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.
