Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Hardware Hacking

Creative use for empty whiskey bottles 253

Japala writes "You might have seen computers built inside of toasters, radios, garden lamps etc. As motherboards keep getting smaller and smaller the possibilites on where you can embed then increases. As it turns out, you can get them to fit inside an empty glass bottle. Whisky PC for a whiskey lover that needs a small and silent server."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Creative use for empty whiskey bottles

Comments Filter:
  • by joe 155 ( 937621 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @12:55PM (#14646139) Journal
    well, it is certainly more portable and better looking than your average tower. I think that there could well be a market for these things, in all different types of bottles or shaped glass cases... If you wanted to go all out you could put a plasma screan on the side... set it to show the original label as a screan saver if you want to go all out...

    I wonder if it's kept its nice wiskey smell...
  • by jerkychew ( 80913 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @12:57PM (#14646145) Homepage
    The article just says that the board is an "industrial 3.5" SBC board". Does anybody know the model number, and where one could buy this board?
  • by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @12:59PM (#14646153) Homepage Journal
    Is there any site that lists all the motherboards and components you can use to build these tiny machines? I've seen mini-itx.com, but it's very hard to navigate to specific boards, cases, psu's etc. It's mostly a news site, and it seems like if you don't keep up with it every day you'll have no idea what's up. So, where do you go to find these little things? I'd love to build a PC based alarm clock.
  • Nice work! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by eyepeepackets ( 33477 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @01:02PM (#14646167)
    Excellent mod work. I really like the mods which make PCs look like something other than PCs but then that's one of those personal preference things.

    Again, very nice work.
  • Re:Cooling (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Uber Banker ( 655221 ) * on Sunday February 05, 2006 @01:23PM (#14646249)
    I like the concept, but cutting holes for fans was cheap.

    Putting sufficient airpressure in the top usually pops the bottom off a glass bottle, look at the mould marks in any spirit or beer bottle to see the join. To apply such pressure, decend the palm of your hand onto a bottle mostly filled with water, should make a clean break.
  • by LootenPlunder ( 941724 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @01:32PM (#14646283)
    or maybe just water with caramel color in it. hmmmm this is off subject, but has anyone bred blacklight responsive goldfish yet?
  • by stickyc ( 38756 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @01:34PM (#14646290) Homepage
    You should be able to drop one of those SIMM sized linux modules [uclinux.org] in the mouth of a Mickey's Big Mouth. If only they had an equally small wireless module, you might fit the whole thing including enough AA batteries to run for a few days and have a working linux bottle with the cap on.
  • Re:Nice work! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by LootenPlunder ( 941724 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @01:52PM (#14646363)
    the most impressive thing to me is the side panel with all the connectors. that is really amazing. he could sell those things at specialty shops or the sharper image or harrods or something for a fortune. as a side note, this is the only modding project i've seen that i'd ever bring up at a party.
  • by SleepyHappyDoc ( 813919 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @01:53PM (#14646372)
    This mod, while very cool, would make an excellent semi-portable monitoring device, say, to keep an eye on the stockroom at your restaurant or whatever. Stuff some kind of thin webcam in the bottle neck, lay it on it's side, headless (cords to the wall, somehow) and you'd have an inconspicuous camera that can store images/video locally or ftp them somewhere remote (then you could skip the laptop drive altogether and run the whole thing off the CF card, perhaps allowing a smaller bottle), and looks like an empty bottle on a shelf. Extra points if you mount it in a wine rack with a few real bottles.

    Of course, you could also probably break an empty bottle, drop in one of those wireless network cameras, and glue it back together, but that wouldn't be half as cool. ;)
  • by Bing Tsher E ( 943915 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @02:34PM (#14646541) Journal
    Indeed. I haven't heard of anybody doing that level of surface mount construction, but it should be possible. The constraint would be that you'd have to build the computer with only small enough chips to fit through the neck. That would eliminate many LSI and larger chips. The whole thing could be built with SO-14, SO-16, SO-20, and SO-24 pin packages, though, using conventional 'logic gate' design. Lots and lots of soldering, though.
  • If anyone cares... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 05, 2006 @02:35PM (#14646544)
    In places where a formal title is needed, it's usually "Master Glassblower", although there may be the occasional Journeyman working along side where there's enough demand for more than one. If you poke around larger research institutions, there's usually one hiding out somewhere, who handles all of the custom glass blowing, cutting, polishing, optical gluing (EG, for custom laser prisms), and shaping needs. In larger cities, check under "glassblowers" in the Yellow Pages.

    In practice, "great wizard" is far more commonly used than any formal title, because if you can't buy the right shape piece of glass off-the-shelf, then you need to find someone to grovel before. I know of at least one research project that was derailed for almost three years when the previous master retired "unexpectedly" at the ripe age of 80, and his 35-year old Journeyman assistant who got promoted didn't have half a century of expertise under his belt. Requests that the old guy used to craft flawlessly in one day, the new guy sometimes needed four to get what they wanted exactly right... or worse, almost but not quite exactly right.

    Which just goes to show, loss of critical personnel isn't only a problem in IT.

  • by xdmp ( 946861 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @02:39PM (#14646555)
    Take a glass cilinder, then take SBC with memory, cables and all stuff mounted, and place it inside small asbestos bag. Then push that bag into bottle, bag mouth hole to cylinder bottom. Then heat up cylinder mouth, and fuse it into bottle neck. Asbestos bag will protect board from the heat. Now you just pull asbestos bag through bottle neck, pull the wires attached to it through bottle neck, and voila - you have intact bottle with SBC inside, and cables to connect outside.

    No air flow inside a bottle though, so you need to choose fairly cool CPU for this.

    To bad i don't have any friends with glass blower skills and facility to try it ;-)

  • by LurkerXXX ( 667952 ) on Sunday February 05, 2006 @03:04PM (#14646640)
    I haven't seen goldfish, but you can get zebra fish. http://www.glofish.com/default.asp [glofish.com]
  • by EmagGeek ( 574360 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @07:43AM (#14649738) Journal
    Yes, I have an idea. A long time ago, the FCC cared a great deal about electromagnetic compliance of digital devices. It used to require that any PC sold be compliance tested for both radiation and succeptibility to RF interference. It used to be that a machine had to be tested complete, with all components installed. Well, that became impractical with the advent of do-it-yourself computers. There was no law preventing people from building their own computers. So, then the FCC backed off to simply requiring the "barebone" to be compliance tested in order to be sold. This would be a case/motherboard combination. Again, this hurt small businesses as it cost an arm and a leg to do anything dealing with the government. I can speak from first-hand experience that it could cost up to $100K to have a PC type-accepted in the early 90's. The process involved a consulting firm, lawyers, lobbyists, and all kinds of government corruption. Your consulting firm would do the tests, and hire their lawyers to petition the FCC. It would take some discrete intervention on the part of the lobbyist to "encourage" the officer at the FCC to approve the application.

    Finally, they did away with government-regulated type acceptance all together and switched to the honor system. Now, it's a free for all with a catch. PCs still have to be tested to comply with FCC standards, but there is no direct oversight. However, if you build and sell a PC and it ends up interfering, and you cannot demonstrate that you had that configuration tested, you are quite literally up the creek as the FCC will descend upon you like locusts and take every penny you have and will ever make.

    In any case, this thing is probably an RF nightmare. Glass is nearly transparent to RF, so the bottle will let anything in or out. There is a switching power supply used in this thing, several actually, and they tend to be the "gatling gun" of radiated interference.

Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer

Working...