Today, I'm proud to share a very special, very personal announcement:
my video editor and I are adding a little one to our lives.
That's right, my gaming PC and I are having a tiny gaming PC!
[Baby crying]
This is the Megalith, and she's more than just a glorious rig. She's my beloved life partner.
Sorry, Brooke, your FPS is just too low.
[Whip sound]
Thanks to you, dear viewer, the Megalith has been working non-stop these last three months
modeling projects and cutting videos. As a tribute to her hard work,
we're gonna scale this classy lady down by 75% and build the cutest little baby PC.
[Cuteness noises]
But wouldn't you know, a bunch of doucheblasters already BUILT tiny PC's, and my viewers deserve
nothing less than a truly innovative content-style experience. So today, we're building an entire
tiny battlestation, complete with tiny monitor, tiny peripherals, and a tiny desktop, atop a
tiny desk. So, let's fire up Fusion 360 and start ripping off the first thing I see: the monitor.
You can tell it's a gaming monitor because it's black,
red, and edgy. We are going to copy its dark and brooding aesthetics, but scale it all
down to fit this tiny five-inch LCD. We're just going to make an adorable tiny monitor.
I started by modeling the monitor's bezel and scaled it down by about, y'know, 81.4%-ish. The
touchscreen isn't going to work anymore because it communicates with the Pi through the GPIO header,
but that's all right, because we're of course going to add a tiny keyboard and a tiny mouse.
Here's how this works: The LCD panel nestles into the bezel, and this back plate locks it in with
four screws and captive nuts. My most intellectual
commenters have [fart] tactfully [fart] notified [fart] me [fart] that the prints for my top-10 tools video look like
stringy poo-poo butt [fart] and I'm tired of explaining that this is not my printer, it's the time-lapse software.
I decided to eliminate these boogers once and for all by adding a sacrificial booger-sucking
wipe tower - which is an excellent nickname for anti-maskers - to the plate.
It turns out that the bond between a half-inch thick cylinder of bootleg polycarbonate and a PEI
build plate is a fickle one, easily broken. I had to pull a tactical retreat, print just the upper
part, and make some little sleeves to help glue the two halves together. These little red feet
complete the look and make this an, oh my god, just HYPER-CUTE perfect copy of my gaming monitor.
But this won't do. This desk is far too big for this adorable bastard.
A tiny battlestation needs a tiny desk. To the wood shop!
Voidstar Lab is based out of my hackerspace the Fat Cat Fab Lab.
Problem, is attendance is way down because of the 'rona, but the rent isn't. The Fab
Lab really needs help keeping the lights on, and if you have a few bucks to spare,
a small donation would make a tremendous difference. If you're in the NYC area,
apply for a sponsored membership, which is free to you but earns us grant money.
Links for both are in the description. If the Fab Lab shuts down, Voidstar Lab is going to go
with it, so a donation to them is as good as a donation to me. Anyways, tiny desk.
I'm not a great carpenter... but now I have a little woodworking!!!
[Table flipping noises]
This mini desk is way higher-quality than my real desk, which I bought for $40 at Ikea and is
literally buckling under the Megalith's girth. Adorable mini monitor, meet lovable mini desk.
Next up is the tiny mouse. I grabbed an old Magic: The Gathering playmat. I'm never gonna
use that again in the United Plague of America! I'm gonna cut out a mini mouse mat. Then,
I printed a teeeeny-tiny replica of my mouse bungee, which is tool number 10 in
my top 10 list of 3D-printable tools, link in the pop-up right theeeere...
I just... bought the mouse.
A tiny mouse needs a tiny keyboard. My daily driver is an Ergodox Infinity,
which looks all bad-ass and hackery, but it's really just a regular keyboard split into two
ergonomic halves. Closest thing I could find was this home theater PC remote. It's ortholinear and
it has two thumb boards, but it's technically not a split keyboard. Until I got to it.
[Sawing sounds] [Can can music]
I designed a 3D-printed frame for each half, painstakingly spliced all 20
of those so rudely severed connections together, wrapped it in some cable wrap,
printed some strain relief out of flexible TPU and there we go, the world's first miniature Ergodox.
We have tiny peripherals and tiny furniture to put it on. It's time to turn to the business
end of this build, the tiny gaming PC. I'm going to call this project the Coccolith,
which is a microscopic plate of rock formed by single-celled algae. They arrange them into a
tiny suit of armor called a COCCOSPHERE! It's all going to begin with the Pi.
The heart of the Coccolith is the Raspberry Pi 4, in part because it's actually quite capable
for playing games, but mostly because VidIQ told me that Raspberry Pi 4 is a high-value keyword! I
bought the 2GB version because I'm a cheapskate. I bought a chunky heatsink that makes the Pi look
a lot like my motherboard, and will also help shed the inevitable inferno when we redline this thing.
[Initial D theme song, vaporwave remix]
When you're designing a small project, it's really important to plan not only
how it's going to look, but how you're going to put it together,
right down to the fasteners. With so little wiggle room, it's really easy to paint yourself
into a corner where you can't maneuver a part into place or get an Allen key onto a screw.
[REDACTED]
I printed the main chassis out of more of that fake-carbon fake-polycarbonate. The wee little
feet are printed in classy black silk PLA and I just glued those on. I laser-cut little windows
out of acrylic with this slight green tint that makes it look like tempered glass. Unlike in a
real computer, we don't have enough room to route wires after the fact, so we have to be methodical.
First, we apply our thermal pads. We're going to plug the cables into the Pi,
we DO NOT forget the pre-programmed SD card, we mount the Pi and the heatsink
to the case. That's the lowest layer done. Next up is dealing with the heat.
