What I wanted = A program to scan my collection of disk drives and say things along the lines of 'Whoa pal, this disk is so old Noah used it for his laptop on the ark!' What I got: An anime girl reading my disks and telling me the current price of petrol somewhere in the world. Look, I don't know what's going on here either! Surely it can't be that hard to do a little background check on my disks here can it?
No case? No problem. Now that I've finally got my 3d printer working after months of frustrating downtime, a quick fix solution is just a few hours away!
Yes I always keep an eye out when driving around for any front lawn freebies and recently have picked up and taken home everything from an outdoor setting to a mobile bench I turned into a home brew fermenter stand. However gone are the days where the old dusty computer finds a temporary home outside (unless someone keeps beating me to it) and so this time around I turned to the wonderful world of 3d printing a solution.
And even better, I didn't even have to design anything myself. I just downloaded this awesome print from a designer called Buzzfab from this link on Cults3D and away I went!
Connecting in two parts as seen above, this lifts and supports your motherboard off the ground which helps to no end with plug in components with bits that hang over the side like the ASUS WIFI card I dug up yesterday. Without these stands the board would be up on an angle and scraping on the desk every time I moved it. Now it's got some 3d printed feet, all 9 of them!
THEY DID NEED A LITTLE FINE TUNING THOUGH
Printing both pieces at 100% ended up with a very loose connection - these stands would just uncouple in a heartbeat as soon as you moved anything (or tried to put in another stand into another hole on the motherboard) which was frustrating. So tried a few sizes...er...on for size and discovered that around 107% size for the part with the pin created a nice snug fit without too much pressure and one that wasn't about to uncouple when you least needed it to.
So for the record that's:
Print the bottom (with the hex base) at 100%
Print the top (with the spike) at 107%
While the latest batch was printing, I whipped up a quick and dirty 3d printed band for my collection of SSD's. It didn't take me long to work something up in Tinkercad (if you have a 3d printer then have a play around on Tinkercad, it's amazing what you can quickly build there after a bit of practice.) Given the differing thickness of all three cards, I just grouped them together and used a set of digital calipers to work out the dimensions. The end product is just 2mm thick but none of the SSD's are about to slip out anytime soon!
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| If it doesn't exist, just design one up! |
Now that we've printed up some stability, time to plug things in and see what's still working (and equally as important, what's not!)
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