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Build Your Own Lego Computer Case
PuppiesOnAcid writes "Here is what comes about when you cross a case modder and an AFOL (Adult Fan of Legos). It would be interesting to see how he got everything mounted in there since there don't appear to be any screw holes." Not just a Lego shell around a case, he's used the Legos to support everything. Impressive.
This has been done before: http://mini-itx.com/projects/legobox/
Im glad he isnt a gamer, because it would be a bitch taking it to lan parties.
I've seen a variety of these types of cases, but this is the first one that I've seen that didn't require drilling.
I also built a computer case made out of Legos. It isn't as nice as the one shown but I thought I would share it with the rest of Slashdot. You can view some pictures on my website at http://home.comcast.net/%7Esessions9/lego.html.
I love it. It seems silly at first, but Lego makes a great material for prototyping case designs.
A case made out of machined metal and plastic is better, but you can't move things around easily.
once upon a time.(Scroll down.)
Not nearly as artistic as these, though.
Cute, but with no sliding panel, I'm sure doing any maintenance (switching HDs, cleaning, etc) must be close to hell.
Case-modders. Funny people.
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After seeing all these projects done with legos, I wonder how you can obtain this much lego. Stores do not seem to sell much more than kits, or very simple buckets with varieties of pieces. Where can you get a ton of just plain bricks?
Aside from just being plain ass-ugly (I like how he added the blue light.. Kinda like a NuSpeed sticker on a Pinto), it's pretty nifty. Or something.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Wonder how long this'll take to get destroyed. The server or the case, actually. Either way, it'll be entertaining.
"Who needs reincarnation when we've got parallel universes?" -Me
It may seem like you can build and do everything you want with Legos, but you're really locked into what their fat cat corporate greed team says you can do. What the world needs is a good, peer-reviewed, open-ended, modular plastic building block system that everyone can have for free. That would totally rule.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
All those pictures and the webserver is still going strong. I think that is more impressive than the case itself.
So what everything you do has been done before. Does that stop you from doing it?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Or a beowulf cluster out of lego.
The amount of structural support built into a Lego piece is pretty astounding. Each piece has not only the outer rectangular area, but inside it also has round surfaces as well as straight surfaces. The upper surfaces also have round nubs which can double as fins to dissipate heat. Each Lego piece is a heat sink in and of itself.
Obviously they are pretty heavy and difficult to carry around to LAN parties, but a set of aluminum Lego pieces could be the answer to our desire for a quieter computer.
Ok, so is it just me or does the guy on the top of the case look like he is setting on the toilet reading? Ok, maybe not but that was my first impression.
As for the case, very cool. Makes me want to go get out my Lego bucket and start building my own. That or go play with my mindstorms kit.
The Houkster "Oh yeah brother, what you gonna do when Houk O' Mania runs wild on you? Besides wet your pants in laughte
Adult Fan of Lego? we've really got an acronym for this now? Seriously, what's wrong with just 'Lego fan'? Can we stop the frivolous acronyms, they're absolutely unneccessary and getting out of control.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
What do you suppose the melting point of lego is?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Another Lego Computer!
A much better (IMHO) legoputer as its not just using bricks, but has windows and doors to control cooling!
I have built computers where it is a motherboard running with stuff sticking out of it? All he did was put some shelfs on there for the drive bays with holes at the front, and holes for the fans. Give me time and legos and I could do that too.
Mod Wisely.
Impressively hideous. Stay tuned for my working lego toilet.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
The one near my house has a back wall full of buckets with bricks sorted by type and color. If you want a big pile of roof tiles, purple bricks, hinges, glass block, whatever, you can get it. They don't always have everything out, and the selection changes, but it's a great way to stock up on bricks.
You can also get the big blue tub which has a bunch of plain bricks.
yep
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
I was gonna build one of these a few years back, but bulk lego are expensive.
If this guy had enough Lego(tm) bricks, then he would have been able to do the entire thing in reasonable colors.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Interesting to see the systems relegated to the garage/basement....
Now there's an oxymoron for ya!
Seeing as Lego is a brand name, then shouldn't the individual pieces be called "Lego Bricks" or "Lego Pieces" rather than "Legos"?
To get on the top nerd news site in world is to build some kind of rediculous case?
Looks like I might even get by with a lego case since two have already...
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
How are the various disks, boards, power supplies, etc. mounted? It seems like he could've just built some custom size holes to prevent the components from sliding around, but there's no real mounting mechanism such as screws.
Did you mean: ridiculous
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Actually, the server appears to be holding up very well. When I first clicked on it, I was just waiting for a "Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" message to come up... Perhaps Cox will just bill the hell out of this guy...
