Atari RISC Workstation
Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2013 11:40 am
So, I've had this Raspberry Pi for a little over six months now, and it's been hanging around. Quite literally, I would often find it hanging on one of the plugged-in wires. Transporting it, plus the usual peripherals of choice was also a spaghetti mess as well. Then I dug out an old, dusty external hard drive I had leftover from my pile of Atari ST stuff I sold long ago.
The 30MB ST-238 hard drive inside died long ago, and I haven't any Atari stuff left to use this old thing with, so I tore out the logic board, the hard drive, and everything else but the LED panel and the power supply, which I decided to reuse. I've had some issues with stability and peripheral devices using the 700mA Blackberry charger, and with 3A available on the 5v side of this power supply, I should have plenty of current to spare from now on.
Preparing it to feed my pi all the juice it should ever need...
This was a start, but still a bit on the light side. After all, that case was mostly still empty! So I dug around and found an external drive with a dead hard drive in the casing. I tore out the controller board and mated it with a working 320GB drive I had laying around. I initially tried to mount it in the metal cage the external was packed in, but the drive ran a bit hot for my comfort in there, so I opted for removing the cage later on. In addition, the drive, plus controller demanded more amperage than was available on the Atari power supply's 12v side, so I ended up popping the circuit board out of the power brick, moving it inside the case and wiring it in parallel with the Atari board, after the power switch. A power LED was wired in, and the HDD activity pads on the controller were wired to the activity LED on the front panel. By this time, I was ready to call it a night. I slapped the lid on, wired it into my bedroom TV and fell asleep watching Bill Hicks on the Atari.
Today, I found myself with some free time, and looked the thing over again. More like, picked it up and heard loose boards rattle inside. It was meant to be a test fit anyway. And it was awfully dirty, still. I felt it was time to tear it back down, give the case a good bath in the dishwasher, and perhaps have a second go at organizing the inside and stabilizing everything.
Finally, it was clean inside and out, cleanly laid out, and secure enough to be held upside down and shaken with the lid off. I had the slight misfortune of having the top half bend slightly in the dishwasher, but once it's screwed on, it pulls down to lay flat as it should. The HDMI and RCA cords are tucked out one of the back holes (Hey, that's how we did it in the Apple II days...) after being looped around one of the internal pillars for strain relief. For now, it's finished. It's exclusively used over SSH, for now. But there's room for future upgrades! (Internal USB hub is certainly planned in the near future, and perhaps proper panels on the back with plug-in ports, rather than the tails it has now.)
Hope you enjoyed
The 30MB ST-238 hard drive inside died long ago, and I haven't any Atari stuff left to use this old thing with, so I tore out the logic board, the hard drive, and everything else but the LED panel and the power supply, which I decided to reuse. I've had some issues with stability and peripheral devices using the 700mA Blackberry charger, and with 3A available on the 5v side of this power supply, I should have plenty of current to spare from now on.
Preparing it to feed my pi all the juice it should ever need...
This was a start, but still a bit on the light side. After all, that case was mostly still empty! So I dug around and found an external drive with a dead hard drive in the casing. I tore out the controller board and mated it with a working 320GB drive I had laying around. I initially tried to mount it in the metal cage the external was packed in, but the drive ran a bit hot for my comfort in there, so I opted for removing the cage later on. In addition, the drive, plus controller demanded more amperage than was available on the Atari power supply's 12v side, so I ended up popping the circuit board out of the power brick, moving it inside the case and wiring it in parallel with the Atari board, after the power switch. A power LED was wired in, and the HDD activity pads on the controller were wired to the activity LED on the front panel. By this time, I was ready to call it a night. I slapped the lid on, wired it into my bedroom TV and fell asleep watching Bill Hicks on the Atari.
Today, I found myself with some free time, and looked the thing over again. More like, picked it up and heard loose boards rattle inside. It was meant to be a test fit anyway. And it was awfully dirty, still. I felt it was time to tear it back down, give the case a good bath in the dishwasher, and perhaps have a second go at organizing the inside and stabilizing everything.
Finally, it was clean inside and out, cleanly laid out, and secure enough to be held upside down and shaken with the lid off. I had the slight misfortune of having the top half bend slightly in the dishwasher, but once it's screwed on, it pulls down to lay flat as it should. The HDMI and RCA cords are tucked out one of the back holes (Hey, that's how we did it in the Apple II days...) after being looped around one of the internal pillars for strain relief. For now, it's finished. It's exclusively used over SSH, for now. But there's room for future upgrades! (Internal USB hub is certainly planned in the near future, and perhaps proper panels on the back with plug-in ports, rather than the tails it has now.)
Hope you enjoyed