Last ditch effort so save the pizza boxes!

each cluster needs 6 identical of each (and 2 or more spares! )

Microquadra Mobos
PDS NIC's (with as many blinking LED's as Possible)
Fans
Speakers
DRAM SIMMS
VRAM SIMMS x 2

Additional items:

6 Cool looking heat sinks
6 6" neon tubes or misc. el string
6 2.5" SCSI HDD's (old PB 20's min. to ?)
1 low profile PC Power Supply (adapted)
1 6 Port Hub With Uplink (and LOTS of flashing LED's)
1 Floppy Drive
1 SCSI internal ZIP (mostly for looks HAR!™)
1 SCSI CDROM Drive - Bootable
6 Dozen LED's (minimum) for disk access indication
(and anything else that'll make the suckers blink!)

Lotsa custom ABCDEF TTL Switching Circuitry (simple crap!)
6 custom PCB or Ribbon Cable 2.5"- 3.5" Adapter/Switch/Term. Assy.
Several Braided Wiring Harnesses (Macrame anyone?)

Misc. 1/8" Aluminum Horizontal Chassis Plates
Misc. 1/2" Clear Plexi Vertical Case Members
Misc. 1/8" Clear Plexi Vertical Case Cover Plates

(think: lincoln logs meets glass skyscraper architecture building blocks)

Large helping of free time and much larger serving of insanity.

jt ™. .

p.s. did i mention that they are all clocked to at least 40 Mhz?

p.p.s. i think i need to do a graphic of a backplane, they all face front for visibility and to show the LED's on the NIC's. the bottom cover panel is just full of blinkin led's.

p.p.p.s. Cinemo, all your 840AV Clock Cycles are belong to 10.5" cube = pizzabox warming rack! HAR!™ . . .

. . . disk access we won't bother mentioning!

p.p.p.p.s. no spec. on what kind, but there WILL be feets!

POWER POWER POWER!!!

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assuming the speakers had their drivers exposed (as Apple seems attracted to doing, as well), that is!

POWER POWER POWER!!!

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Instead of feets, how about rubber rockers so it can be wheeled around?

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huh? it's only a 10.5" cube! maybe feets and a plexi carry handle like an ice bucket?

jt ?. .

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Edited by - g4from128k on 17 May 2002 17:59:08

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Cool one, JT! You actually gonna build it?

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thanks, i hope not, but if all those 'zaboxes are only gonna make it a few feet closer to NYC by getting buried, i think i'll foot the bill to get the parts here to build one for myself and make the parts for one to send to babyB if he wants them. if anybody else wanted to save a few of the mobos/goodies from the fate of the pit, maybe i'll digitize the parts and have a buddy turn 'em out on his routertable and laser cutting equipment. he owes me bigtime for designing the production layout of his shop, but he'll probably try to charge me anyway! we'll see!

any suggestions for refining the design would be appreciated. the look is basically all clear plexi cover panels attached to thick plexi block verticals laminated with aluminum chassis/cooling fin horizontal members that protrude from the sides of th cube to give it a thechier feel and break up the outlines of the cube (to make it look like i did it on purpose rather than to make fabrication easy, also!).

i wasn't sure if the look would come across from the plan views, it is pretty clear what i'm going for? do the six rows of backplane connectors sound appealing, it's a takepff of the XServe rack pizza oven, obviously.

jt ™. .

hey, B! have they buried all those poor pizza boxes yet? what do the ethernet cards look like?

jt ™. .

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Question: How are you going to interface the single set of cd / floppy / zip drives with 6 motherboards? How are you going to interconnect the machines (Ethernet??) How about display / input? 6 way kvm switch? Would it really be necessary to scrounge up all those vram simms if the machines are operating in a cluster?? Interesting Idea, while relatively useless (don't get me wrong, I loved my quadra 605), it would just TOTALLY rock!

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the whole thing would be pretty much entirely worthless in any real terms, like all the rest of my 68k's and even my 2300c's by any rational standard! but i'll never give them up or my nikon F's or the professional level nikon, leica and canon rangefinders/lens sets in my collection, it's the same kinda thing in my book!

all the 475/605's have PDS NICs, so if they are thinnet that'd look very cool running up and down the face, if they're 10baseT that'd look good running down to a hub built into the black panel on the bottom front. Video and ADB will either be IDC/Ribbon cable runs from the mobo connectors to the custom PCB's or maybe a woven loom of wire wrap wire patches to the PCB or a header pin interface, dunno, whatever looks the best, this is kind of an LED/neon/lighting/digital sculpture project.

i'm leaning toward building TTL gating into custom circuit boards that will allow chip select (probably a one of eight selector circuit, so the removables could be accessed from any of the BrickOven's six microquadra boards or from either of two macs hooked into it, so it'd be doing double duty as an external drive enclosure/KVM. (not entirely worthless after all! )

PCB function/physical interface spec:

* top of board adapts 2.5" drives to 50 pin internal bus

* LED's for Disk access (& anything else i can think of) also are mounted on top of pcb.

