Ikea PC

The lovely, hairy Gazmond got me a Mini-ITX motherboard for my birthday. It's an older model, the Epia-800 - one of the original Mini-ITX form-factor boards. If you compare it to the one in Yoshimi, my PC hooked up to our TV and hi-fi, you can tell it's behind the times.

Yoshimi has two Firewire ports, four USB2.0 ports, a very capable 1GHz processor and connectors for an extra serial port and a floppy (yeah, I know... in this day and age) onboard, with a not-bad hardware accelerated video output and impressive 5.1 surround sound capabilities.

Epia-800 has four USB1.1 ports provided you have the cable for the header, which I don't. So two USB. One serial. Underpowered processor. Fairly good stereo sound. Poor graphics.

But it's not fair to compare them, and I'm not dissing the Epia-800 - there's an identically specced board (but not so small) running Kryten, my Linux box. I don't expect to get blistering performance from either of them.

Anyway. Some time ago I spotted an old external Syquest drive at work which was going to be binned. I saw Mini-ITX written all over it (in my mind, obviously) so I saved it from the trash and stripped it down last week to try and install the Epia-800 into it. I immediately spotted a problem though - metalwork isn't my forté and my tools are, on the whole, not suitable for metal. My little fake Dremel had enough difficulty grinding an opening for the cable in my Elite lightboxes! So I gave up on that plan, and decided to get back to my Ikea-loving ways, and mount everything in something Ikea-y and wooden.

I'm a fan of the Ikea Bås box frames, as anyone who enters my world will know. Not only do I have them turned into lightboxes, I've got them used for displaying Guatemalan worry dolls, collections of cat things and soon for showing the valves removed from the old telly mentioned elsewhere and as a UV box for making Buddy Christ look ace and glowy. I've even got an LCD display hooked up to my work PC built into one! Yes, I love them frames. And you can get a bigger version that's almost A4 sized.

So, I got the frame out from upstairs (it had one of Jayne's dolls in like some kind of mad Leninesque mausoleum) and ordered myself a small PC power supply - the sort used in very narrow servers (a 1U PSU to the initiated). What would you know, they seemed to fit quite nicely:

With a clear mind of what I had to achieve, I went out and bought a saw blade that fits into a Stanley knife. It more or less turns a Stanley knife into a hand-powered jigsaw, and all for 99p. A bit of drilling, sawing and sanding later I had two squarish holes. Squarish, but not square. So yesterday, at the same time as getting a laser-guided circular saw (true!) from B&Q, I picked up some wood rasp files and made the openings a little more regular. It would be bad form not to try putting the components in to test the holes were sufficient, so I hooked up everything I had ready and slid the glass in over the top. Perfect.

What you can see there is the PSU and motherboard with a 2.5" laptop hard drive at the bottom-right. It's not a large capacity drive (I think it's about 1.4Gb, so it's pretty tiny) but it's small and it's quiet, unlike the couple of 3.5" drives I've got knocking around the place.

Currently missing are the power/reset switches and power/drive lights. I figure I can get away without having a reset switch really, and my power switch will be an old arcade machine button (because, like all geeks, I have loads of them hanging around the house). I've ripped LEDs from an ancient PC case and will find somewhere to put them inside - the great thing is there's a huge window to find places within!

Here's a complementary view from the back of the case, so you can see my wavy sawing:

No backplate there because it's gone the same way as the USB cables, so I'll cut up a plastic take-away lid to cover the big gaps, and paint it black. I might paint the whole inside black as well, depending on how it looks with some black card in there.

So there you go - another PC for me to look after. This one will probably have some kind of Windows on it, just so that I can run the stuff that WINE can't cope with on my Linux box, like the stuff for a Cybiko wireless gateway. More on all that as and when...