it just serving up files to me without any kind of server software is tempting in it’s simplicity.

hmm. That is an interesting idea. I guess the router wouldn’t have the juice to do anything other than serve up the file though? No running of jellyfin or transcoding on the fly for chromecast or anything like that?

That’s what I was thinking. My biggest home project are only a 1-2 TB max, and most are more in the order of 200-400GB. The type of DAS options I’m thinking of would be RAID systems. I’m fond of the LaCie ones just because of familiarity and relative reliability, but I do think they’re overpriced and they went through a period a few years ago, of a pretty major quality dip. I haven’t dealt with them much since but I think they seemed to have pulled themselves back up from that.

It’s not a major concern that I’d spend a lot of money on, but the idea of self-hosting a little mini home netflix seems fun and I guess for that I’d want things to be always on. Ideally there’d be one piece of hardware for each purpose given it’s a little unprofessional to host my home viewing content on the same storage as professional media, and I guess if the drives are always spinning then they’d wear faster just so they can be ready at a moment’s notice for me to watch TV but I don’t really have the space or money to buy dedicated equipment for each so I’m hoping to dual purpose here. There’s always the option to buy a cheap ‘passport’ drive that’s always connected to the laptop as the ‘media server’ for my jellyfin content and have the laptop be running the jellyfin server as it is now, it’s just, I guess I wondered if that made less sense because I’ll need more editing storage eventually anyway, and maybe running my very expensive laptop 24/7 would cost more in the long run than running a NAS.

I don’t have an iPhone, though I understand the shortcuts of Mac os are supposed to be compatible with iOS so maybe there’s a possibility the instructions could work on my Mac. I don’t want to convert the images though just strip that metadata.

The other thing is, I kind of want to do it this way because there’s something of an ulterior motive here where I want to learn to make simple applications and buttons that work with various command line apps I use frequently on my computer, like a crude form of home made GUI. I find that there are often such apps where I only use one or two commands and use just often enough to need an easier way but infrequently enough not to remember the syntax of what to type.

no it’s very easy to modify. I just wanted not to have to open up terminal and try and remember what the commands were every time I upload something to the internet

I think the trouble is this decklink device is not ejectable. It’s not storage. I can always be sure to power down the laptop before disconnect the enclosure perhaps.

Oh this is an interesting thing I might have missed. So, to be clear, when I want to use this device (thankfully not an all the time thing), I need to turn off the laptop, turn on the enclosure, hook up the laptop then power the laptop on? Is that about right? Or can I connect the enclosure to the laptop at any point laptop on or not, but if I want to physically power off the enclosure then I need to power off the laptop to first?

What typically happens if you don’t follow best practice in these types of situations? Do you physically damage components or just crash the computer? Bit worried about busting my laptop because I did this wrong or a cat brushed a cable or something. Not the end of the world if I break the card or the enclosure I guess, but the laptop would be a painfully expensive lesson.

Nice. I like what I hear. What’s the best way to deal with this hotplugging situation? Power on the enclosure with the device plugged in first and then attach to the lappy via thunderbolt? Or something else? What happens if you mess that up, does anything physically break? Or just a crash that I can reboot from?

One last thing. One of the 2 products I’m looking at, the better of the 2 because it also comes with an m.2 slot and some extra ports, has instructions in a youtube video about connecting power supply cables to the GPU itself as well as the enclosure. My card only consumes 10w of power and doesn’t take external power. If I connect a power supply to the enclosure and plug in the card, it should just draw power from the PCIe slot right?

I think it will connect just fine, it’s just that the device was made before Apple Silicone existed so I’m unsure if it will continue to do it’s job on a current version of Mac os

Yeh but this is Lemmy and the picture is even hosted on a Lemmy server. Ain’t nobody paying for clicks from some tiny niche community of Linux nerds and disgruntled reddit refugees.

When I have a BBQ, even where all the guests are meat eaters, I still like to have a potato salad and vegetable skewers and bread and sometimes a regular salad and roasted corn and sometimes roasted eggplant. I like to think if there was a vegetarian there, they’d be well catered for by default without me having to really do anything different. I love meat, and for a BBQ it’s typically the star of the show, but you’re going to want a supporting cast.

Have the beer anyway though, you might well get hit by a car tomorrow.

Well there you go, completely authentic poor workplace safety even in the middle of the photo being taken someone has somehow been permanently fused into a table.

I’ll add to the chorus. No, by definition this isn’t gas lighting, but the behaviour is extreme and no less concerning. I’ll not try to give amateur psychological diagnosis over the internet like some here are apparently willing to do, but you don’t need that to know that she’s acting in a really fucked up way.

