Project ARIAS: The ever evolving suitcase mod.

[Emission]

In the fear that I may lose some of your interest with a long drawn-out introduction, I'm revising my explanations to make everything short, sweet, and to the point.

I'm building this because I need something more portable. I can't be bothered with a gaming laptop because it's too expensive and not modular enough. I mess around with my computer too often, the laptop would bore me after a week anyway. Of course, who doesn't love a good project?

ARIAS stands for A Rig In A Suitcase. I'd say this is fairly self explanatory. The suitcase part, well, it's the most advanced suitcase I've ever seen!

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Design Considerations:
Relatively small size.
It needs to be small enough that I can still call it a suitcase, and rival the portability of a gaming laptop (not that easy, but I can try). Of course, it needs to be big enough that I can fit a full ATX board in it, because this means I can use 90% of the boards on the market, so my choices aren't limited.

Cost Effective.
Here's the big one: I'd like to keep my arms and legs. This is one of the main reasons I'm doing this project in the first place. Gaming laptops are too expensive, even if I was to settle for one of those, I couldn't afford one that fits my computing power needs.

Modular.
This goes hand-in-hand with cost effective. High-performance desktops can be cheaply built these days, and if all I have to do to upgrade every now and then is swap my processor or my graphics card, then I'm set for a very long time (relatively, this IS the computer world after all). I'm in love with this idea, and I'd love to be able to keep the actual case for a good long time too.

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The Prototypes Thus Far:
Prototype 1, ARIAS-000:
What this prototype has accomplished:
- Easy to pack computer setup
- Much quicker to pack than a typical setup with tower/monitors/etc
- Easier to transport, it's got wheels and handles
- Indestructibility is a plus with this particular design, as well as being water-tight when closed
- Able to use 100% desktop parts with this particular design, including the recycling of one of my desktop monitors without any major modifications.

Drawbacks:
- Freaking huge.
- Did I mention huge? Just checking.

I've never been able to pack my entire setup in less than 5 minutes before, and this was probably the best part of this prototype. It was easy to mount all of the parts straight from the tower into this box. The motherboard tray and removable HDD cage were salvaged from the damaged remains of my tower. The tray had to be persuaded to fit, but once I finally figured out the orientation, everything else just fell into place. I'm also thoroughly impressed with how well industrial-strength velcro is able to keep my HDD cage in place. Granted, I used two whole pads of it, but it is firmly in place. After surviving the 500 mile trip home, I'm convinced of that. The empty spaces in the box were actually used for a bunch of other crap, the box was stuffed, and yet the computer was still intact and perfectly functioning after unpacking all that crap and setting it up again.

Now, what I do *not* love about it: It's huge, forget trying to put this thing on your lap, let alone a desk. Maybe a short table at that. Given the size, the entire thing is almost as big, if not bigger than a Cooler Master HAF-X or equivalent cases. Pretty sure it's thicker anyway, in relative respects. I got all excited about the case when looking at it on ebay, and it was much cheaper than almost everything its size and most things smaller, also indestructible was an exciting plus, but that is going to be another consideration for the next prototype in terms of keeping it durable AND relatively small, much smaller than this box anyway.

Continued in the next post.

 

[jrrandell]

looking foward to seeing the pics

 

[Emission]

ARIAS-000 Continued:

Note: The case has wheels that are not currently attached, as they were removed to make things more compact for travel. If anyone would like to see them, I can take pictures of them, and what the case looks like with them attached, just let me know .

The case candidate: A Hardigg 25x19x15 (external dimensions in inches) shipping container. MIL-SPEC, indestructible, the works. The only thing I was satisfied with about this case is the rigidity of it, and the safety of the components inside. I was also satisfied with the fact that I saved money on not having to buy any new parts to make accommodations for size.

It should be noted that I built this in a hurry, with very loose requirements, as I needed to have this before the following LAN at the time. The only substantial tool available to me was a drill, everything else was good old fashioned hand tools. Pliers, some screwdrivers, a crescent wrench, and that's pretty much it. My only real design consideration for this was to keep everything completely inside the case to retain water-tightness. Full rigidity when closed.

A picture of the overall setup, what it looks like when everything is laid out for use. Wall sockets, Table, and Xbox controller for size reference to give you an idea of what I mean by huge.

A picture of the upper section, the interior of the lid. My LG W2243-T fit perfectly with room to spare towards the bottom. It was mounted using the 100mm VESA mounts on the back, through the lid. Neoprene washers and hot glue were used to ensure that everything stays water-tight. The power strip was a last-minute idea, worked out very well, makes it very easy to find a place to plug this thing in.

Photo of the lid and the monitor mounting setup on the outside. The other rubber pieces are recycled rubber fan rivets that I used to close off some extra holes that were made when I drilled out the old plate that used to be there to hold shipping papers. Liberal use of hot glue here as well, to keep the rivets solidly in place, and to keep it water-tight. I also salvaged the stickers off of my tower and put them on this case .

