Thread: Small case

Check your local electronic shop. Many sell ready-made aluminum enclosures with removable lids. This is what I used to house my player in. It's very easy to drill and cut, drill, and paint since the aluminum is less than 1/16" thick.


--Jason
http://jump.to/m2pc

alecl? how did u fit a motherboard, pwer supply, harddrive, soundcard etc in a 3" tall case
will the soundcard stand?

i easily fit a motherboard (with onboard sound and video), a hard drive, and the power supply (built in) into a 2.5" tall case. You can also get right angle riser cards off some company on the web, there address is somewhere on this BB (I don't have handy).

Well I got a motherboard w/ onboard sound + video that came on a riser card. The riser PCB had empty space for video out which my board didn't even support so I CAREFULLY clamped the riser and cut the extra piece off with my trusty dremel so it just barely fits in 3".

Where did you find a 2.5" case?

Where do we find the riser cards?

I haven't tried these personally but I've been looking at these motherboards that www.necx.com sells

PCWARE ALTON 5071 K6 TXPRO-2 VID AUD BABY-AT $58

and

PCWARE ALTON 5098 K6-2 SIS530 1MB VID AUD BAT
$76

there are some others as well but these motherboards support the normal socket 7 options and they both apparently have sound and video builtin.
there are two others that have lan also built in and one of those has a 56k modem built in.

heh
PCWARE ALTON 5099 K6-2 SIS VID AUD MDM LAN Micro ATX $83
it's a small board indeed. get this thing and add a right angle ISA riser card then add one of the VGA LCD panel & LCD controller kit options from

http://www.allelec.com/VGALCD.html

like the $90 9.6" monochrome 640x480 VGA LCD screen and controller or the $320 10.4 color active matrix 640x480 VGA LCD screen controller and then make a custom power supply for the mother board and get a nice fat 27.3 gig HD a K6-2 400 maybe for $60 or so and 32 megs of PC100 (maybe you can sub other parts you have lying around somewhere)

this is easily under $1200 total including a power invertor or DC-DC regulator and even a $150 GPS unit heh heh.

dang... wish i had the cash for all this. but i can help people dream can't I?

and then add one of those $10 5"x8" formfactor keyboards and you're set with a mp3 playing box with oh more than 20,000 minutes of MP3's storage space and probably more

again under $1100 still
$83 motherboard
$10 keyboard
$60 K6-2 cpu
$64 for 32 megs of PC100 sdram (could go lower but you might as well go to 64)
$50-100 for powersupply and invertor
$320 for the 10.4" color active matrix
$80 overestimate for a custom designed plexiglass case
$275 for 27.3 gig WD HD
ok add $120 for a tripmate GPS
and we're at $1250 or so (overestimate, you can also sub a cheap used pentium and PC66 SDRAM or something or old HD etc and get the cost a LOT lower)
say motherboard and LCD combined total is $400 or so.

$1250 would be an awesome setup though and still pretty small maybe not 3" tall but definltely pretty small rivaling total volume of an early 1990's laptop i'd say.

oh well enough dreaming back to work =P

-Frank Grayson