I havbe seen lego cases before, but thats neat. I wonder if he needs a host :)
ModLife.Net - If it ain't modded, what's the point?
...but the execution sucks. Has to be the ugliest color schemes I've seen for a case. A classic lego case would have the case resembling something other than a computer case, say a house, or a hospital building. I probably couldn't tolerate legos as computer casing. I don't see any metal plating to screen out RF generated by the computer components.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Yeah yeah, he built a case out of legos. A big box with holes in it is kinda anti-climactic.
Now, if he'd used 6-micron legos to build a processor....
I hand it to the guy for doing what he did, but it's been awhile since I've seen something so aesthetically unappealing. I wonder what the queer eyes for the straight guy would have to say about this geek monstrosity.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
I noticed that too, there's a whole rack of computers in the background of this pic: http://members.cox.net/richw/3lego6.jpg
After looking at the pictures I noticed that you only had about one fan for each unit. Doesn't the heat make it a problem? I mean, these legos ARE made out of plastic?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
http://members.cox.net.nyud.net:8090/richw/lego.ht m
;) The speaker box was a little more successful, tho... after the Legos dried-out, of course.
For use when his server melts down, or the bandwitch cop pulls his plug.
Note to fellow Slashdotters... why don't you coralize this stuff right away, *before* the site goes down? I've tried many times to coralize a site, only to see that Coral couldn't retireve it.
Back on topic: This sure blows away any of the stuff I did with Lego bricks when I was a kid! I even tried making an "aquarium",once, but it REALLY leaked.
Willie...
Wow, that's quite something.
you notice he starts with a design, but at just about the half way point he seems to have said 'screw this noise, I'm putting them on however'
also, he made a box. With legos. Pretty much what most kids make.
heh, good job though.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As a Lego fan i'd just like to say that the 1st CPU is a slap in the face to Lego fans everywhere. It is lacking in any kind of Uniform, random color legos are just tossed about carlessly........ The others, I must say are impressive.
Insert Pithy Quote here.
At best it's absurd. At worst it's hideous.
I'd take an old-fashioned "beige box" over that thing any day.
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
... are like a bunch of bloody sheeps.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Everyone I know since like the 7th grade that has been into computers has done this. Although they might not all have been picture worthy, but anyone who grew up in my generation, and has a bucket of legos hanging around, and about my age 20, has been there done it.
It seems kinda weird that an article about it got posted here. :P (Tin-foil hat time?)
As I told my friend, I'd be worried about heat issues, and ESPECIALLY static. I mean, think about it... When you were little, playing with those things, you'd often get shocked when you were reaching for another piece out of the bucket. Wouldn't that be kinda hard on your $150 video card?
In general though, it's kinda cool to see something like that actually done.
Back in the 80s I built a Lego monitor case. (I bought the guts of a monochrome monitor for $15 and I needed a case for it that did not consist of foil lined cardboard.)
In the end it cost more than if I had just gone out and bought a brand new color monitor. (Not that color would have gotten me much. This was an 8mhz XT clone. CGA was pretty ugly.) Legos are not cheap. Even if you buy the big huge buckets, it takes a lot and you always need something not in the bucket.
You also have to cement the legos together or the heat will pop them apart.
I still have it in a box somewhere. I will have to dig it out one of these days and post pictures.
It is not something I would want to use on a regular basis. I swear you could feel the x-rays pouring off the screen. It was pretty evil. But it looked cool.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Not only better than the case from TFA, but also the most beautiful case I've seen!
http://mirrordot.com/stories/1e7c223617044dd5754a4 f7a98f45ff0/index.html
Wait, his personal homepage, serving up massive amounts of large image files, is still alive!? Whoa...
Does not seem like anything is mounted, not the way we usually mean it. Rather, components are encased in lego bricks from all sides and supported by lego ridges or shelves sticking out of the case. So to remove something from the bottom of the case you have to take off everything above it. I wonder what happens if you turn it upside down, too...
The same thing has been done with several older macs also.
If you really want a computer made out of Lego, and you don't mind taking a hit in processing power, I think Lego already makes a computer case--much nicer looking too, I might add...
o ti cs/RCX.htm
http://www.object-arts.co.uk/wiki/html/Lego-Rob
My son's fingers will be drawn to those led fans like a child to an led fan. Needless to say dads do not appreciate lego cases with easily accessible instruments of pain. No sir, I reckon they don't.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
The plural of lego is lego.. its like sheep the plural is sheep Americans need to learn it.
Look at her website for a while, and you'll just say "wow." She has the most amazing designs, and stays as true to the equipment she's modeling as she can.
John
Not to be too blatently obvious here, or piss of the lego fans, but could it be that the original post wasn't really about legos? With a little word substitution and a sense of irony, I had myself a good little chuckle and it had nothing to do with plastic blocks.
