Pre Release: Mini PC Shelf

Today my spare stuff from Monoprice arrived so I could repurpose a mini PC I had. A while back the only service in our lab available was crazy Verizon TLS service ($1800/month for 10mbit service - yeah) due to the fact that A) brookline MA is crazy and B) the building was opened during the Lincoln administration - no seriously). The problem is the TLS service requires a “real” router, not a consumer router, and our IT group supplied one to me, but we had a pair of these. I made a router out of one of those small fanless PCs using the Ars Technica directions.

So finally comcast (yeah how often have you craved comcast) arrived in our building, so I got the PC back. It’s not super powerful (that well known manufacturer American Megatrends - hahaha) with a core i3, 8gb of RAM and a 250gb M3 SSD. Anyway it would make a perfect box right near the Glowforge and my 3D printers to kick off/cancel jobs; loaded it up with Ubuntu. But I needed one of those VESA PC/monitor/keyboard thingies to get it all off the worktable nearby. Well I got the one from monoprice, but it didn’t have a shelf for my little PC.

If you recall way, way back I had an “accident” with a fairly significant laser fire with an 80w with a sheet of 1/4" black acrylic.

Which resulted in me having a stack of leftovers from the areas that didn’t burn. (normally I would have used proof grade which would have smelled way better, but I had it). Put these together and BAM I figured I could make a cool shelf.

I decided that it should be 2 parts (each the same one flipped) that I would glue together. While I could have designed this solely in AI, decided CAD would be so much faster (this took all of 3 minutes). I realized that in putting these over the shaft (I had to make it in 2 parts since I had already assembled the whole wall thing) that I would need some way to locate them, so I put 2x 1/4" holes which i could slip bolts into. Anyway, usual OnShape->SXF->AI workflow.


(one weeded, one not yet)


Placed opposite sides so it is ready for glue up

hahaha. Of course I had 1/2" bolts right? No. No I did not. OOOPS. But then I realized I could simply use a 1/4" drill bit to act as the pin during glue up.

A few minutes with the needle-bottle with acrylic glue, and we have a shelf.

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Oh, and before someone goes, why does your IT group let you do this in your lab? This extra line (with their blessing) is not on the hospital network (which goes through an even more insanely expensive TLS100 line to the data center) but is used to connect certain machines to an outside project where the other hospital’s VPN and our intrusion detection systems fight, resulting in 28K modem speeds over a 2gbit connection… So ironically we get 50-100x the speed by going through an outside 50mbit comcast business line. This was all blessed by IT…

Note: That just freed up my mini PC. This shelf is in my basement…

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