Rada's workshop

Computers

Heart Shaped Chassis

New computer for private medical practice "Family Doctor Slavica", got it's new chassis. The aluminium hart shaped foundation is 3mm thick. Dimensions are 30 X 30 X 6cm. It holds a mini-itx form factor motherboard and a 120GB solid state drive. A laptop 12V power adapter is powering a "Pico PSU" bought from http://www.aliexpress.com/ instead of a classic computer PSU, so it does not take up much space. The cower over the motherboard is made from a truck air filter. It holds two step motors who rotate a disk with gears from a mechanical alarm clock and move a lever with a piston moving through a glass test tube. Plastic glowing hart contains a push button which starts the computer. It is made from a transparent jevlery box. Round parts of the hart are made of tin candy box.

 

Smaug Chassis

Decoration for an already existing computer in the shape of an eye of a dragon. I used a smiley for the glass of the eye, and the image of the eye was printed on plasticized paper. The rest is copper wire and a tin sheet of Nescaffe. A few LEDs are an inch behind the eye.

Rolling Gears

Basis is an aluminum heat sink size 40 X 40 X 4cm. It holds a motherboard, 60GB SSD, 500GB HDD, transformer for powering audio amplifier, the audio amplifier, PSU and a cooling fan. The air itself is cooled in contact with the heat sink, so no ventilation is required. The CPU is connected to the heat sink via copper heat pipe. There is a capacitive touch sensor on the front panel which is used to start the computer.

 

Rolling Gears Mini

The sides are made of aluminium profiles 5cm wide. Total height of the chassis with the corners on which it stands is 12cm. The corners ware ment for building audio speaker boxes. The bottom is made of tin and on it is a fan that cools the PSU and the HDD. from there, the air travels across the motheboard which is attached to a tin plate in the middle of the chassis. The top side is 4mm glass painted black from the bottom side. Behind the front pannel glass is a mechanism which turns gears and it is there for purely estetic reasons My greatest problem was making an electric motor rotate slower than one revolution per second withot using a reductor to avoid noise. I solved it by using electromotor from an old VHS player. It served to rotate the head which picked up the recording from VHS tape. I modified it to be thinner so it would take less space and I designed an electronic circuit that drives it slowly. It is connected to gears from old mechanical clocks using belts from a cassete deck player. The mechanisam it self is completly silent. The switch on button in the middle of the top side of the front pannel is from Nokia headphones. Beneath it is a microphone connected to the motherboard.

 

Pendulum Chassis

Sides ware cut on a CNC machine and made of Plexiglass. It was already painted ocher. Behind the holes is a fan connected to the motherboard. Bios is regulating speed based on the CPU temperature. I took out the power supply from the original tin case, and it is located inside the computer case as an open electronics.It Does not have a fan but relies on air circulation in the cassing. Since the mini-itx board consumes only about 30W , the power is not very warm. The 2.5" hard drive is silent and not noticeably warm. DVD burner is the slim type from a lap-top. The corners are plastic, designed for angles of speaker boxes. They are excellent for mounting the USB connectors on them. Nickelplated edges are plastic, selfadhesive, purchased in a car part store. The front panel and top panel are made of glass, painted using a copper colored paint on the inside, and then painted over the with a black lacquer paint. Behind the front panel , there are several red , low light-emitting diodes. Their light is poor so that they would not emit too much light at night when I leave my computer running. They are poorly visable during the day, and since the computer is comletly silent, I would not notice when it is running, so I made a pendulum. The pendulum is made of a computer graphic card fan, guitar strings , bearings of a larger computer fan, copper wire,... decorations are made ​​of thin guitar wire and copper sheet.