Ant Farm PC

secolactico writes "This has got to be the coolest case mod I've come across. An ant farm in your PC case. Too bad there are no pics of the case actually on a working PC. It'd be interesting to observe the effect that the temperature and vibration of an operating PC would have on the ants."

Comments

Fried ants..

[Larkfellow]

It would be interesting to see if the heat generated by the CPU/etc killed the ants.

Re:Fried ants..

[Anonymous Coward]

I would guess the vibration would kill the ants -- years ago, I had an alligator lizard for a pet. It ate crickets. I would buy crickets by the box (of 100 or 200) and feed them to him periodically. I learned early (and more than once, unfortunately) that leaving a box or cup of crickets on a noisy PC case will kill them in a few hours. :-(

-- TTK

idea

[adamruck]

s/ants/fish/

then you have a cool case

Re:idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Hummmmmm

I preferred these

[shut_up_man]

Stained glass case mod (by a hemophiliac too, that's just crazy)
Fish tank case mod (with genuine Neon Tetras)

Ants?

[Cyno01]

This may not be the best idea, i was watching something on the discovery channel the other day about fire ants. It was talking about all the damage they've caused across the south because they're atracted to electrical fields. They short out computers, traffic lights, appliances, and make hell for the linemen because they ussually nest under high voltage lines. They had a bunch on a live pc board, and they just swarmed over certain components, the ones i'm assuming that had strong em fields. This may be just fire ants though, i have no idea.

Re:Ants?

[el-spectre]

My father is an electrical inspector... he says that lots of the controllers (for traffic lights) are infested with ants, you have to open the box and spray it with compressed air before you stick your hand in.

Also fun are the black widows...

Hex?

[ackthpt]

This puts me in mind of the computer in Pterry Pratchett's books, Hex. It's effectively a colony of ants which move things about, thus performing operations, calculations, etc. often of a thaumatical nature. There's a sign mentioned in one of the books, "Ant Hill Inside"

Hammerhead Sharks & Electric Fields

[handy_vandal]

Hammerhead sharks can detect subtle electric fields -- the "hammers" are actually sensor arrays, which the sharks use to find the bioelectric signature of prey animals buried in the mud. The sharks also follow geo-electric paths to feeding grounds.

It was *my* idea....

[cybermace5]

He claims to have no idea where he got the idea to put an ant farm in a PC.

Among other obvious sources, here is one of my posts from a past Ask Slashdot: Pets

Of course the guys at TechTV must read every little comment on Slashdot. ;-)

Or maybe it's just another one of those "critical mass of knowledge" effects, where technology (or boredom) reaches such a level that an idea springs to life simultaneously for multiple individuals.

Mir space station..

[SystematicPsycho]

I used to have a pentium 133 that had a huntsman spider living inside. It didn't bother me so I didn't bother it, they're not dangerous.

This computer was so bad that when I booted it I had to manually kickstart the fan to start spinning by tapping it a bit, kind of like how they used to spin those propellors on airplanes to start them up.

Anyway, I thought "MIR" was tha appropriate name to give to this poor sod. It was decommisioned around a year ago.

Spiders and lizards and fuzzies, oh my!

[ChaoticCoyote]

I've found all sorts of strange critters living in my systems. Back about ten years ago, I opened a 386 to find a Black Widow merrily tending her egg sacks in a web built around the power supply. I had a system offline for a couple of months; When I started it up last week, I heard something inside. Upon examination, I found an anole (small lizard) inside the case. Those dang things get in everywhere... they even move in with my Uromastyx sometimes. Must think he's their big brother or something. But I can't see building a specific house for ants in my computer. After all, I live in Florida, and wage war against fire ants almost daily...

Re:Spiders and lizards and fuzzies, oh my!

[Ian Peon]

I actually had an and farm set itself up in my laptop a few years back.

Left the thing sitting for about a month under a desk. Pulled it out and fired it up and ants crawled out of everywhere! (not fire ants thankfully) Shut it down, grabbed the thing up and set it out on the back porch standing open on its side - wasn't sure whether to curse or laugh. Thought that I might have just had dropped some cola on the case, but the ants were carrying brewd - so they had indeed set up shop.

