Currently I'm playing with ideas for another small, low cost project. This would be a dedicated Folding@Home cruncher built around a Pentium M, running Linux. That's the excuse, anyway. I just feel like modding something... Something... steampunk. In honour of the godfather of steampunk, Charles Babbage, I present: Babbage. A brass and aluminium CNC'd, passively cooled PC around a small ITX mobo and Pentium M. The lid has a 7" screen (possibly touch, don't know yet). Not sure when I'll build it, but I think it would be cool if people started to just throw out some concepts in the Modding forum.
Mini-ITX with PicoPSU, 2.5" HDD or DOM storage, LCD, maybe a 1/2 height optical should be about 60 watts total. My new Jetway Atom is 12 watts. Stuff in a small USB hub and maybe a multi-card reader and it's way do-able. If your modding skills are as good as your elocution, the current design is ready for me to subscribe. John
That's the idea. Don't even need a USB hub, optical drive (it can share the one on my desktop PC via the network for installation purposes) and multi card reader.
+1 for the angled LCD. Even a modest 30-60° angle would do. Maybe have it stowed at 30-45° and then have it pop or propped forward for use? I don't like the bulgin switch or the circles on the 2nd level. If you're going to have it CNCed, go for something else. Maybe 9 polygons as you have it now of increasing verticies? Triangle, square, etc and with the last one being a circle? I dunno. Are those levels made of brass or alum, and how thick would you plan for it to be?
That sounds more Euclid than Babbage to me. Babbage suggests cogs & levers. I've been considering/planning a steampunk mod myself for some time, but I'm constrained by lack of cash & imagination.
I'd third (or whatever we're up to) the tilted screen. Maybe a pop-up screen on damped cogs - a bit like the the doors on tape decks used to be (for those that are old enough to remember the days before CD).
Just wandering about the cooling- were you going to leave the sides open to aid airflow and negate the need for a heatpipe system? Seeing as it's only a PentiumM you'd only really need a good quality heatsink on the CPU anyways. As for the HDD, I was thinking maybe getting a SATA/IDE compact-flash reader and running the OS off of a CF card to avoid using a spinning drive? Would save a lot of space as well, and could even mean you only need to make 2 trays.
some manufacturers have the CF right on the board. Wander around www.mini-itx.com for some of the newest board info. This smaller size is really catching on now that the CPUs available can actually do some real cycles of work. John
A Pentium M will still produce 35 Watts though, so I'll have to see how well a sufficiently small passive heatsink would cope. I was indeed thinking of a CF for the Linux OS, but Folding@Home needs to dump its data somewhere and I'm not sure how well a CF would cope with that over the long term. The third tray is also for the PSU circuit board.
Bear in mind that if you're thinking about a flash SSD for storage, according to a recent article on tom's hardware, SSDs actually use more power than a 7200RPM hard drive, mainly because they don't have a low-power idle mode like HDDs do. There is also the problem of limited r/w operations on flash memory cells, which may limit the usefulness of flash drives for something like a folding machine.
One guy has a system running off a USB memory stick (Linux of course). Interesting, but there a ppear to be a bunch of flaws in the article... I'll have to study it closer.
I think it would be just as easy to tilt the entire unit, rather than just the screen. It's tiny enough to do that. If you're going for steampunk, you should get some fillagree (not in my spell checker!) patterns etched into the brass.
Engadget has a rebuttal post from the SSD mfgr. here: http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/03/ssd-maker-responds-to-nasty-report-says-itll-do-better-next-ti/ John
There are some really nice brass lid stays that can be used for the screen, and give that ornamental steampunk look.
