ITX PC case.

[Michael Simpson Virgina]

Here is one of my first cutting projects. This is one of the reasons I purchased the laser in the first place.

This is an ITX PC case. This one is cut out of Ivory Acrylic. The only screws used are for mounting the PC board to the bottom base. The tops and sides all snap together. This case will be part of a robot so I still have to come up with the 2.5" hard drive mount. Probably some sort of elastic cradle.

[James Jaragosky]

Here is one of my first cutting projects. This is one of the reasons I purchased the laser in the first place.

This is an ITX PC case. This one is cut out of Ivory Acrylic. The only screws used are for mounting the PC board to the bottom base. The tops and sides all snap together. This case will be part of a robot so I still have to come up with the 2.5" hard drive mount. Probably some sort of elastic cradle.

Looks nice.
Do you have enough venting? Acrylic probably won't heat sink the way a metal case will.
What program did you to design the case?

[Michael Simpson Virgina]

This particular ITX board runs pretty cool. The CPU fan will pull the air into the case. I have not decided where to put the exhaust yet cause I still have to figure out how to do the hard drive so that its shake proof.

I used Corel and a lot of trial and error. I use card board for the first stages of the design. This keeps the cost of materials down during the design process. Im still trying to figure out how the laser kerf plays into things. Many times My first pass ends up the the cut out ares much larger than expected.

[Rodne Gold]

Most HD's are pretty much shock proof - the one in my IPOD has to be...why not just use one of those.

[Scott M Smith]

Man, that is a great idea! for your hard drive, you could use some rubber grommets for shockproofing it.

[Dan Hintz]

Rubber grommets only absorb energy within a certain range of vibration frequencies based upon the durometer of the rubber used. If you hit the resonant frequency of the grommet, your drive will be slammed around quite a bit.



Rodney has the right idea, just pick a drive designed for laptops and your vibration issues have been taken care of by someone else.

[John Noell]

Is that the new Zotac Ion board?

[Dave Johnson29]

Is that the new Zotac Ion board?

Intel Atom is my guess.

I have several purring away in the garage. Way cool little board, 75-bucks delivered. Good performer too.

[Michael Simpson Virgina]

This one is an Intel Atom 1.6Ghz. I also have a Dual Atom 1.6Ghz.

I am looking at the Zotac as well. But the Nvidia chip set is wasted on a robot as the graphics are used very little.

The key part in my robot is the PSU. It slips into the Power connector so it takes up no room on the board. Its input is 12-24v. Which is perfect for the 18 and 19v batteries I am using.

To hold the hard drive I cut a small 4.5" x 3" piece of Acrylic and attached the 2.5" hard drive to that. There are cutouts on this board and cut outs on the sides of the case. Several rubber bands are used to suspend the hard drive.

I have done this on a larger scale suspending a 7" laptop with elastic bands.

@rodne
Mechanical hard drives are by no means shock proof. The more capacity the more platters so the more sensitive it its to shock. The original IPod had small microdrives. Microdrives just dont work very well for an OS. The are designed to read then park which is perfect for music files. If you dropped the Ipod during one of its reads you will trash it. I know cause its happened to me and thousands of others. The newer Ipods like the Ipod touch use solid state drives. So they are very shock resistant since they have no moving parts.

The smaller 2.5" drives are a bit better than the 3.5" drives as they have less platters and dont spin as fast (In most cases) but if given a nice bump you can crash the heads.

The problem with a robot is that they are alwasy bumping into things and going over bumpy surfaces. For a drive mounted directly to a robot base this is very bad. I have used all kinds of things but found that suspeding the hard drive with elastic or rubber bands realy does work. I had a robot that fell down a flight of stairs. It pretty much trashed the construction but the hard drive was fine.

At some point I will probably pick up a couple 2.5" solid state drives but the technology on thes is still in a state of flux and they just are not proving to be as reliable as the good old mechanical hard drive. They are also cost about 5X more. This will change.

Im building a couple of these enclosures for looks but eventualy the robot will probably be built out of white board or plain hardboard. Its just so much more durable. Weight is not an issure and if I use Whiteboard I can place logos and other things on the robot.

[Michael Simpson Virgina]

I have been working on an updated case. I added about 1/4" to the height so now a hard drive can be mounted against one of the side walls for a desktop model like the one shown here.

This box has a Dual Core Atom 1.6 so it was running a little hot when stressed. I added a vent on the side (when flipped its on top) and a large cutout for a very slow and quiet 120mm fan.

When totaly stressed the temp on the CPU does not get over 46Celsius which is pretty cool. The case, 320Gb hard drive and Chip set stays in the low 30's.

This was a prototype for a new acrylic box. It turned out so nice I think I will get more wow from the fact that its made from totally recycled priority boxes.

I think I am going to sell kits on the web site (just the cutout parts) along with parts lists and instructions. Since its recycled stuff I have no material costs and the stuff cuts super fast so I can cutout a complete kit in under 3 minutes.

As for the dual core Atom. Its running Windows 7 and its very fast. I have 2GB installed and have been playing with Corel Draw X4. Ok its not a Quad 4Ghz system with a raid drive but the dang board with memory was about $100. All you have to add is hard drive and Power supply (Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor) Windows 7 is free until June 2010 so the OS wont cost you.

You will have to hookup a DVD drive while you load software.

[Scott Shepherd]

If the fan quits working is it going to heat up and catch the cardboard on fire?

[Robert Ray]

Very nice project! I was wondering if you could run Corel X4 on the Atom's, and now that you posted you can run X4 ok, I'm going to get a couple of those dual core boards for my Alps printer backups. (it's a parallel port bios thing, so most newer boards that do have parallel ports dont work with Alps printers, but the Atom based boards do for some reason)

[Michael Simpson Virgina]

I ran it for hours without fans or vents. If if the CPU fan goes off the CPU will throttle its self at about 90celcious or just burn up and it takes a lot of heat to cause cardboard to reach its kindling temp. About the same as wood.


I guess you younger folks don't remember that in the days of tubes many of the devices were in wood. And the tubes got a lot hotter.


As for an Atom running X4. It will but I would use XP or Windows 7. Vista has too much over head. I have run X4 on both the Atom 1.6 and the Dual Atom 1.6

[Scott M Smith]

What kind of power supply did you use? The mini system i built has a pico psu. Also, when SSD prices drop, you could put one of those in it and have no worry about shock.

[Michael Simpson Virgina]

Yep Im using a Pico 150. Its nt just the cost on the SSD drives. They have a real high failure rate. Much higher than mechanical drives. This tells me that the technology is jut not there yet.