Like the Megalith, the Coccolith will have five intake fans, and even the fans are cute and tiny!
Life is too short to make you watch me tighten 20 screws, so let's finish the job Instagram-style.
[Superfriends transition sound]
HOW WHIMSICAL WAS THAT?!!
Next up is the "graphics" "cards". I am using "scare" "quotes" because these are not really
graphics cards. The Raspberry Pi basically already is a graphics card. The Coccolith's teensy SLI
setup... is a pair of Teensy microcontrollers! The top Teensy 3.2 drives the status display and
controls the fans. Bottom Teensy does exactly what my bottom graphics card does - absolutely nothing.
I really take pride in the Megalith's liquid-cooling system. As desperately as
I would LOVE to put a tiny liquid-cooling system in the Coccolith, tiny pumps and tiny
radiators are nowhere to be found. Instead, I mounted these radiator-looking shrouds over
the fans and I bent some fluorescent acrylic into bogus water cooling.
Last part is the casemodding. The Megaliff's case... Megalithfh... Megalithfs...
smegma...
The Megalith's case has notoriously bad airflow through the front and top panels.
To keep the machine from imploding, I had to carve
holes with the angle grinder so I could mount these laser-cut acrylic grilles.
What, do you think I have a water jet? Or a friend with a water jet? Or a friend? Pfft-
Well this time, I can design the grille right into the Coccolith's shrouds!
The Megalith is wrapped in unconvincing fake carbon-fiber vinyl, so I set the slicer to
put Hilbert-curve infill in the top and bottom layers of my own panels, which actually makes a
pretty convincing imitation of imitation carbon fiber! It's a fake of a fake. Baudrillard's
rotting corpse approves. I stuck some magnets on the panel so I could just slap them in place.
Apart from the built-in status light on the motherboard, the Megalith has no RGB
anything. It is illuminated in 100% old-school cold cathode fluorescent
blacklights. Nothing fakes fluorescent lights like electroluminescent wire,
which phosphoresces when you pass 120VAC through it, and they will give you a nasty shock.
[TF2 "Nope" meme]
Not gonna zap myself on film for your amusement, I'm not ElectroBoom!
Anyways, I formed the EL wire into these super-cute mini blacklights,
and I tucked the high-voltage driver under the divider. I think this looks pretty convincing!
Finally, the Megalith has a custom vacuum fluorescent status display that runs on, you
guessed it, a Teensy. This thing shows heat, load, and memory use, and when I reboot the computer,
it even scrolls through randomly-generated status lines! I salvaged this VFD from an industrial
HVAC controller, but the cute li'l baby version is going to use one of those super-small OLED
displays that I have left over from the Among Us card swipe project. I will need to gather
the info from like nine different command-line utilities that all need to be individually parsed
with regexes, and screw that! I'm just gonna use data I already know: sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll.
That's it, we're all wired up. I mounted the divider, attached those magnetic cosmetic panels,
and now there's only one step left to do. If you're a stoic macho manly-man who's never
experienced strong emotions, you may not be prepared for what's about to happen. Have
your cardiologist on speed-dial, 'cuz this is going straight to your heart.
I screwed in my very finest 0.25 millimeter nozzle, I loaded up some flexible TPU, and I printed
the world's smallest cable combs, only 2.5mm thicc. It took hours of tweezing,
but I routed those wires into the smallest, cutest cable raceway on YouTube.
Oh my god... I must contain the cuteness... long enough to mount the back window...
and the front window... I just... I can't take it anymore... it's all just... so... CUUUUU--
Say hello to the Coccolith, the adorable miniature bebeh of the fire-breathing Megalith
that is editing this very video. Just like its mama, no detail has been overlooked
to make the Coccolith the ultimate pint-sized gaming machine, let's hoist it to the tiny table,
hook up the tiny peripherals, and... what's this... oh no... the tiny backplane..!
[Pitched-down NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO]
Well, we built a tiny gaming battlestation. What do you say we do some tiny gaming?
First on the tiny agenda is Minecraft. This comes preinstalled, so if it doesn't run
I'm gonna be flabbergasted. Woohoo! Minecraft Pi runs buttery smooth,
and although we can mine, uhh, this does not let us craft.
What we can do is use Python to instance 400 blocks of TNT
and set them off with a bow and arrow.
I'm going to grab a snack, this could take a few minutes.
The Raspberry Pi is going to look like an ashtray when this is done...
After the dust settles, we've blown out a cavern the size of your mom. Zing!
Next question: Does it run doom? The port is called chocolate doom,
because it is not vanilla doom. We launch our .WAD, and there we go,
kicking demon butt Carmack-style. I regret not making a set of tiny speakers to play the tiny
Pantera covers, but then I'd be worried about getting a tiny copyright strike.
Last challenge is going to be the hardest: Can it play Crysis?
I installed PlayOnLinux, I loaded WINE, and guess what: My SD card is 8GB but Crysis is seven.
That is the stupidest reason something can't run Crysis ever. So the best thing I can do is use
Steam Link to stream gameplay from the Megalith. It does actually work, and it's responsive enough
to play, but for some reason, it's... the picture is upside down. So will it run Crysis? As of now,
no. Will it PLAY Crysis? Absolutely. Technically correct, the very best kind of correct.
And that is all about my tiny computer. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving
the Fat Cat Fab Lab a small donation or apply for a sponsored membership.
Links to both are in the description.
[Singing] Wanna build your own
itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny 3d-printed RasPi PC? Links to STL's are down there below!
If you've made it this far, you may be interested in the official Voidstar Lab Discord,
coming soon to a full-size chat program near you! Hit subscribe to stay in touch,
mash that bell to get sucked back into this rabbit hole in a later date,
thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the future.
[smooch]