bbenchoff.github.io

Rackintosh

A rackmount Macintosh, from 1993. My instagram requires me to keep an old Mac system around (pre-OS9, with a serial port), and existing solutions don’t fit into my workstation layout. The solution is a rackmount Macintosh.

The enclsure is built around a Hammond Manufacturing rackmount enclosure – 1U, 8” deep. I downloaded the 3D cad files from the Hammond website, added bezels for the floppy drive, ports, and power supply, and printed out the result.

The internals are Quadra 605, with most of the original components transfered over. A SCSI drive won’t fit, instead a BlueSCSI is used for the boot drive.

This was also featured in the May 1993 edition of MacWorld. The files to make your own can be found in the Rackmount Mac repo.

Frog Design-inspired Mini-ITX enclosure

Inspired by the the best industrial design for computer cases of the 90s – Packard Bell – I decided to build my own Frog Design-inspired computer case. It supports a Mini ITX motherboard, with provisions for dual card slots.

The design offers little in the way for space for extended graphics cards, but in the mid-90s, graphics cards weren’t that big, anyway. Of note is the slot-load DVD drive; although the DVD drive is slightly anachronistic, it does suit the design nicely.

SGI-inspired Micro Quad-3.5” drive tower

A take-off of the big Zip drive tower, this enclosure fits four 3.5” drives, power supply, and interface electronics.

The design is inspired by the SGI O2, with a dash of Power Macintosh 6400. With four Zip 250 drives, this enclosure holds an entire gigabyte of data, accessable over USB 2 High Speed interface. This does not saturate the USB connection; the bottleneck is the drives.

A Raspberry Pi BeBox

Long story short – I needed a Raspberry Pi to sit on a shelf for something (an FTP server, I think?), and I wanted it to look cool. A BeBox enclosure did not exist, so I made one.

This includes blinkenlights displaying the current CPU load. This is done with an MCP23017 I2C/GPIO expander. This board is mounted to the resin-printed front panel.

More information can be found in the BeBox Repo.

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