My Hulu machine II - Hulu Castle I

Once upon a time deep in the thickest forest of the land, there was a castle named Hoo-loo-Ma-Sheen. Unlike any fortification you might have come across, this one is a house of joy where the swords are forever sheathed and the guardsmen always wear a smile. Because this castle hosts my Hulu machine.

So I needed a case for my internet TV computer. Too bad I had thrown away all my beige boxes. And I am not about to cough up $30-$40 for a boring black rectangular tower case. Those stereo component like chassis look okay, but they are over $200. I was down without ideas when suddenly it came to me: I blogged about a Lego computer case, and as a Lego buff, there's just nothing stopping me from doing something like that myself. So I decided to dig out my 6080 castle set from 26 years ago, [ackham, I mean, 6 years ago], to build a computer case out of it.

First of all, I have a PCI video card and a TV capture card that I want to plug-in; and then there's the CPU heat sink/fan. They all add to the height of the assembly; I need to build walls high enough to cover them all so I doubled the height of the original wall, which left me with only enough bricks for 1 guard tower. That's okay, it still looks cool.



I slided in the mother board with the CPU fan and video cards plugged in, and quickly realized there wasn't much room for anything else, like the hard disk, CD-ROM etc. I need to cut down on things I don't need. I made the entrance bigger so that I could easily remove that IDE and power cable to the CD-ROM after the OS has been installed. That saves me some space.



Also, I didn't want my wireless USB key to stick out at the back, so I added an USB extension cord and put in a little bracket to hold it inside the castle. I even assigned an archer to attend to it 24/7, poor little guy.



Still, my 3.5" IDE hard disk is still way too heavy to stack on top of other components...