Came back every few mins and gave it a tap to let them all know it was "time to LEAVE!" After a few hours they had all vacated - I fired the laptop back up and it worked without a hitch! I used that thing for another 2 years and never had a problem.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Ants are attracted to electricity

[Stonent1]

Ask any air conditioner repairman. The ants get stuck inside the relays and cause the relay to fail. Sometimes they eat the insulation of the wiring, cause it to short and trip the breaker. So don't be suprised if your power supply starts smoking one day.

I can testify to that!

[beer_maker]

I lost a power supply 6 years ago when a migrating column of "sugar ants"* wandered up the power cable and into my non-l33t Compaq PC. I had just got a then-new Roadrunner cable modem, so the system was on 24/7, apparently generating a tasty vibe.

I returned home that evening and noticed the screen was doing an unusual flickering. When I snapped on the lights, I found the system crawling with bugs like ... well, you know. I took it outside, pulling out all the components and dusting them off with my trusty Spray-Air, but it was too late.

The next day I opened the power supply and found about 25 traces of crispy ants neatly bridging the traces on the board inside, as well as 100 or so crispy but unattached.

The most annoying part was finding another half-sized Compaq power supply to fit the half-sized space in the full-sized tower case. (RANT)What the heck is wrong with Compaq's designers, anyway? Every case & component in their PC line seems to be curved or an odd size ...(/RANT)
I was worried they'd come back, since the house had only jalousie (yeah, and lousy they were, too) windows, which couldn't be shut tight enough to keep out flies much less smaller-than-average-ants, but they never came back.

*These "sugar ants" were brown in color, a bit smaller than the average black mound-building ant and a LOT smaller that the "Texas Red-Devil" fire ants I hope never to see again ... They had no interest in anything in the house, including the kitchen trash and even sugar spilled on the counter, but the sweet sweet smell of the transformer sure pulled them in!

and pcb's

[dsb]

Back in my college days, living in a house with a few other guys we had a bad ant problem. We first thought that maybe we should clean up the week old chinese food and yesterday's pizza, but that did not work. It got so bad that we were obsessed with our clean living habits in the kitchen. Finally, after living with a new cleaniness lifestyle we were able to track the source of the ants. They were making homebase in the base station of the cordless phone unit. Apparently, they were attracted to the glues on the PCB in the phone base unit. It certainly wasn't the main 'ant house' which had to be outside somewhere, but it was definitely the main place where they made their mystic ant communications to invade the rest of the place. This is no joke, once we elimated that phone base station our ant problems were no more.

That's not questioning begging.

[Potor]

Begging the question is when the conclusion of an argument is also a premise of that argument.

Biological display unit?

[kinnell]

Does that mean it would be possible to manipulate them using electric fields? You could put a backplate on the ant farm with a matrix of electrodes. The ants would be attracted to the ones which were switched on. You could control it from a parallel port to have an ascii display composed of swarming ants. Not only would this be a cool hack, it would completely creep out anyone who saw it in action. IANAB - does anyone know if this would work?

EM rather than heat

[UnixRevolution]

I think the electromagnetic field rather than the heat, noise, or vibration would be the worst for the ants. (yes, i know heat is a form of EM radiation, just bear with me :P) Ants are known to infest stuff like transformer boxes and stuff because they're lured by the EM field. I imagine the EM field generated by case fan motors/circuit boards/procs/drives/PS would have a similar effect, I.E. drive the ants insane. I remember Another Story where someone's iBook (like mine) got infested with ants. They must have been attracted by the EM.

Ants in my laptop.... NOT A JOKE!

[Total_Wimp]

This is too funny seeing this here. A couple weeks back we had some ants on the kitchen table (a few here and there) and I got rid of 'em. A while later there were a few more. I didn't see anything sticky that they might be going for, but I decided to clear off the table and wipe it down to make sure.

Well, one of the things I had on the table that needed clearing off was my laptop. When I lifted it up there were a bunch of ants underneath it and that's when I noticed there were a bunch more crawling in and out of the cooling holes. I saw at least one of them with some kind of a crumb or something and since I seriously doubt he got it from inside the laptop, my best guess was that he was carrying it from wherever he found it to store it in the laptop.

I had the laptop on the kitchen table for a few days at this point and it had been on the whole time so it was running plenty hot. The ants didn't seem to mind at all. I guess if they can live in Arizona then they wouldn't mind the interior of a laptop either. The only thing I never figured out is why they would go there in the first place? Was there some kind of noise drawing them in? Did they prefer the higher heat environment?

TW