Extrovert Caseless
A composite photo with 3 panels, one with the copper tubing soldered through the wooden frame, one with the motherboard mounted to the wooden frame, and one with the full system assembled with a view of the mounted hard drive and ATX power supply

After a bit of consideration, I decided that Calder-A was too cumbersome.

I cut it down to a more useable / standard ATX size and used the components of Calder-A, minus the DVD drive, Hollywood+ MPEG2 decoder card, and Vortex audio card; and there was enough copper pipe left to build a second frame.

(Notes from 2023: keep in mind how incredible it was that we needed full PCI bus cards to decode MPEG2. The equivalent codecs run in a tiny corner of any modern system-on-chip at a fraction of the power.)

A view of a bunch of tools on the floor of the basement workspace, pliers, copper tubing, the propane torch, a can of propane, a barbecue lighter, and leather gloves 3 long pieces of copper tubing on the workbench, a pair of pliers, and a copper pipe cutter A measuring tape measuring a length of copper tubing The disassembled Calder-A hanging computer with all of the computer parts The rectangular wooden support frame being held together by long bar clamps Three quarter inch holes drilled through the wooden support frame Two three quarter inch holes drilled through the wooden support frame A view of the assembled wooden support frame with the copper tubing built through it A microATX motherboard placed atop a piece of middle-density fiberboard panel A coil of black signal low-voltage signal wire and a large capacitor A large capacitor with two pieces of black signal signal wires soldered on A view of the ATX power supply where I broke the capacitor off A very out of focus view of the backside of a printed circuit board A view of the large capacitor soldered onto the ATX power supply to repair the damage Attaching the ATX power supply to the piece of middle-density fiberboard Attaching the middle density fiberboard to the wooden support frame at the basement workbench The support frame and copper tubing leaning against the wall in the upstairs workspace, hard disk and ATX power supply visible Sitting on the floor looking at the support frame built from copper tubing, with no components mounted A closeup of the microATX motherboard mounted to the middle-density fiberboard, with the whole machine standing, and ATX power cable and parallel IDE cable visible A view of the full system assembled and standing with the mounted hard drive and ATX power supply A view of the full system assembled and standing with all components attached to the motherboard A view of the full system with the keyboard and mouse cables attached A three-quarter profile view of the full system assembled, the backside of the Slotket Celeron processor is visible
©2004, research, mv