BenchoffHey, I made a bunch of weird, quarter-scale retrocomputers. This is a thread, so feel free to share.
Or check out the documentation in non-mastodon form:
First up, and probably the best: the eMachines 'Never Obsolete'. The circa 2001 computer (with anachronistic Y2K sticker) sold in Circut City and Best Buy.
Inside is a Raspberry Pi 4. The outside is loaded up with stickers. Zoom in!
Those are waterslide decals, or the best way to put white text on something. it was done on an Alps dye-sub printer with waterslide decal paper. 75x50mm.
The interior of the eMachines is built on a chassis, with the front panel and outer shell just snap-fit on.
The other decals on the sticker sheet? Yeah, that's an SGI Indy. Raspberry Pi 4 again, with a right-angle HDMI adapter board.
Again, 3D printed, and again a Raspi 4. The tricky bit is the front panel, with integrated square LEDs. These are controlled by the raspi through an I2C GPIO expander.
But what about a monitor? Sure thing. Here's a tiny Viewsonic monitor. The panel and HDMI board came from AliExpress, the resolution is 1440x1600, which is crazy for a 3.5" display.
Anyway, yeah. Tiny retrocomputers. I have all the STLs and stuff you need to build your own. You can find links to those on the project page: https://bbenchoff.github.io/pages/BeBox.html
Feel free to share
Some people have suggest what computer I'm going to do next, and, duh, the answer is a Thinking Machine CM-5, with 8x78 LED display.
I think the micro CM-5 would be about 260mm by 65mm on the front. This is from some quick layout of what the LED matrix would look like.
That's a lot of space, and I don't know what I'd do with it. Put hard drives in the case? Make it a supercomputer NAS? No idea what to do with something this big.
Oh sweet it would be about as wide as a 2.5" SSD.
So there we go. CM-5 RAID NAS
Quick but of modelling and printing, made something to serve as a size comparison.
Yeah. It's big.
Anthony Sorace@violenceworks As soon as I saw your stuff, I thought about this, which Iād love to see your take on: http://www.clustered-pi.com/blog/clustered-pi-zero.html
Eli the Bearded@violenceworks These are great. Now someone needs to make scale inputs like keyboard / mouse / trackball for a full micro experience
@elithebearded I have the stuff for a scale keyboard, and I think the mouse is possible.
Tim of the Cade@violenceworks This is fucking AWESOME. I just got a 3D printer, so I may give this a go when I get it set up.
Michael K Johnson@trevorflowers these would look right at home next to one of your 1:6 memex builds. š
Trevor Flowers@mcdanlj Well, those are adorable. I particularly like that they added the blinkenlights.
Pete Wright@violenceworks that looked like a lot of fun to put together!
Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL]@violenceworks do you do commissions because holy shit it has been a dream of mine to have a VAX 11/780 case for a raspberry pi for a long time now!
This? Yeah, that can be done on a filament printer. It's just paint and decals.
To do this I'd need an Alps dye-sub printer, but if you want I can model it up for you. Probably with the Pi ports coming out the side instead of the back.
@violenceworks in going to bookmark this and start a conversation about this when I'm not on my phone at a bar. š I'm totally clueless about printing stuff but I've never really considered it possible until now.
@mike Cool. But just warning you, for a vax it's basically _just a box_ and a painting and decal project.
@violenceworks I have a photo saved somewhere I'm sure that had the main unit with a tape drive on one side and my thought was "oh that'd be neat".
But yeah, when I'm not at the pub I might go down this rabbit hole. š
Gary@violenceworks @mike +1 here for a VAX to put a raspi in. In it would look lovely sat on the desk next to my real microvax 3100, all clustered up. A VAX 4000/500 would look even better (I had a real one but it died on me)