I wouldn’t say you were “in the wrong” for missing her text, I mean, you missed it, it’s not like you chose to do that, but I can see why from her perspective it felt temporarily frightening and it made her angry to be put in that situation (I’m assuming she was just frightened and that that’s justified where you guys live, because where I am, her request is strange in the first place and getting mad about it not being fulfilled is ludicrous). How she’s dealt with those unpleasant, but temporary emotions that had a perfectly reasonable explanation and resulted in no actual harm is unreasonable, unfair and ridiculous.

The questions themselves are as manipulative as they are pointless. “What would you tell my mother?” I hardly think that’s a particularly important consideration “she’s been kidnapped” probably, since that’s what’s happened in this scenario, the question is not asked to get an answer, it’s asked to maximise guilt because she thinks it’s your fault if some psychopath kidnaps her. The subsequent questions likewise are selfish questions to ask because realistic answers are implicitly unacceptable, she just wanted debasement and contrition. If the CCTV is broken then the police, who would be the ones investigating this, would have their investigation compromised, there’d be little you or anyone could do about that hence asking because she wants some kind of super hero saves the princess type of answer or for you to have no answer so she can pounce. She’s extracting false or unrealistic promises on purpose as a kind of emotional salve. The worst and most concerning of all is the request that you kill someone for her, this is real life, not John Wick. I can only assume and hope that she doesn’t really actually believe you’d do any of this nor really want it and it’s just part of this stupid punishment where you’ve got to promise the moon over and over until she feels you’ve made an idiot if yourself for long enough. If she really is sincere about that request and wants to bring it up again in any serious capacity that really would be time to leave because the fact that she has a manipulative streak and is now apparently murderous as well raises a lot red flags, but most likely she was never serious to begin with and this will likely not be something that comes up particularly often. This was up to you but frankly I would have stopped the game of make believe at that point and not actually made a promise to kill people on her behalf even if it’s all non-specific fantasy, it’s not a prospect that should be entertained on any level. The thing about the cat was just funny and honestly would have been kind of sweet if it wasn’t for everything that came before. It is evident from the order of questions and the fact that you had answers to everything at that point that she was reaching for a “gotcha” to prove you don’t think about things because you’re somehow inconsiderate.

This response to an everyday wrinkle in the fabric of life is something to keep an eye on because if she cannot deal with being temporarily made to endure bad feelings on occasion without having to make you pay then this is going to happen to you a lot and the things you’re accused of or indirectly implied to be responsible for will be long and absurd. Let her cool off on this specific incident and if after there’s been time to reflect, she still brings it up again with the same manipulative and guilt tripping approach I’d suggest to her that maybe it’s not working out. If this single incident has shaken her faith in you so badly maybe she could take some responsibility for her own safety since apparently nothing you say will convince her that you’ll be of any use in that regard.

Yeh that definitely sucks they’ve rigged it up in a way that’s unusual for this type of work and also forces you in to this situation. Redirecting is good and probably your best option, canny and sensitive people will notice you doing this and take it for the hint that it is but dense or uncaring people will probably carry on steering things in to places you don’t want to go. If you’re forced to eat with them then yes redirecting the conversation will work up to a point but it is a subtle skill to do so non-obviously. It’s hard to advise specifically what to say like a script, though I would say if you just totally ignore the question altogether and switch topic very bluntly it’s going to come across strange and prompt confusion and questioning. You’ll need to somehow maintain the initial thread of their topic as lip service and then turn off down an unrelated avenue fairly smoothly. It’s what politicians do professionally. Reading the other responses to your post I think they’ve got some really good ideas on how to deal with this if you really get forced in to conversing against your will. It’s a subtle art of contributing basically nothing and rephrasing their same question back to them. I think another commenter suggested something along the lines of “I don’t know much about that what about you?” and similarly bland and useless resonses. This is friendly enough not to piss anyone off and lame enough to be totally uninteresting which hopefully invites little follow up. If they continue on their original track, you can combine this with seguing to another topic.

I didn’t suggest this to you initially because it doesn’t sound like your natural style and I think advice is best if it allows the recipient to handle things mostly in their own way while helping to avoid pitfalls in doing so. I guess you’ll have to navigate this daily frustration in a way a little outside of your comfort zone by carefully appearing to engage whilst really not and hopefully they’ll find you so boring they don’t bother anymore. Hopefully you don’t mind this giving the impression that you’re a boring person to the remaining 50% of your peers that don’t bother you so much but sometimes it’s a necessary evil.