It's Done! Finally! Yes, the idea that got me on none other than The Screen Savers on TechTV, is finally done. I have come to name it StereoPC. I have spent many homework hours on this project, but my grades haven't suffered because I rock.... Anyway, I have the pictures posted in a semi-chronological order. Unfortunately, some images have been doctored because I didn't have my digital camera in hand.
I guess I should first start with why I chose to do this.
It was a cold and blustery January night. I was slacking, as usual, trying to do everything but homework. I then remembered something I had once seen, the NES PC. I then remembered mini-itx.com, which is the site that the NES PC maker linked to when telling you what you need to make one. I then remembered I had wanted to make one of these NES PCs about six months ago. The Mini-ITX site has a store, in the store was the VIA EPIA M10000, with the Nehemiah core. It is less than 7"x7". I then started to watch Leno. I went to look at the clock on my stereo to see what the time was, and it hit me, like in that Travolta movie, Phenomenon. I just started putting it together in my head.
The next day, at school, I was working on AutoCAD. I started drawing the PC but it wasn't anything major, just enough for an idea of size. The rest of the day I just kept thinking about it. At lunch I told my friends about it, one had to be not friendly and question why I would ever want to do something like that. I knew it would have to be done now.
A few weeks passed, and then a half day at school came up. It was then that I began my deconstruction. It was pretty easy, but getting everything to work again was hard. The lack of CD a CD drive made the thing freak out. I had to slowly reconstruct the controls to find where the problems were. I did it, and all within about four hours.
Here is everything I took out. On the left is the CD carousel, and controls. On the right is the cassette deck. They took up a lot of room. |
I then waited until March 3, and called into The Screen Savers. My original idea was to make the StereoPC a server. I couldn't swing the server portion, because I just don't have the resources.
Within the following pages I will dump unto ye an unholy crapload of information, and ramblings...