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.