A shot of the business end of things. It took me about half an hour to figure out the final layout of things on the inside. There are three long strips on the bottom that are raised, these are part of the case design that allow these things to be stacked on top of another in a way that they stay in place. That's nice and all, but it made things difficult in terms of mounting. I recycled the motherboard tray from the tower and finally decided to mount it as shown. There's just enough clearance on the right side to allow things to be connected with relative ease. Hard drive cage is mounted to the left where all of the connectors can meet in one place, same goes for the power supply. The size of this case allowed me to keep my Noctua in there too.

Given that I was limited in time and materials, I had to throw this solution together real quick. A scrap metal piece and an old PCI slot blank were used as the mounts, screwed into the upper section of the lower half of the case. Turned out to be very rigid. I added a bit of hot glue between the power supply and case to help that along as well. It's also conveniently located next to the power strip.

In this picture you can see things connected, as well as another part of the old tower that was salvaged, the front I/O connector board. Turned out to be a handy addition. Three of the six mounting screws can be seen towards the bottom here. The tray is mounted in between two of the three raised plastic ridges, holes were drilled in the centers of the ridges, so that on the underside of the case, the screws are recessed and they won't hit anything that this case is sitting on. Neoprene washers and hot glue to the rescue for these screws as well. I used neoprene washers on both sides to allow the tray to have some vibration/shock resistance during travel. I threw in the blue cold cathode for fun, looks pretty cool lit up in the dark.

Here is where the bulk of the interior wiring happens. The power supply is a modular Seasonic M12 700W unit, and there is just enough space to have things plugged in on the bottom there, where they won't hit the bottom of the box. The only wires that have to travel long-distance are the 8-pin CPU power wire and the motherboard wire, seen traveling over the HDD cage, everything else is central to the area, power and SATA data cables. The cage is affixed with two large pads of industrial velcro. This allows a small bit of play in the movement, large enough to help vibration and shock resistance, small enough that it will stay in place during travels, particularly when being rolled over rough surfaces.

A fun shot of the lighting in the dark. Glows through the 3/16" plastic casing.

In practical application, this box is a success. There is a lot more I could have done with it, and it could have looked a lot nicer on the inside, but in terms of outright practical use, it works. The motherboard is a MSI X58 Pro-E that has power/reset switches right on board, so I didn't have to make any final accommodations for front panel switches. I originally had plans to put a separating cover on top of the parts where I keyboard could sit, and all the rear connections would be placed on this cover panel for easier access, but I knew as soon as this was finished that it was going to be too large in terms of practical portability. I was barely able to fit the thing in my friends car for the trip home. This is when I started brainstorming plans for the second prototype.

I'll be working on sketches for ARIAS-001 during the next few days as I finalize some design decisions. What I can say with absolute certainty is that the next prototype will be a custom built wooden case that resembles a suitcase in design. Good pre-manufactured suitcase candidates for this are hard to come by, so I'm going to make the case from scratch this time.

I will leave you guys with this for now, I'd love to know what everyone thinks of the first prototype .

 

[Emission]

Alright guys, I need a moment of your time to help me out with a design decision. I think I've come pretty close to figuring out a decent parts layout, but I'm split between two potential directions to go in at this point.

Before I continue, I just want to note that I've decided to make the actual computer section of the case no taller than 4 inches total in height. This is because if I actually wanted to place this thing on my lap, anything thicker than 4 inches would be awkwardly bulky. It would be a bit of a different story if it were sitting on a table, but for ergonomics sake, I'm sticking with my 4 inches max requirement.

I'm stuck between two potential design ideas in terms of the graphics card setup. I've drawn two sketches of these scenarios on my tablet, and taken screen shots of both sketches, with notes.

First idea, dual-slot graphics card mounted side-ways with a pci-e riser card (riser card not specifically labeled, but the use of one is implied):

Second idea, dual-slot half-height graphics card mounted normally on the board.I had some short-lived excitement regarding this idea, more details below the picture:

The first option allows me the flexibility of using just about whatever full-height card I please. This has many benefits in terms of performance and noise. However, I'm concerned that mounting the card may be more of an issue, as its a bit difficult to support the back of the card with it sideways like that. Another potential concern is that the fan of the card will pretty much be sitting right next to the board, where its airflow could be limited. If I did actually want to use the other slots, I'd be out of luck. I also don't know if the overall height of this setup would interfere with the placement of a keyboard here. I may just use a slimmer form factor keyboard to make it work though.

The second option allows me to mount things normally, and grants me full use of the board. There are 3 pci-e x16 slots present (one of them being 4x electrically), so I could potentially use sli or crossfire. It would also be easier to mount things, as well as things being more securely mounted as they are sitting directly in the board as opposed to any kind of riser cards. Taking all that into account, I would still be limited to half-height cards.

Currently, I've found that the Palit GTS 450 Low-Profile is the most powerful LP card available. I've also found that SLI can be used without a bridge, at a roughly 5% performance penalty (usually less, especially with these cards). My only concern here is the noise output of the card. It could get rather loud at full-throttle, and that kinda defeats the point.

After some consideration, I'm leaning towards the full-height card with the riser. What do you guys think?

 

[Emission]

Revised my first post to make everything short and sweet, hopefully this might actually get some attention now .