...lego my ego? God it must be 3 AM and a couple adult beverages...oh wait .
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Cool stuff, in fact it would be very nice to have a totally custom-sized case. But wouldn't there be issues with grounding, since the case isn't metal?
The case itself is going to look pretty much like a standard (if not a little bigger) full size tower. It'll have an opening door on the front that allows you to get to the removable hard drive bays. I'm only using black bricks, I tend to be somewhat anal that way, I can't mix brick colours, (well, unless it's symetrical.. heh).
I started off with designing the hot-swappable removable hard drive enclosures, followed by their housings. Then moved on to the 5.25" enclosures. Everything is pretty much as breatheable as a screen door, so no fans in the removable enclosures are required. After the enclosures and their respective enclosures had been designed, I moved on to the case itself, which was pretty much a breeze except for designing locking mechanisms for the enclosures that made sense. (Ie, accessible.) I have a number of fans strategically positioned around the inside of the case, and the intake and outtake air is channeled in and out of the case respectively.
Once I had the case completely designed, a quick export of a parts list later, I was on Bricklink.com [http://www.bricklink.com/] to start searching their online stores for parts. (They have HUNDREDS of stores accross many, many countries, they're online auctions, you can find pretty much ANYTHING there, with many degrees in price to chose from.)
And that's where I am today, I'm slowly (it's expensive to buy 30,000+ single lego pieces) getting parts in the mail, and saving up for more. I'm taking pictures of the entire process, and I have renderings done by MLCAD, but I don't have a website to host them. If anyone would like to see it or would like to help me host it in the near future (read: a week or 2), you can always drop me a line at 'PseudoSchizo@gmail.com'.
I should really sign up for /. so I can post under an actual name.. hrmm.. ah well, perhaps next time. ;)
Cheers,
Ben 'Jammin
These were done a long time ago. Have a look at them on www.applefritter.com in the hacks - custom desktops section.
The posting dates are the dates for the redesign of the site, not the mods themselves, so please don't mod me down for that...
*****
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
*****
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
All I can say is:
Well, DUH!
Yeah... Man, I always miss that one...
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
There is no such thing as Legos. Lego is a name so you can say Lego Bricks but not legos. People writing Logos sound like non English speakers who make common mistakes such as using infos.
Look at the pics -- he still has a TYPEWRITER on his desk!! Gack!
Whew, thanks! I was getting worried there for a minute.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If the entire thing is made out of legos, electromagnetic shielding is going to be a bitch with those rigs. I wonder how much his portable phones / 802.11 / microwaves goes haywire when he stick one of those near it.
Also got to wonder about cooling. I'm not sure of the thermal properties for legos, but I imagine they're not the same as regular metal...
Definitely my favourite case mod from that series is the last one. Slick, small, and styling!
Just look at the horrible pixellation at http://members.cox.net/richw/4-6.jpg.
What do you suppose the melting point of lego is?
Flames are welcome
You lego-pyro!
Not just a Lego shell... Screw Bash. THAT'S the shell I want to use!
This hearkens back to the kind of masochism out of which a true hacker is born....
-- I speak only for myself
Or a hi-rise or any number of cool structures. But NOOOOOOOO he grinds out this horridly ugly monstrosity.
"Form follows function" may not necessarily apply when the medium you're building with it capable of so many things...
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
worst.html skills.evar.
Speak truth to power.
As built by my brother ;-)
6
http://www.kansloozz.nl/forum.php?view=2&sid=1978
Heh, it was my first post ever.
Proud Rememberer of the BBS Days.
W00t, that's awesome. I really want one of them.
But... won't burn all that thing? ^_- hehehe
I can use it also in the water, it will float.
I WANT ONE OF THEM!
i did this once before and thought it would be a great idea. However, all the heat from the system started to melt some of the pieces since everything was pretty jampacked in there. I love Legos and all, but I'll stick to metal, thank you.
I'm going to go create my own technology news site, with blackjack and hookers. You know what? Forget the news site.
I'm considering doing a Lego case, but i need to solve some issues... First, is heat a problem? Is electromagnetism a problem???? Would I gain some karma from my athlon? Where I live there is no "ground cable" in the electric system, so static would be a problem for me.. should i worry? what can I do to alleviate this problem? Thanks! Sergio
Bah! That's not a lego computer. This guy is working on a REAL lego computer.
If you were a hot dog, and you were starving, would you eat yourself?
My wife saw me looking at the pictures and said no. :(
You want to impress me ? Build a case out of old porno mags and empty beer cans. /nods
Its full of bricks!
Oh well, what the hell...