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Tool Box PC
Mr. Red Baron writes "A resident geek at Ars Technica has turned his toolbox into a nice little computer. Looks more portable than most LAN party designs I've seen." His webpage has a few more pictures.
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My Osbourne One did this a long time ago.
Thanks all; I'm glad so many of you like the box. And for those who think it's ugly: be glad I didn't use the yellow version of the toolbox. As I said on the page, it's meant for my daughter. If it was meant to be more high-performance I would have chosen a different mobo with more appropriate specs. Even now it would would do great for LAN parties if I dropped in a decent vid card.
;)
/. AOL for a little while!
About balance: yes, it is a little heavier on one side than the other, but not overly so. It's easy to carry from either direction, because the PSU is still fairly central.
About the size of the box: I would have loved to get a toolbox big enough for peripherals, but I just couldn't find one. I looked all over town and this was the best I could do. Virtually every toolbox I found was too narrow to hold a motherboard. There were plenty wider and taller, but most toolboxes were less than 8" deep, front to back.
As for why the page is hosted on AOL; I've explained it before when I catch flak at Ars about my AOL-ness, but I won't go into it all. Suffice it to say that my main connection is cable. I pay $0 for the AOL, so why not use it?
Yes, I am a lowly user of Win98. It does what I want it to do. My wife is OK with it, too. Sorry if it bugs you.
As for the Jergens... take a look at the pic. Wolf mousepad, turtles and wolves on top of the monitor. What does it add up to? I'll tell you: it's my wife's desk in the living room. It was much easier to plug it all in there since her machine was already down with a bad mobo.
Frankly, anyone who could recognize that bottle as Jergens specifically, must have some of their own...
Congrats to you all: you even managed to
I plonked it down onto my bathroom scale just now. It's roughly 17 pounds.
The hard drive beneath the PSU should be fine. The front intake fan is blowing in right in that area. Part of that air goes directly into the venting on the front of the PSU, and the PSU fan should then be sucking all of that straight out the back. There is no venting on the underside of the PSU, so there is the bottom of the PSU as well as the top of the drive cage in between the PSU and the hard drive.
The case temp as read by the motherboard has hovered at 22C ever since I set it up. None of the exhust streams are very warm, and nowhere on the outside is warm to the touch.
Wow! You are so correct! One could construct this such that either a normal powersupply (one you connect to the wall) OR a battery based power source (wired into the original supply as you state) could power the thing. You could also quite easily build a regulator circut and employ the use of some switchers and or linear devices (free samples at National Semiconductor) to provide all your voltages from 12 or 24V. Not bad.... Just put as many battery packs in there as you can fit/cary and wire them in parallel! Construct a charger circuit that tops off the batteries whenever you're plugged into the wall! ... bingo!
Yes you are very correct. 12vDC->120vAC then back again, all within the same box - bad. 12vDC -> directly to the board, with some regulators to produce your +-5v, etc. - good.