Today, I'm proud to share a very
special, very personal announcement: my video editor and I are adding
a little one to our lives. That's right, my gaming PC and
I are having a tiny gaming PC! [Baby crying] This is the Megalith, and she's more than just
a glorious rig. She's my beloved life partner. Sorry, Brooke, your FPS is just too low. [Whip sound] Thanks to you, dear viewer, the Megalith has
been working non-stop these last three months modeling projects and cutting videos.
As a tribute to her hard work, we're gonna scale this classy lady down by
75% and build the cutest little baby PC. [Cuteness noises] But wouldn't you know, a bunch of doucheblasters
already BUILT tiny PC's, and my viewers deserve nothing less than a truly innovative content-style
experience. So today, we're building an entire tiny battlestation, complete with tiny monitor,
tiny peripherals, and a tiny desktop, atop a tiny desk. So, let's fire up Fusion 360 and start
ripping off the first thing I see: the monitor. You can tell it's a gaming
monitor because it's black, red, and edgy. We are going to copy its dark
and brooding aesthetics, but scale it all down to fit this tiny five-inch LCD. We're
just going to make an adorable tiny monitor. I started by modeling the monitor's bezel and
scaled it down by about, y'know, 81.4%-ish. The touchscreen isn't going to work anymore because it
communicates with the Pi through the GPIO header, but that's all right, because we're of course
going to add a tiny keyboard and a tiny mouse. Here's how this works: The LCD panel nestles into
the bezel, and this back plate locks it in with four screws and captive nuts. My most intellectual commenters have [fart] tactfully [fart] notified [fart] me [fart]
that the prints for my top-10 tools video look like stringy poo-poo butt [fart] and I'm tired of explaining that this
is not my printer, it's the time-lapse software. I decided to eliminate these boogers once and
for all by adding a sacrificial booger-sucking wipe tower - which is an excellent
nickname for anti-maskers - to the plate. It turns out that the bond between a half-inch
thick cylinder of bootleg polycarbonate and a PEI build plate is a fickle one, easily broken. I had
to pull a tactical retreat, print just the upper part, and make some little sleeves to help glue
the two halves together. These little red feet complete the look and make this an, oh my god,
just HYPER-CUTE perfect copy of my gaming monitor. But this won't do. This desk is far
too big for this adorable bastard. A tiny battlestation needs a
tiny desk. To the wood shop! Voidstar Lab is based out of my
hackerspace the Fat Cat Fab Lab. Problem, is attendance is way down because
of the 'rona, but the rent isn't. The Fab Lab really needs help keeping the lights
on, and if you have a few bucks to spare, a small donation would make a tremendous
difference. If you're in the NYC area, apply for a sponsored membership, which
is free to you but earns us grant money. Links for both are in the description. If the
Fab Lab shuts down, Voidstar Lab is going to go with it, so a donation to them is as good
as a donation to me. Anyways, tiny desk. I'm not a great carpenter... but
now I have a little woodworking!!! [Table flipping noises] This mini desk is way higher-quality than my
real desk, which I bought for $40 at Ikea and is literally buckling under the Megalith's girth.
Adorable mini monitor, meet lovable mini desk. Next up is the tiny mouse. I grabbed an old
Magic: The Gathering playmat. I'm never gonna use that again in the United Plague of America!
I'm gonna cut out a mini mouse mat. Then, I printed a teeeeny-tiny replica of my
mouse bungee, which is tool number 10 in my top 10 list of 3D-printable tools,
link in the pop-up right theeeere... I just... bought the mouse. A tiny mouse needs a tiny keyboard. My
daily driver is an Ergodox Infinity, which looks all bad-ass and hackery, but it's
really just a regular keyboard split into two ergonomic halves. Closest thing I could find was
this home theater PC remote. It's ortholinear and it has two thumb boards, but it's technically
not a split keyboard. Until I got to it. [Sawing sounds]
[Can can music] I designed a 3D-printed frame for each
half, painstakingly spliced all 20 of those so rudely severed connections
together, wrapped it in some cable wrap, printed some strain relief out of flexible TPU and
there we go, the world's first miniature Ergodox. We have tiny peripherals and tiny furniture to
put it on. It's time to turn to the business end of this build, the tiny gaming PC. I'm
going to call this project the Coccolith, which is a microscopic plate of rock formed by
single-celled algae. They arrange them into a tiny suit of armor called a COCCOSPHERE!
It's all going to begin with the Pi. The heart of the Coccolith is the Raspberry Pi
4, in part because it's actually quite capable for playing games, but mostly because VidIQ told
me that Raspberry Pi 4 is a high-value keyword! I bought the 2GB version because I'm a cheapskate.
I bought a chunky heatsink that makes the Pi look a lot like my motherboard, and will also help shed
the inevitable inferno when we redline this thing. [Initial D theme song, vaporwave remix] When you're designing a small project,
it's really important to plan not only how it's going to look, but how
you're going to put it together, right down to the fasteners. With so little
wiggle room, it's really easy to paint yourself into a corner where you can't maneuver a part
into place or get an Allen key onto a screw. [REDACTED] I printed the main chassis out of more of that
fake-carbon fake-polycarbonate. The wee little feet are printed in classy black silk PLA and I
just glued those on. I laser-cut little windows out of acrylic with this slight green tint that
makes it look like tempered glass. Unlike in a real computer, we don't have enough room to route
wires after the fact, so we have to be methodical. First, we apply our thermal pads. We're
going to plug the cables into the Pi, we DO NOT forget the pre-programmed SD
card, we mount the Pi and the heatsink to the case. That's the lowest layer
done. Next up is dealing with the heat. Like the Megalith, the Coccolith will have five
intake fans, and even the fans are cute and tiny! Life is too short to make you watch me tighten 20
screws, so let's finish the job Instagram-style. [Superfriends transition sound] HOW WHIMSICAL WAS THAT?!! Next up is the "graphics" "cards". I am using
"scare" "quotes" because these are not really graphics cards. The Raspberry Pi basically already
is a graphics card. The Coccolith's teensy SLI setup... is a pair of Teensy microcontrollers!
