Casemodding

Today, a friend of mine mentioned the Raspberry Pi, a miniature computer sold as a naked circuit board. The idea is that you build some sort of chassis (or not) and add an SD card (the kind of memory card frequently used in cameras) to function as a hard drive. It reminded me of the summer that I built an abomination that would today look like a parody of the Raspberry Pi. For some reason, I had come into possession of an old (by today's standards more or less ancient) laptop, a Dell with what I think was a Pentium I processor. The machine was bulky, the battery completely worn out and the screen quite horrible. But, I saw promise where everyone else saw only garbage.

So, I promptly opened it up, and with a non-trivial application of violence managed to separate the motherboard along with the CPU and RAM from the chassis. Then I attached said motherboard between two slabs of acrylic glass that I had spray painted black. A 1GB Compact Flash card replaced the hard drive (using a cheap IDE-CF adapter I bought from Hong Kong on eBay), technically providing it with a solid-state drive. So, this machine was in more ways than one a sort of predecessor of the Raspberry Pi. Then I plugged in a PC Card-based ethernet adapter, since this machine was so old that it didn't have an ethernet port on the motherboard. Finally, I built a replacement battery using six ordinary rechargeable 1.5V AA batteries. I think the idea wasn't to make this monstrosity portable, but rather to ensure that it could cope with power loss, rather like a low-budget UPS. Finally, I hooked it up to a screen and keyboard, installed Puppy Linux (command-line only, of course) and set it up to make it accessible over my local network. The thing worked as well as could be expected, as far as I can recall. It booted up fast enough, and could handle lightweight tasks.

The casemodded machine. Unfortunately, I never took any pictures of the original laptop. I also can't remember where I got that wire mesh, but it was most certainly not intended for that.

 The original idea was to build some sort of contraption using the pins on the parallel port to trigger a micro switch, enabling it to turn some other device on and off. I never got that far though. After a while, it ended up in a cardboard box in storage.

Today, I dug it out and hooked it up to a power supply. It didn't boot up when I pressed the power button. So I took it apart, and found that it had taken a bit of a beating during the move. Some connectors were loose. A hour of troubleshooting, reconnecting and disconnecting stuff, and it still didn't boot. So I removed the CF card hard drive and hooked it up to the card reader on my current PC. There wasn't much on it, but it told me that the last time the machine had been running was on August 27, 2009. The log files also told a tale of a failing file system that I had obviously not cared enough to repair. I repaired it now, mostly out of curiosity. Not that it makes any difference, the machine will now finally go its eternal rest at the local recycling facility.

And I will probably end up getting a Raspberry Pi.

/ Tony