Introduction

Around the time I first discovered the Mini-ITX motherboard (and this wonderful website), I was surfing the web and came across this new Playskool version of the Millennium Falcon. I instantly thought, the original Falcon mod (by Russ Caslis) had a lot of empty space. I bet you could fit everything you need in here.

It turns out I was *almost* right.

Construction

The first thing to do was gut it. It originally had buttons that played different sound effects. I wanted to preserve the buttons for power and CD ejection, and also try to save the sound board and spaker, but when the project got toward the end, there wasn't really enough space to keep the speaker.

I took a dremel and cut/ground out all protrusions and cut a piece of acrylic to serve as a base for the drive and motherboard. In the picture here you can see the snap in power supply. It takes 12V input from a brick and supplies the hot power switch function. By now, I could see things were going to be tight so I looked around for the smallest DVD drive I could find. I wound up getting the Panasonic slim slot loading DVD drive.

Cutting the slot for the DVD was the hardest part of this whole project. If I had to do it all again, making a jig to hold the model vertically and runing the nose through a table saw would have been a lot easier and would have looked a lot better. You can also see some more acrylic pieces I glued around the DVD slot to give it some reinforcement.

I then bent some sheetmetal into L-brackets and attached them to the botom level of the support structure. Finding the screws that this drive used was probably the second hardest thing I had to to.