The top Teensy 3.2 drives the status display and controls the fans. Bottom Teensy does exactly what
my bottom graphics card does - absolutely nothing. I really take pride in the Megalith's
liquid-cooling system. As desperately as I would LOVE to put a tiny liquid-cooling
system in the Coccolith, tiny pumps and tiny radiators are nowhere to be found. Instead,
I mounted these radiator-looking shrouds over the fans and I bent some fluorescent
acrylic into bogus water cooling. Last part is the casemodding. The Megaliff's
case... Megalithfh... Megalithfs... smegma... The Megalith's case has notoriously bad
airflow through the front and top panels. To keep the machine from imploding, I had to carve holes with the angle grinder so I could
mount these laser-cut acrylic grilles. What, do you think I have a water jet? Or a
friend with a water jet? Or a friend? Pfft- Well this time, I can design the grille
right into the Coccolith's shrouds! The Megalith is wrapped in unconvincing fake
carbon-fiber vinyl, so I set the slicer to put Hilbert-curve infill in the top and bottom
layers of my own panels, which actually makes a pretty convincing imitation of imitation carbon
fiber! It's a fake of a fake. Baudrillard's rotting corpse approves. I stuck some magnets
on the panel so I could just slap them in place. Apart from the built-in status light on
the motherboard, the Megalith has no RGB anything. It is illuminated in 100%
old-school cold cathode fluorescent blacklights. Nothing fakes fluorescent
lights like electroluminescent wire, which phosphoresces when you pass 120VAC through
it, and they will give you a nasty shock. [TF2 "Nope" meme] Not gonna zap myself on film for
your amusement, I'm not ElectroBoom! Anyways, I formed the EL wire into
these super-cute mini blacklights, and I tucked the high-voltage driver under the
divider. I think this looks pretty convincing! Finally, the Megalith has a custom vacuum
fluorescent status display that runs on, you guessed it, a Teensy. This thing shows heat, load,
and memory use, and when I reboot the computer, it even scrolls through randomly-generated status
lines! I salvaged this VFD from an industrial HVAC controller, but the cute li'l baby version
is going to use one of those super-small OLED displays that I have left over from the Among
Us card swipe project. I will need to gather the info from like nine different command-line
utilities that all need to be individually parsed with regexes, and screw that! I'm just gonna use
data I already know: sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. That's it, we're all wired up. I mounted the
divider, attached those magnetic cosmetic panels, and now there's only one step left to do. If
you're a stoic macho manly-man who's never experienced strong emotions, you may not be
prepared for what's about to happen. Have your cardiologist on speed-dial, 'cuz
this is going straight to your heart. I screwed in my very finest 0.25 millimeter
nozzle, I loaded up some flexible TPU, and I printed the world's smallest cable combs, only
2.5mm thicc. It took hours of tweezing, but I routed those wires into the
smallest, cutest cable raceway on YouTube. Oh my god... I must contain the cuteness...
long enough to mount the back window... and the front window... I just... I can't take
it anymore... it's all just... so... CUUUUU-- Say hello to the Coccolith, the adorable
miniature bebeh of the fire-breathing Megalith that is editing this very video. Just like
its mama, no detail has been overlooked to make the Coccolith the ultimate pint-sized
gaming machine, let's hoist it to the tiny table, hook up the tiny peripherals, and... what's
this... oh no... the tiny backplane..! [Pitched-down NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO] Well, we built a tiny gaming battlestation.
What do you say we do some tiny gaming? First on the tiny agenda is Minecraft. This
comes preinstalled, so if it doesn't run I'm gonna be flabbergasted. Woohoo!
Minecraft Pi runs buttery smooth, and although we can mine, uhh,
this does not let us craft. What we can do is use Python
to instance 400 blocks of TNT and set them off with a bow and arrow. I'm going to grab a snack,
this could take a few minutes. The Raspberry Pi is going to look
like an ashtray when this is done... After the dust settles, we've blown out
a cavern the size of your mom. Zing! Next question: Does it run doom?
The port is called chocolate doom, because it is not vanilla doom. We
launch our .WAD, and there we go, kicking demon butt Carmack-style. I regret not
making a set of tiny speakers to play the tiny Pantera covers, but then I'd be worried
about getting a tiny copyright strike. Last challenge is going to be
the hardest: Can it play Crysis? I installed PlayOnLinux, I loaded WINE, and guess
what: My SD card is 8GB but Crysis is seven. That is the stupidest reason something can't run
Crysis ever. So the best thing I can do is use Steam Link to stream gameplay from the Megalith.
It does actually work, and it's responsive enough to play, but for some reason, it's... the picture
is upside down. So will it run Crysis? As of now, no. Will it PLAY Crysis? Absolutely. Technically
correct, the very best kind of correct. And that is all about my tiny computer. If you
enjoyed this episode, please consider giving the Fat Cat Fab Lab a small donation
or apply for a sponsored membership. Links to both are in the description. [Singing] Wanna build your own itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny 3d-printed RasPi
PC? Links to STL's are down there below! If you've made it this far, you may be
interested in the official Voidstar Lab Discord, coming soon to a full-size chat program
near you! Hit subscribe to stay in touch, mash that bell to get sucked back
into this rabbit hole in a later date, thanks so much for watching,
and I'll see you in the future. [smooch]
I love this project, it's super cute. I actually put the STL's and models on GitHub, so feel free to make your own!