Heya, haven't posted anything in a while, but I thought I should show my latest project anyway.

I needed a PC for travelling, and I needed a PC to connect to the TV to show movies, and of course normal cases aren't pretty (ymmv) and not very practical for travelling, so I decided to simply put a PC in a briefcase.

It's modded a bit, so it's probably "silent" although very very far from my normal semi-passive-watercooled rig. It's made from leftover parts (yes, I have a ton of more or less silent fans laying around from previous experiments, Mike knows what I'm talking about) and the budget were very low.


[url=http://www.mirar.org/travelpc]
click for more images and descriptions[/url]

/Mirar

I'd give you 5 dollars for a video of you trying to take that on an airplane.

Bwahaha... Yeah, that could be interesting.

neat project, but why not just use a laptop? is it because of the TV-out requirement? i guess i don't follow laptops much so maybe that feature is not available on them... though seems like it should be possible with some adapter or something. anyway, good job.

tons of laptops have s-video out and enough VRAM for a second display, or video mirroring if not, see last part of post though

Lol ... I'm sure even if you explained what it was, they wouldn't let you bring it on. I'm sure the thing looks "explosive" when opened.

Well, two reasons. This thing cost me less then $150 in hardware (the motherboard is "demo", the PSU is the cheapest, and except the CPU and the $15 case I had it all already as leftovers from silencing projects),
and another important thing is that since it's (also) a media computer disk space is important and I haven't seen any laptop that can chew on a bunch of normal 3.5" HDDs...

But actually I had tried to use the same hardware in a normal miditower, but it was so ugly and loud and heavy I had to do something. (And I couldn't convert it to a laptop.)

And here's for you that's too lazy to click the link above:


/Mirar

what did you use to stick the harddrives tot he side panel? and what did you use to secure the motherboard down?

neat stuff

~RaNDoM

I used elastic strings. They are fixed to the case plywood (beneath the black foam seen in the picture above) with cyanoacrylate superglue.
It works well so far. The PSU is fixed with that too.

The superglue needed a really long time before it could be put to stress though, like 12-14 hours. I did a lot of false starts before I understood why... my first experiment was fixating over night, so that one worked well.

whoa, i didnt think they made glue strong enough to do that.

btw, i notice that you rheatsink is surronded by the elastic. Is that safe? it wont burn or something?

thx
~RaNDoM

The heatsink is just top 60°C... it wont harm the elastic. The CPU will be dead from the heat before it harms the plastic.

But you should use elastics from a sewing shop, so it can take more stress and more heat (you can usually wash it in 60°C). Normal rubber bands die quickly, especially when heated.

That really sounds as something to keep in mind when looking for elastic strings I must say. Thank you, that was a good tip.