The "Lego 0933 Portable PC"
By James Watson
Posted on July 6, 2003
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As I moved up the case I kept encountering small problems, like the board mounting, you can see the solution to that in this picture in the bottom right corner of the case. At this point I was still dreading having to mount the hard-drive since my previous mounting hadn't been that successful, and relied rather heavily on being attached to the lid (and hence making it difficult to remove the lid). Notice the mess of wires at the bottom left of the case, those were ripped from a standard PC case, there are two switches (power and reset) and two LEDs (power and HDD), and I still had the problem of mounting these in the case to make them work.


The power switches weren't a problem, I glued them into 1 block wide gaps in the front of the case, but I still had the problem of how to mount the LEDs, but decided to leave that since I want to replace the square ones with round ones that will fit into the holes in Technic bricks. As you can see from the photo I'd left two holes in the front, these were for my case windows, the cockpits from the two TIE Bomber kits I'd brought (mainly for the flat tiles, but other components from them came in so handy I’m glad I got them now). I still hadn't decided what to do about the hard drive yet, and the power cable was also giving me headaches.


They say that patience is a virtue, and well it finally paid off, above is the hard drive mounting it goes in the top left corner of the case, and is very sturdy, although it doesn't stand up too well when on the desk (there's no support under the bottom right corner), but when mounted in the case it gives a good solid mount for the drive.


Here the drive mounting has been installed, the drive sits in here, the cable ensures it stays in place. You may also notice that the power cable (back right) is now held in place, this took some doing, the end was slightly too wide for one brick, but a little bit of brute force and I managed to wedge it in nice and tight. You might also spot that the two switches now have nice bright caps on them to make them easier to see and push, the orange one is reset, the blue on is power.


As you can see I've almost finished now, the case windows (cockpits) are in, the cables have been tidied up inside, just to the left of the picture you can see the lid of the case.


That's it really, the lid went on, and it was time to connect the power and fire her up. Now all I needed was a portable display.


Windows 2000 running on the machine.


This display came from Lik-Sang, at the price it was selling for it would have been churlish not to buy one, I still need to find a way to power the display from the PC itself, but that's another problem entirely.

Finally

The name of the machine comes from the fact that all Lego products have a 4 digit product code, 0933 is the processor speed of the machine and so seemed like a suitable code for this PC.

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