* 2.5" drives are bolted to PCB with short standoffs

* PCB's are mounted to mobo carrier plate with standoffs

* KVM connections (thru holes for external D-Sub and DIN connectors as well as internal header connections and built in sense pin configuration via jumpers. also thru holes for internal drive a/o external SCSI connector for use as in external drive enclosure/KVM mode.

PCB bottom side TTL circuit gate switching spec:

when pcb is enabled by outside selector circuit signal:

* built in KVM gates are enabled for dedicated mobo or attached macs.

* floppy interface gates are enabled

* SCSI bus "or" gates disable connection to terminator resistor pack for 2.5" drive and enable extended connection to the terminated removables bus.

________

haven't thought it all that far through as i'm in no hurry to build it. i'm really hoping other homes can be found for all the machines. i may start saving up the components to build one out of damaged 475/605's tho!

jt

=8-}

p.s. if it looks better, i'll hang the drives from the bottom of the PCB and expose the custom TTL and connectors, dunno, gotta dummy up a model to see how everything fits and looks irl.

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hey, B! have they buried all those poor pizza boxes yet? what do the ethernet cards look like?

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hey, B! have they buried all those poor pizza boxes yet? what do the ethernet cards look like?

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Good luck with your brickoven hack. I wish it was practical for me to donate some hardware to the cause .

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http://homepage.mac.com/jwt1863/.Pictures/HACKS/BrickOven/BrickOven35.jpg

maybe i will try to build this thing even if i have to use serviceable macs . . . . .

. . . . . maybe?

jt ™. .

p.s. added some feets to it while i was at it also!

Still looks very cool tho

--
Mark Benson

FlatPackMacs http://fpm.gotdns.com

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if you use 6 LC475s it'd be a formidibal cube. I dunno how you'd use all 6 at once, maybe a distributed computing system. If you have the cases left over save a couple. When I've got the money to cover postage (in about 2 months maybe) I'll pay to have 2 shipped as bare case & psu sets.

Still looks very cool tho

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jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF

that leaves just:

(4) mobos
(4) 2.5" SCSI HDD's
(5) NIC's and
(6) 33 MHz 68040's

that remain to be acquired!

jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF

p.s. i can't withstand the urge to mod a half dozen 'zaboxes!

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that leaves just:

(4) mobos
(4) 2.5" SCSI HDD's
(5) NIC's and
(6) 33 MHz 68040's

that remain to be acquired!

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--------------------
keeper of the website , master of the Quadra/Centris Stick of Justice™, and figure-head of the Peoples' PDS Republic
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Yikes! Those 2.5" SCSI HDDs are gonna be expensive/hard to acquire! Why not half-height 3.5"?

For the 33 MHz 68040s, why not just get a bucket full of 25 MHz 68040, heatsink, that glue stuff, and and overclock 'em?

I would think those NICs are a dime-a-dozen on 'Bay...or am I terribly mistaken?

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jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF

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how far did this project progress? is it built yet?

-------------
Special Ops, 578th Performa Division
Fort Llama, Memphis Tennessee
68k Macs Liberated: 2

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Warrior maclover5
68k Macintosh Liberation Army
Number of 68ks Liberated: 6

I decided that it probably will get built after I finish the three hacks I've actually started already. It's probably not going to be for parallel processing tho. I think each layer will have a different PDS card, one for PAS16, one for network connection and anything else I can find to play with, it might be fun.

I forgot... does this project encompass a shared power supply? or just a built in power strip :)

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I forgot... does this project encompass a shared power supply? or just a built in power strip :)

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jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF

RenderFarm
SETIfarm
Collective computing power ServerFarm
Because it's cool
I'm bored
To run tests

at any rate... I'd love to see pics of the final product... and good luck!

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To run tests

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Warrior maclover5
68k Macintosh Liberation Army
Number of 68ks Liberated: 6

it's just fun to compare different computers... pit them against each other in competition to see who'se is best

think... a BrickOven would likely beat a single proc 840 or 950 right?

then it might beat an 8100, or even more MHz macs!

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